Wonderland and The Imaginal Commons

Welcome to A Wild Green Heart. Hearty thanks to you for dropping by - you are exceedingly welcome here!

Twofold news today, of an old book and a new one. Firstly, tomorrow marks five years since I wrote the very first poetic diary entry that would later mark the start of my first self-published book, Wonderland.

Cover image mine. Design by Micah Purnell

March 17th 2020 was the day that, shortly before a national lockdown was announced in the UK, our household opted to go into isolation. This was due to a combination of vaguely viral symptoms in some family members, and my vulnerability to a higher risk of covid complications due to my chronic illness.

Here's what I wrote at the end of that peculiar day, and what I sent out to half a dozen close friends by WhatsApp the following morning - a pattern I was to keep up for forty days:

Day One

Rain outside, inertia within. 
As potential broadens, paralysis looms:
In this limited form of living, 
there are still too many possibilities to follow: 
perhaps more than ever.

I list all the friends I could contact. 
I fill a page. 
I consider who might most appreciate a call. 
I can't tell. 
Perhaps a random approach would be best. 

Arguments over bacon don't concern 
a vegetarian. 
We're unlikely to run out of chickpeas
any time soon. 

Zoom call for therapy 
Zoom call for work
Zoom call for socialising
instead of a meal together. 

I pull out my son's wobbly tooth. 
He places it under a cushion on the sofa
and asks me for a pound: 
I grin and hand it over. 

As I meditate I realise
my body is phenomenally tired
my brain is activated, 
looking for something to do. 
I breathe into it and aim to
shrug off all my "shoulds"
but they linger like a cloud
of accusing witnesses. 

Wonderland began with a sense of claustrophobia and strangeness, but as time went on, the diary entries increasingly became poems of love and thanks towards the two local green spaces I walked each day, mostly in solitude, occasionally with my younger son.

It is these poems, written from my woodland wanders, that remain deeply embedded in my body. I can still vividly feel the awe of watching the seemingly impossible feather described here, written a month after the first entry:

Day Thirty-One

On my late-afternoon
post-work walk I once again
seek out the hidden corners
of our large local park.

I'm predictably soothed by
the sight and song of birds, 
the vivid new shoots of plants,
(even the new growth of brambles
positively glows with life!) 
by gnarled roots covered in undergrowth, 
by the scent of wild garlic. 
I allow my thoughts to gradually ebb. 

A feather floats, gently spiraling 
from the canopy, and descends 
to immaculately balance on
the very tip of a sapling. 

I pause in wonder, 
and in the new silence
I fancy I hear a great
subterranean breath. 
Could this be the land itself
letting out a huge sigh of relief? 

Wythenshawe Park woods, March 2025

Browsing through The Book of Symbols - Reflections on Archetypal Images just now, I came across these lines:

Feathers are sensitive to the slightest wind, and thus are emblems of psyche’s capacity to pick up “invisible and imperceptible currents” (Marie-Louise Von Franz, “The Interpretation of Fairy Tales). If we take note of these and follow up on them, as happens in some fairy tales, we can be shown new possibilities, or discover where psychic energy is tending…

Feathers form the wings with which one can transcend the concrete, escape confinement and soar to creative heights or spiritual vision.

This makes me so curious about the particular poem I felt drawn to share from Day Thirty-One of Wonderland. Because it was, without doubt, these daily lockdown walks, visiting the same paths and streams and woodlands again and again over time, that birthed in me a previously unknown fidelity to place. This devotion deepened me in connecting to everything wild, and prepared me for the connection I would make with Pomona less than a year later.

It is curious to think of that unbroken green thread as almost the only thing that didn't radically change over the coming months. By that autumn, I had left my wife of two decades, and the family home. By winter, the world of myth had arrived in my life, initially through the twinned tales of The Lindworm and Tatterhood, in Martin Shaw’s magnificent book, Courting the Wild Twin - via the truly fantastic Hellboy short story, The Troll-witch, which first captivated me.

From “The Troll-witch” - story and art by Mike Mignola, colours by Dave Stewart, letters by Clem Robins

Within a year of beginning to write Wonderland, blown helplessly across Manchester like a feather, I had been captured by the powerful gravitational force of Pomona, and was already finding great solace and delight with her. Not long after that, I started renting my own flat, a short distance from Pomona. And within two years of starting Wonderland, no longer well enough to work, I had left my beloved job of fourteen years - a significant story in itself, which I've told here in my Imbolc Tale.

