For as long as I can remember, there has been a forest somewhere in the back of my mind. I can even tell you when I first entered it, but that is a story for another time.
It began with some childhood image of Robin Hood: green leaves overhead, a bow resting against a tree, sunlight breaking through the branches, and somewhere beyond the path the sound of laughter around a fire. Like most children, I knew the stories. Robin Hood lived in Sherwood Forest. He carried a bow. He robbed the rich and gave to the poor. The Sheriff hunted him. Little John stood beside him. Marian loved him. His companions gathered beneath the trees. Those were the pieces of the story I understood then. But something else had taken root beneath them. I did not know the word Greenwood yet, at least not in the way I understand it now. I only knew that whenever those stories carried me beneath the trees, something there felt familiar. The forest was not empty. It was alive.
There were birds watching from the branches and old trees standing like witnesses. There were paths disappearing into places I could not see. There were people gathered around fires who did not seem concerned with who possessed the most or who sat upon the highest chair. And somewhere among them walked Robin Hood. As I grew older, the childhood stories faded somewhat, as childhood stories often do. Other things entered my life. Work. Responsibilities. Spirituality. Community. Questions about who I was and what kind of life I wanted to live.
Yet the Greenwood never really disappeared. I simply stopped calling it Robin Hood. I found it whenever I sat beneath an old tree and listened to birds moving through the branches. I found it walking trails where moss covered fallen trunks and streams cut their patient paths through the mountains. I found it sitting with someone who needed to talk. I found it around fires. I found it in communities where people gathered. And slowly, without realizing it, I began building my life around those moments.
People have sometimes asked me why I spend so much time doing the things I do. Why write?Why teach? Why build communities? Why spend hours talking with someone who is struggling? Why care so deeply about land, spirituality, tradition, and the strange difficult work of trying to help human beings understand one another?
For a long time, I did not have a particularly good answer. Eventually I found a word for it. Vocation. But even that word felt strange at first. Vocation belonged to churches and seminaries. It belonged to clergy standing behind pulpits and institutions with titles, offices, and hierarchies. When I looked toward those models, I could understand them, but I could never quite see myself within them. The place I imagined was different. There was no cathedral only an oak tree. And beneath that oak was a council. People came carrying their disagreements, fears, hopes, questions, and stories. Someone tended the fire. Someone listened. Someone spoke. Then someone else spoke. No one needed to sit upon a throne. I wanted to sit among them. That image has followed me for much of my life. I never wanted a calling that placed me above people. I wanted one that placed me among them. I wanted to listen.
I wanted to help untangle disagreements when I could. I wanted to help people discover their own wisdom rather than hand them mine. I wanted to tend traditions without imprisoning them. I wanted to help build communities in which people could belong without surrendering themselves. And most importantly, I wanted to be useful. It took me many years to realize that I had seen that kind of vocation before. I had seen it beneath the trees of Sherwood.
Beneath the Oak
As a child, I thought Robin Hood was interesting because he was an outlaw. As an adult, I began to understand that the outlawry was never what mattered most to me. It was the fellowship. Robin was surrounded by people not subjects or servants but companions. The stories imagined a little society hidden beneath the trees, outside the ordinary structures of power. They ate together, argued together, fought together, laughed together, and depended upon one another. And Robin, at least the Robin who had formed in my imagination, did not seem to stand very far above them. I had become suspicious of thrones. Not literal ones as there are many kinds of thrones. Sometimes a throne is a title, authority, knowledge or even the desire to become the person everyone else must listen to. Even spirituality can become a throne if we are not careful.
The Greenwood taught me to sit down beneath the tree. Listen to the birds. Listen to the person beside you. Listen long enough that the world has a chance to speak before you decide what it is saying. That became one of the foundations of my spirituality.
Much of what I know did not begin in books. It began in observation. The trees taught patience. The seasons taught change. The birds taught attentiveness. Streams taught movement and adaptation. The forest taught me that almost nothing survives alone. An oak may look solitary, but beneath it is soil filled with lives we rarely notice. Around it are fungi, insects, birds, plants, rain, stone, sunlight, and generations of decay becoming generations of life. Pull hard enough upon any single thread and eventually you discover that you are holding the entire forest.
Human beings are no different. We belong to families, communities, places, histories, traditions, ecosystems, and stories. We affect one another constantly, whether we recognize it or not. This is what I mean when I speak of the Greenwood. Yes, it is a forest. I mean real forests. Mud beneath the boots. Moss beneath the hand. Rain caught in leaves. Birds disappearing into branches. Streams running cold over stone. But somewhere along the way, the Greenwood also became a way of understanding the world. A place can become a teacher if we remain there long enough. And the Greenwood kept teaching me the same lesson:
Stewardship instead of ownership.
Participation instead of domination.
Service instead of control.
Compassion instead of consumption.
The Sheriff and the Greenwood
The older I became, the more I noticed how difficult those lessons can be to live. We inhabit a world that constantly asks us to turn things into possessions. Land becomes property. Knowledge becomes product. Community becomes audience. Teaching becomes content. Identity becomes brand. Even spirituality can become something packaged, marketed, and sold. There is always another wall we can build and another gate upon which we can hang a price. I understand why people do it. But every time I imagined doing the same with my own work, something resisted. I could build walls around what I know. I could hide things behind paywalls. I could measure success through followers. I could try to become an authority people depended upon. But then I find myself beneath that old imaginary oak again. And Robin is there. So is the Sheriff.
