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November 6, 2025
The coming of the Green Man
By Gary Lindorff
And he began walking. / As he walked his boughs began to shapeshift / Into the features of a man dressed in a green cloak.
::::::::
One day a man was sitting in a field
And he thought there was someone beside him
Standing there dressed darkly.
He turned and it was a cedar.
He said out loud: "That bush looks like a man!"
After he left, the bush thought to itself,
If I look like a man
Maybe I can be a man.
Maybe my roots can walk.
He pulled up a root and it became a foot.
He pulled up another root and it became another foot
And he began walking.
As he walked his boughs began to shapeshift
Into the features of a man dressed in a green cloak.
He passed some children playing.
They stopped playing to watch him.
He smiled for the first time and said,
"Good day children."
As he spoke, leaves came from his mouth.
The children laughed.
They asked how he did it.
He did not know
But he was glad that it made them happy.
He walked and walked.
Soon it was dark and he stopped
But he did not sleep.
The moon rose and shone on him.
He heard it say something to him.
It said, "You are the Green Man.
You used to be on Earth.
Now you are back.
I am glad to see you."
"What did I do?" he asked.
"I do not know what to do with myself."
The moon said, "You are here for a reason."
"But am I a tree or am I a man?"
The moon said sweetly, "Sit down.
I need to tell you something."
She said, "You used to be a face of stone, like me.
You appeared in the oldest cathedrals
So that when people came to worship
You reminded them of the spirit of the forest.
But now the forests are in trouble,
So you must walk about."
With that she grew silent
And was covered by a cloud.
(Article changed on Nov 06, 2025 at 9:23 AM EST)
Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.
He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.