Throughout our evolution we have sought for meaning and connection – a sense of a higher power that illuminates our lives and gives us context, a sense of being part of a larger whole with a purpose, a sense of beauty in the midst of suffering and striving to survive. Along this rocky path strewn with demons and potholes, we encounter the many mystics who have discovered another version of reality, an alternative view of our material lives in the frame of revelatory, other worldly experience. A common theme amongst these mystics is that they received visions, they felt light and fire envelop them with love and a radiance beyond words, these visionary states were often preceded by illness, or childhood sickness. What is remarkable is that from mediaeval times we have written accounts of these mystics and visionaries, and many of them were women.
One of the earliest recorded and hugely influential personalities in this lineage is Hildegard of Bingen. (c. 1098 – 1179.) She was sickly from birth and received visions as a child.
‘Hildegard said that she first saw “The Shade of the Living Light” at the age of three, and by the age of five, she began to understand that she was experiencing visions. She used the term visio (Latin for ‘vision’) to describe this feature of her experience and she recognized that it was a gift that she could not explain to others. Hildegard explained that she saw all things in the light of God through the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.’
Her parents placed her in a Benedictine monastery set within the Palatine Forest in Southern Germany. Hildegard, although living in much pain became a polymath writing a vast library of mediaeval verse and music, studying Natural History, Medicine and even inventing her own mystic alphabet. I consider her to be one of our earliest ecologists bringing that mystical quality into her understanding of the way of Nature, and she regarded medicine and gardening as parallel forces.
“I am the fiery life of the essence of God; I am the flame above the beauty in the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life.”
Hildegard felt that she was guided by the ‘reflection of the living light’ and she reminds me of another profound visionary hermitess Julian of Norwich who lived slightly later than Hildegard (1343-1416) Mother Julian had also suffered sickness throughout her life, and also recovered through receiving visions which she later documented in her book Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving English language writing by a woman. She wrote so eloquently of love from her small cell, visited by so many seeking her help and wisdom. She had a refreshing non-judgmental attitude of grace towards our failings: –
“Grace transforms our failings full of dread into abundant, endless comfort … our failings full of shame into a noble, glorious rising … our dying full of sorrow into holy, blissful life.”
Jumping across the chasm of many centuries comes a different sort of visionary, but still a challenger of the norms and the establishments of the day. Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964)
was a pioneer, advocate and sister in spirit of these 2 earlier trailblazers in her strong beliefs and convictions, except that Theocratic religion had now been replaced by the religion of science, and so required someone who was well versed in the language of rationality. Carson has become one of the 20th century’s most influential voices in literature and environmentalism. She wrote in a way that combined science and poetic writing. Her revolutionary text Silent Spring helped shape the modern environmental movement. Carson had already gained a huge following for her ecological books about the sea, bringing knowledge and awareness to the general public. In the 1950’s she challenged government and industry over the use of chemicals and pesticides that she regarded as poisonous to all life forms.
“It seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.”
As a child Carson spent most of her time wandering the family farm in Pennsylvania and had her first nature story published by the age of ten. Towards the end of her life she was fighting terminal cancer, completing Silent Spring and raising her adopted son. Silent Spring reminded us of the fragile and complex interdependence of all life, the value of the thrush’s song, and the beauty of the natural world. She never got to see the legacy of her work and how she has inspired contemporary writers, scientists, plant spirit environmentalists like Monica Gagliano and mystic poets like Annie Dillard who reflects on our place in the awesomeness of nature:
“Concerning trees and leaves… there’s a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.
We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”
Finally this year’s Booker prize has been won by a book Orbital which invites us to see the fragility of our green and blue speck from the confines of the Space Station. In her acceptance speech the author Samantha Harvey said “What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves,” and this returns us neatly to Rachel Carson’s observation on our hubristic blindness – “But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” This also echoes Hildegard’s appeal to us: “The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!”
Actors come and go, but the message never changes.
References:
Hildegard of Bingen Wikipedia, Goodreads
Julian of Norwich – Friends of Julian of Norwich.
Rachel Carson – Silent Spring, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/may/27/rachel-carson-silent-spring-anniversary
Monica Gagliano – Thus Spoke the Plant 2024
Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 1974