Over the years those two figures have become something larger than characters in an old story.
The Sheriff asks:
What can I control?
What belongs to me?
How much can I take?
Robin asks a different question:
What can I give?
That does not make Robin perfect, nor does it make every act of authority wrong. The lesson is deeper than heroes and villains. It is about relationship. Do we stand above the world trying to possess it? Or do we stand within the world accepting responsibility for our place in it? One builds a throne. The other tends a fire. I know which one I would rather spend my life doing.
The Fire Beneath the Trees
I once had a Druid brother tell me something that stayed with me. “You may not want people to follow you, but you do want people to follow your values.” I laughed when he said it because I knew immediately that he was right. I have never particularly wanted followers. I do not want people to become versions of me. I would much rather see someone discover their own path, their own voice, their own Awen, and walk away from me needing me a little less than they did before. But there are things I hope people carry with them. I hope they remember that compassion matters. I hope they remember that listening can be more powerful than speaking. I hope they remember that every action sends ripples through the wider community of life. I hope they remember that traditions survive because ordinary people tend them. I hope they remember that land is not merely scenery surrounding human lives. And I hope they remember that community is not something someone else builds for us. We build it together. That is why the image of the fire has become more important to me than the image of the throne. A throne has room for one person. A fire makes room around itself. People gather. Someone brings wood, food, or tells a story. Someone sits quietly because they have nothing to say that night. Someone arrives carrying grief. Someone else arrives carrying laughter. The fire does not ask which one deserves warmth. It simply burns. That is much closer to the kind of service I have always wanted. To tend the fire. To keep a place where people can gather. To protect it when necessary. To add wood when the flames grow low. And eventually, when my time tending it is finished, to place the work into someone else’s hands. Because the fire was never mine.
Robin Beneath the Leaves
It is strange how childhood stories return to us. We think we have outgrown them. Then one day we discover that they have been quietly growing alongside us.
When I look at Robin Hood now, I do not see merely the outlaw with the bow. I see an archetype of the Greenwood. I see someone standing between power and the people around him and choosing to stand with the people. I see someone who belongs to a place rather than possessing it. I see fellowship. I see resistance to domination. I see the possibility that leadership does not have to mean elevation.
Leadership can mean stewardship, listening, standing beside someone, or protecting something fragile. It can mean knowing when to speak and when to remain silent. Sometimes it means holding counsel beneath the oak, keeping the fire burning, or drawing the bow. And sometimes it simply means noticing the bird calling from the branch above you.
There will always be Sheriffs. There will always be people who look at the world and ask what can be owned, controlled, measured, accumulated, or consumed.
But there will always be Greenwoods too.
There will always be places where another way remains possible. Places shaped by relationship rather than possession, fellowship rather than hierarchy, and responsibility rather than control. And there will always be people who disappear beneath those branches and begin building something different together.
So if there is a prayer within my Greenwood Path, it is this:
May I listen more than I speak.
May I serve more than I take.
May I protect what deserves protecting without trying to possess it.
May I leave the land and my communities a little better than I found them.
May I remember that I am only one small part of a much larger story.
Tending the Greenwood
For most of my life, I thought I was searching for the Greenwood. Now I suspect I had it backward. The Greenwood was always there. It was there in the forests I wandered and the stories I carried with me. It was there in that childhood image of Robin Hood beneath the leaves. It was there in the communities I would later help build, in the traditions I would come to care for, and in the people who would sit across from me and trust me with pieces of their lives. I simply did not yet understand that all of these things were connected.
Looking back now, I can see a path running through them.
That path led me into Druidry, into writing and teaching, into caring for the natural world, into community, and into service. For a long time, I thought these were simply different things I cared deeply about. Now I see them more like trees growing from the same soil. They are all part of my vocation. And I finally have a name for that vocation.
To tend the Greenwood.
I do not mean simply tending a forest, although caring for the living land is certainly part of it. I mean tending the places where people, land, tradition, community, and the sacred meet.
Sometimes that means listening to someone who needs to be heard. Sometimes it means writing or teaching. Sometimes it means helping a community through a difficult moment. Sometimes it means carrying an old tradition forward while leaving room for it to remain alive. Sometimes it means caring for a creature, planting something, cleaning a trail, tending a fire, or simply paying enough attention to notice what needs care.
The work changes. The vocation does not.
That is why the Greenwood has followed me for so long. As a child, Robin Hood gave it a face before I had words for any of this. I saw the bow, the green clothing, the adventures, and the forest. Only much later did I begin to see what lived beneath those stories: relationship, responsibility, fellowship, and service.
So what was Robin teaching me? He was teaching me how to belong to the Greenwood. And belonging brings responsibility. That, more than anything, is what the Greenwood Path has become for me. It is not a destination, and it is not a title. It is the recognition that wherever I find myself, there is something there worth tending. I cannot know where this path will eventually lead me. Forest paths rarely reveal themselves all at once. They disappear around bends, cross streams, become overgrown, and sometimes lead us somewhere we never expected to go.
But I know what I am called to do while walking it. Pay attention. Notice what needs tending. And tend it. Somewhere ahead there will be another old oak, another gathering around a fire, another person needing a place beside it. And when I reach them, I know what I am there to do.
Tend the Greenwood.
Leave a Reply