Five: The Fiery Life

Hildegard of Bingen began writing her first great vision at the age of forty-three.

Not because she had finally found the time, or the courage, or the right circumstances. But because the pressure of what she carried had grown too great to hold any longer. She described it as veins and marrow filled with powers she had lacked in childhood and youth. A voice that said: cry out and write.

Hildegard was a Benedictine abbess in 12th-century Germany. She was a composer, a healer, a naturalist, a theologian, a letter-writer to popes and kings, a founder of two monasteries. She composed over seventy pieces of music. She wrote her greatest visionary work — the Liber Divinorum Operum, the Book of Divine Works — between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-five.

She called her central concept viriditas — greenness. The living, fecund, greening force of the divine moving through all created things. Not a metaphor. A reality she could see and feel and name.

The soul is a breath of living spirit that permeates the entire body to give it life. Just so, the breath of the air makes the earth fruitful. Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it.

She was not describing something she had found. She was describing what she had remembered. That the divine life and her own life were not two different things that had come into relationship. They had always been one thing, briefly believing itself to be separate — and then, in a moment of grace, remembering.

What if the sacred energy moving through my life right now is not diminishing — but greening?

What if what feels like slowing down is actually deepening?

Hildegard described herself with an image so simple it stops the breath: Thus am I — a feather on the breath of God. Not grasping. Not striving. Not proving. Simply available. Carried by something infinitely larger than her own effort, to exactly where she needed to be.

She was eighty-one years old when she died. She was still writing.

What am I still here to become?

What in me is not yet finished — not because I have failed to complete it, but because it is still being made?

What would it feel like to stop pushing the work forward, and let the breath carry me?

Viriditas. The greening force. It does not retire. It does not diminish with age. It is what happens when a life roots deeply enough to become something even it did not expect.