The Green Man as a Portal

The Green Man as a Portal, By Amanda Camenisch

He is there. His presence felt. In the dim hush of a sacred space we can feel his eyes, carved yet alive, staring with the knowing of forgotten pasts. A teaching without words, older than memory, whispering that we are all the same. All drawn from the same material. All destined to return to the same dark humus of the earth. A vast cycle stretches out, beyond reach, cold and ungraspable, yet it coils within the body, pulsing through every vein.

The figure of the Green Man has long stood as a liminal emblem of renewal, resilience, and the eternal cycles of life. Carved into medieval churches, hidden in temples, whispered through folklore, he emerges at the threshold between wilderness and civilisation: both guardian and reminder of our entanglement with nature.

To think such thoughts is one thing, to feel them another. The mind can name unity, eternity, rebirth. The body trembles. The body resists. For in sensing the vastness, something ancient awakens: that raw, unreasoning part where survival is all that matters. A hunger that does not bow to language, a will that knows no law. It whispers of endings, of decay, of the fragility of breath.

The Green Man draws this contradiction into form. He is not only benevolent, not only savage. He smiles with leaves spilling from his mouth, yet his laughter tastes of rot. He thrives in the blossom that will soon collapse into mulch. His foliage mouths open in silence yet declare the oldest truth: that creation devours itself, that decay feeds life, that every beginning is already a return.

Perhaps this is why he appears on stones where prayers were once offered. Not as ornament, but as reminder. That beneath every sermon, beneath every empire, beneath even mercy itself, there runs a law without pity. Nature is not Eden. It does not distinguish between what is good and what is evil. It grows, it consumes, it transforms. To enter into its rhythm is not to discover moral clarity but to dissolve in an endless round of vanishing and renewal.

And yet, humans are not merely swallowed. We carve ourselves from nature even as we remain bound to it. It is not out of hunger that we fashioned ritual but out of remembrance of the divine. It is not out of fear we forged culture, but out of a desire to live in harmony.  The rules we shaped were not to imitate nature but to soften its severity. Mercy does not spring from the soil; nor is it our own fragile creation. Without it we collapse back into the jungle of tooth and claw, into the impulse that cannot see beyond itself.

The Green Man lingers at the threshold, reminding us that the wild is always close, that culture without compassion withers, that roots without balance strangle. He shows us what we refuse: that in the pursuit of purity we generate shadow, in the pursuit of endless ascent we sever what sustains us. Every empire that sought only the good, only the true, only the perfect, fell beneath the weight of what it cast aside.

His lesson is quiet but relentless. Do not forget what you are made of. Do not imagine yourself free of soil and decay. Do not dream of rising to the heavens without knowing the roots that hold you to the ground. For those who deny this balance, shadow grows vast, and what is repressed returns in forms too dark to master.

Society makes a promise it struggles to keep. A vision of individuals gathered together, bound by laws meant to guard the wellbeing of all. Shining futures, perfected health, endless opportunity. Yet what does not fit this dream is cast aside. What is fragile, wounded, or in need of care becomes a burden, a hindrance, an unwanted remainder. The dirt no one wishes to see, the labour no one wishes to do. But this labour is not only external. It is within us, the work of tending the wildness we all carry.

Here, in our own time, the Green Man’s presence gathers force. He reminds us that harmony cannot mean denial. That to live well is not to sever wildness but to live with it, to balance the raw and the tender.

In the streets where people sleep on cold stone, in the doorways where bodies endure the seasons without walls, he lingers. Homelessness is not personal failure but collective forgetting. Forgetting that the house is only a thin shield against the forest. Forgetting that without compassion, our structures collapse back into wilderness. Those without shelter live in the raw exposure most of us keep hidden. They are witnesses, unwilling but undeniable, to the truth that society has turned away from mercy.

The Green Man walks with them. Beyond the walls of ordered life, he shares their seasons, their precarious balance between visibility and invisibility. In the gaps and interstices of the city, his face flickers: dignity in dispossession, endurance carved into survival.

He walks too with the seekers and the estranged, the artists, the hidden, the unassimilated. Many who cannot return from the forest to the rigid grid of order are not broken but marked: creative, intelligent, scarred by hardship, bearing visions that resist domestication. In a culture that fears its own wildness, they are pushed aside, left to wander the borderland between civilisation and wilderness.

Homelessness is a mirror. It shows us neglect made visible, stewardship denied, homes turned to commodities. To call it individual misfortune is to uphold an order that is not social but anti-social. A law of exclusion, where the vulnerable are stripped of care and cast outside the circle of culture.

Against this, the Green Man endures. His leaves whisper that endings feed beginnings, that resilience is woven into the fabric of existence. He teaches that the wheel turns, that loss and renewal are inseparable, that survival is never final defeat. For those on the street, he is not an answer but a companion. A presence that affirms dignity even when stripped bare, endurance even when forgotten.

But he does not linger only there. He is with us all. For we live in an age when nature, long subdued, presses back. Fires, floods, heat rising. The old severity returns, reminding us that dominion is not stewardship, that separation leads not to mastery but to collapse. The lesson carved in stone remains: balance or ruin.

The Green Man’s gaze unsettles because it is not moral but elemental. He does not ask us to be good. He reveals what happens when we forget what we are. His leaves grow through our failures. His eyes follow us into shadow. He waits in the cracks, in the ruins, in the slow turning of the wheel.

He is not comfort, nor threat. He is witness. Reminder. That life is many things, all at once. That it belongs to us, and we to it. That our striving, our building, our dreaming, are branches growing from a root older than memory. And that mercy, hard-won, fragile, necessary, is what allows us not only to survive, but to flourish together.

Harmonic resonance as practice

Coming soon