Spring Collection Launch: The Greenest Branch
The Greenest Branch is a collection of richly green, vibrant, foliage collected in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico. Ferns, mayflower, strawberry, and other leaves with beautiful forms make up this collection. I’ve brought all these plants together into one collection inspired by a 12th century woman ahead of her time who worked in that most familiar place of mine - the place where nature and spirituality meet.
Hildegard of Bingen was a German mystic, visionary, prophetess, Benedictine abbess, and consecrated virgin in the 12th century. Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed her a doctor of the church on Oct. 7, 2012. Surrounded by damp green forests of the Rhineland, this amazing woman was inspired to see God's "living power of light" in all creation and named this greening force viriditas, the Latin for her original “das Grün,” the greening. Rhineland is an area my German ancestors on my father’s side inhabited and I feel an affinity for this green area of the world and Hildegard’s study of it.
There is likely no better time to ponder Hildegard of Bingen's concept of viriditas, the greening power of all creation, than spring. I am every year taken by surprise when dead looking branches finally, suddenly, purposely, sprout little green buds. And how full of potency do those red rhubarb heads look while pressing their new stems forcefully through the rock and cold mud? If we were patient, we could watch their first green leaves slowly unfolding.
The early threshold of spring has always been a powerful metaphor for the new life, dormant, which has prepared itself under layers of dark and cold. Already, in the slow season of waiting, when it appears like winter will never end, even then, the new not-yet-green prepares itself silently and patiently for its coming.
“There is a power that has been since all eternity, and that force and potentiality is green!” wrote the sage Hildegard of Bingen nearly 1000 years ago on a wax plate. She wrote it in her German tongue and only later did her scribes translate it to Latin, the academic language of the time.
The greening is indeed a rich spring metaphor, but it reaches beyond spring to encompass the power of life. With viriditas Hildegard captures the greening power, the living light, that breathes in all beings, flows through all that is alive: “Be it greenness or seed, blossom or beauty – it could not be creation without it.”
Hildegard's spirituality is embedded in her philosophy of human nature and its fundamental connectedness to mother earth: “The earth is at the same time mother...She is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. She is the mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all.”
Hence Hildegard was an early pioneeress exploring the feminine Divine and also the relation between ecology and spirituality. Her teaching reminds us of our deep connection with the life force which sustains the cosmos and also every living being: “Viriditas is the natural driving force toward healing and wholeness, the vital power that sustains all life's greenness.” One scholar describes Hildegard’s term as the feminine aspect of God as creator, denoting freshness, fertility and growth in the spiritual life. Hildegard linked viriditas to Mother Mary, calling her, “the greenest branch.”
For Hildegard this life force is a “living and fiery essence ... that glows in the beauty of the fields.” It speaks to the one who is listening: “I shine in the water, I burn in the sun, and the moon, and the stars. Mine is that mysterious force of the invisible wind.... I am the breath of all the living.”
Just as nature renews itself in spring, our spirit also has this capability to blossom again, this greening power of renewal.
In our age we have lost the powerful images our ancestors wielded to grasp the mystery of our souls, the breath that sustains us, the “anima” which animates us. Or as Hildegard pictures it: “The soul is for the body as the sap is for the tree, and the soul's energies unfold as the tree unfolds its gestalt...Thus, the soul provides the inner solidity and strength of the body.”
Hildegard also taught that the only sin in life is drying up and that we should do whatever it takes to stay “wet and green and moist and juicy”—in other words, creative.
Hildegard recommends the following spiritual practice to connect with this greening power:
"Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars.
Gaze at the beauty of earths greenings.
Now think.
What delight God gives to humankind with all these things..."
Resources:
Welcoming Spring: Hildegard on "viriditas" and the greening of the soul.
