The Wisdom of Ste. Hildegard: Notice what grows
Hildegard at her wax tablets. Lucca, Biblioteca Statale, Ms. 1942, c. 1220. Library of Congress.Hildegard of Bingen, 1098–1179. Abbess, composer, writer, visionary. When the Abbot refused to let her found her own house, she founded it anyway. She wrote to popes, kings, and an emperor and told them what she thought. She had a word for the green force in everything that grows — viriditas — and she spent her life paying attention to it.
She paid close attention to plants, food, and the relationship between what we put into our bodies and how we feel. She wrote about herbs and their properties, about foods that nourished and foods that did not, and about living in a way that worked with the body rather than against it. She had her theories, some of which have held up better than others. (It was the twelfth century, after all.)
Our own century is arguably better for women’s health, but there’s still a long way to go. Too often, when we have questions about our health, we’re told to “consult your doctor” — as though the answer must live somewhere outside of us, in a medical system whose scientific foundations have so often been built around the male body. How useful is that when the body in question is your own, individual, female-gendered beautiful self?
Hildegard’s Feast is an invitation to revisit the wisdom of this badass saint: notice what grows. Pay attention to your body. To the seasons you move through. To what gives you energy to grow, or what causes you to wither. This is not a replacement for medicine or science, but an invitation to attune yourself to another, powerful source of information — one that lives within you.
I took her name, her greenness, and her nerve. Not her prescriptions. Nothing I make treats or cures anything. It is food, made with care, for a season of life that deserves better food than it usually gets. Seed cycling worked for me. Might it work for you?