viriditas and the unseen lifeforce of creativity

a new season, a new inspiration, and a new project

Ryan asked me a couple of weeks ago: “Why haven’t you written anything lately?”

“Umm… I’ve been a little busy.”

But to be honest, it’s a good question. And I know why he’s asking it. My spouse is very adept at seeing and gently drawing my attention toward ways that I am forgetting (or downright consciously neglecting) to care for my mind/body/spirit. 

The thing is—snarky response aside—even with our six-week-old baby who loves to be held constantly (convenient, because we also love to hold him constantly), I actually have had time to write, even if only in small sentence fragments in a stream of consciousness note on my phone with a sleeping baby on my chest. 

And let’s be clear—Ryan doesn’t ask me this question out of a belief that I should be more productive or that I should be busy creating content during this time. He asks because he knows that as we are caring for a tiny new human who has endless needs, we also mustmustMUST tend to our own flourishing as well. One of the gifts of our particular marriage in this particular season is that we get to be the ones to remind each other of this. Over and over and over again. 

I’m sitting here now in the rare moments of my beautiful Velcro baby napping away in his bassinet, reflecting on a few things:

1. My creative practice has abruptly shifted into something that looks very different, and if I’m not careful, I’ll fail to recognize and/or nurture its presence.

2. There is a new lushness and reciprocity in my creativity that interacts not only with the Spirit but also with the baby in my arms. 

3. I really have not gotten the hang of that “sleep when the baby sleeps” thing. 

During this season of (perhaps foolishly?) staying awake while the baby sleeps, I have become captivated by Hildegard of Bingen’s concept of Viriditas. 

Hildegard von Bingen by sculptor Karlheinz Oswald via Wikimedia Commons

Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th-century mystic who was impressively well-rounded—a nun, abbess, visionary, author, composer, practitioner of medicine… the list goes on. Her sharp intelligence, deep spirituality, and unique sense of the world influenced the mystics for centuries to come (and also, like all the best mystics, got her in some trouble with the Church).

Viriditas is possibly a portmanteau combining the Latin viridis or green and veritas or truth. While there is no neat English translation for Hildegard’s vocabulary creation, it means something like “the greening power of the earth” or “God’s creative force through the Spirit.” It dances around but isn’t ever fully captured by concepts like vitality, fecundity, generosity, verdancy, self-healing, creativity, and abundance. Viriditas is Creation-expressed and Spirit-powered. 

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

Viriditas is not so much vague as it is all-encompassing. I can’t claim to even scratch the surface on its complexity, and I’d urge you to dive into its truths as relayed by the brilliant and wonderful Hildegard. But even in my preliminary understanding of it, Viriditas has captured my attention, in large part because the dual wonder of our growing backyard garden and our growing child. 

As we all know but could probably stand to be reminded, growth is not linear. It happens in fits and starts. It seems to stall then races forward seemingly overnight. A plant that seems at the end of its rope suddenly rushes forward with new leaves and renewed strength. A child looks somehow older and wiser upon waking up to a new day. 

Labyrinth from the Sacred Seams series, available here along with other recent works.

I’m also being reminded during this time of the non-linearity of creativity. In a literal sense, every artist at some point comes face-to-face with the “ugly stage” of a work of art, wherein the piece that was previously going along just fine suddenly starts to look dauntingly hideous. Time-honored wisdom tells us we have to keep working through it. When we can trudge through, the ugly generally melts into lovely right before our eyes—you can’t blink or you may miss it. 

In less direct ways, creativity reveals its non-linearity in the ebbs and flows of creative practice. A creative practice can be an elusive beast anyway, and during periods of shifting tides or—perhaps more fittingly—changing seasons, it can appear to go dormant. But alas! A furtive peek under the surface reveals the branching and reaching of a sustaining root system, biding its time until the more obvious leaves and flowers of creativity return to our daily rhythms.

I’m not sewing much right now. 

I’m not doing any collage or piecing or appliqué right now. 

I’m not sitting down in my studio to do much at all right now. 

But the thrum of my creative practice continues underneath the surface. It is like the Viriditas of a meadow just before Spring. The seeds sown by wind and rain and animals the previous year have undergone their cold stratification and they are simply lying in wait. They are full of potential energy. Perhaps they dream, chilly and dew-soaked, of the moment that the warmth of the sun reaches far enough through the top layers of soil to usher them into their bright new world.

Every now and then, my patiently-waiting creative practice peeks its head out of its burrow. I find it in moments where I manage to grab my iPad without waking the sleeping baby in my arms and begin experimenting with digital collage. I find it in the early hours when mother and son both find themselves awake before it gets too hot to sit in a camping chair in the garden and listen to the birds. I find it when I’m struck with an idea in the middle of nursing, so I grab my phone and voice-to-text incoherent phrases into a note, hoping to capture just enough of the spark so that I can return to it later. 

It wasn’t until I sat with this idea of Viriditas that I began to appreciate how closely related creativity and growth are. Creativity, of course, is a process of ongoing creation, as is growth. Especially when peering through a mystical lens (as I am wont to do), the force behind both creativity and growth is an ever-presence Spirit of vitality. Viriditas. An evergreen truth that reverberates through every nook and cranny of life. Creativity and growth are both invitations into the swirl of potential that encircles us always. They are the fruits of an accepted invitation into the Spirit of life and mystery.

Inspired by these ideas, I’ve fallen into a new creative project. As I briefly mentioned, digital collage is large part of this current iteration of my creative practice, as is gardening. Oh, and I guess also pondering the magnitude of the cosmos while staring into the magical eyes of my child. You know, easy breezy stuff like that.

I’m finding myself very grateful to St. Hildegard for lending me the thread that bundles together these branches of my creative expression. I’m dedicating this new project, and perhaps even this bright and beautiful new season of life, to her.

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The remainder of this update contains a sneak peek of my new digital collage project. This is one type of content I will be offering to paid subscribers of this newsletter. I recently made available the option to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack, and without even advertising this option, I’ve been amazed and so incredibly grateful at those who have chosen to do so. To y’all I say THANK YOU a million times. You have no idea how big of a difference this financial support makes for my business and my family.

If you would like to preview this kind of content, free subscribers can unlock one paid post via Substack. Feel free to email me if you do not see that option below. 

I am in the process of pondering what kinds of special content I will offer for paid subscribers, but you can expect sneak peeks like this one, in addition to more personalized chats about the daily spirituality of creative practice. As I develop these offerings, I will share more specifically about what that might look like.

Rest assured that my writing and work will still be available through this newsletter to free subscribers. While the paid option is incredibly helpful for me financially, I do not have a desire to paywall all of the things that have drawn people to this newsletter. I am immensely grateful to every subscriber, free or paid, who choses to interact with my work and read my words.