The whole landscape of my life had changed; but the connection to All of Life, via my leafed kin, my winged kin, my watery kin, and all the rest, was growing rapidly through the whole of me.

I remain deeply grateful for those daily walks in Wythenshawe Park and Kenworthy Woods. They began the pattern of fidelity to place, as articulated so eloquently by Martin Shaw in the book I already mentioned, Courting the Wild Twin:

Addiction only to Eros is the end of loyalty to person or place or community. One evening you will wait up but find no nightingales under your window. Because it's Amor the nightingales come for, not Eros. It has specificity...

Openness to all can be the end to loyalty to anything in particular. That everything is freighted just the same.

But myth rarely traffics in such equality. I think many of them are infused with amor. They are a love letter to a very specific bend of river where the salmon run in a blue-smoked Connemara autumn, or a crest of Devon granite tors forged from combat between Arthur himself and a powerful west country spirit. As Tom Waits once said, somewhere: 'A song needs an address.'

My life's song, as most of you will already know, is addressed to Pomona Strand, and I shall continue to sing it while there is breath in my body to do so.

Before moving on, I want to let you all know that I still have over a dozen copies of Wonderland left, and I would be delighted to find them new homes. I'm happy to post them out, free of charge, to anyone who messages me or requests one here in the comments, until I run out. Much better in your hands than in my cupboard! Please don't try to offer me any money, it will not be accepted on this occasion. I simply want to share the gift of poetry and the healing wonder of the Earth that supports us all.

And now to my second piece of news. This week I finished designing and editing my second poetry collection, also to be self-published, but under the name of the small DIY creative collective Too Few The Poets Press - thus far made up of three friends and I.

This collection - a zine or a small book, depending on your perspective - is called The Imaginal Commons - Poems for the Thirsty Soul, and comprises nine poems, including a lengthy one, all written over the last couple of years. Here's the cover - the image is a photo I took at Pomona last November, enchanted by the icy eye gazing up at me from the mossy marshes:

To introduce you to the theme of the poems within, here is my preface to the collection:

Earth is our Home. 
Our bodies are our Home.

We have been fed the powerful, dangerous lie of Separation 
by “enlightened” modernist, western colonial powers:

Body as separate from Soul, 
Humans as separate from the Divine, 
All of us separate from one another, and our fellow creatures, 
such that we feel the constant hunger for something More;
an unmet longing for a Home we believe we have lost. 

Such a separation is not only untrue, but impossible. 

I see our life’s work as one of re-indigenising. 
Re-membering our intimate connection to All That Is:
to our bodies, to one another, 
to all creatures, all things; 
to place, to land, to Earth; 
to the Divine - within us and around us. 

These poems are an offering to that end.

I hope to have copies of The Imaginal Commons in my hands within a week, and next week I will let you know how to get your hands on it, too, should you wish to do so.

Some of the poems have been shared before, here or on Instagram, but several have never seen the light of day online before. To give you a small taste, here's the opening poem from the collection:

Hunger

We have all felt the physical force of appetite. 
The enduring gnawing 
that seeks to draw us to its root,
the embodied presence of absence.

The same can be sensed in our emotional body,
a lingering loneliness, 
an unwanted witness to that nagging notion
that we are separate; isolated.

These twin hungers are mightily met
from the very same source of belonging:
the offer of food and friendship both;
Earth assuages all our longing.

Do we yearn for ecstasy, or simply Home?
A return to a place of Being, related:
knower and known, in essence and bone,
our desire for connection, utterly sated.

Given the ease with which this collection came together, and the sheer number of unpublished poems languishing in folders on my laptop, I'm fairly confident that this won't be the last thing I publish this year. However, I have been known to utter such things before, without bringing them into fruition!

And with that, I’ll leave it for now. I shall be returning to my series on the Imaginal Realms in a couple of weeks, with another creative piece born from my own Imagination. Next week's post will be my monthly photo diary report from Pomona.

The comments are open as usual, and I shall repeat my invitation to you to snag a free copy of Wonderland simply by letting me know you would like one in the comments. First come first served. We can find the best way to communicate about shipping addresses and so forth from there. Please do also say hello for other reasons, including to let me know how any of the poems landed with you, or any other thoughts elicited by today's post. Wild Green blessings on every one of you!