Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.”                                                                                              – E. O. Wilson

Welcome Spring!

It is the season of crocuses, bee swarms, longer days and the return of the migrating birds.

Even as we are quarantined and more and more isolated from our daily human connections and habits, earth still awaits us. There is solace in green spaces and with the wild ones.

I visited my bee hives this past week. I determined that 5 of 7 were indeed gone. I harvested the honey and cleaned the hives and celebrated the bursting bees in the south valley. They are my hope.

So, even as all of our worlds have shrunk, driving us to become relentlessly local, I’m also finding it has expanded with new ideas and creative imaginings for how to live in these times. With colleagues, friends and family, I am finding hope as we birth new strategies for this Great Turning…a shift from an Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.

I want to close with the words from Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).

A doctor of the church, she wrote about something called Veriditas or “greening power“. Also known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, she was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath.^[1][2] She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most-recorded in modern history.^[3] She has been considered by many in Europe to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.^[4] (Wikipedia) 

Holy persons draw to themselves all that is earthly. 

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.

Glance at the sun, see the moon and the stars.Gaze at the beauty of Earth’s greenings.

Now think, what delight God gives to humankind with all these things

All nature is at the disposal of humankind

we are to work with her

For without her we cannot survive.

Bee well and keep your eyes and heart open to the miracles of “greening power”.