It is a summer’s day, after the solstice. The light is bright but slowly fading, turning inwards, light of the soul. My bare feet tread warm soil. A rich earth that offers up gifts: centaury, cleavers, chamomile, flax, plantain, woodruff, yarrow… These plants are saints to me, names to be recited with reverence. Each a story of healing.
It has always been nature that leads me to spirit. Revealing itself in that early experience of becoming quanta: the me in me, and the me becoming the formless beyond form, the energy that flows through and between all things. In those moments, and in that knowing, it was nature that said, ‘together let us heal’.
And so it is, as I sit with the plants, my soul family, on a pilgrims’ way through grain and forest and watch the slow-moving flow of the Rhine, that I realise that I have been led here to name my path. This is ecospirituality and nature is my cathedral.
Near the abbey that bears her name, Saint Hildegard comes and sits with me. She meets me where I am, in amongst the plants and the birds. We bear witness to the god in all things and the us in every thing: a falcon gliding, a pigeon cooing, the skylark warbling in the wheat. Together we pick the mugwort to take to the abbey to make tea, and she gives me agrimony for my tears.
For all these years this faith has been growing in me. It took root and then it flourished. And here at the Abbey I realise my morning Laudes and evening Vespers are songs of nature.
It is nature that helps the healing in living and dying. I find connection when I see myself reflected in the sacred, turning cycles of growth and decay. And great peace can be found in that.
My path is an ecospiritual one. A prayer for all times, and it is the ancients who meet me here under Hawthorn and Oak. There are gods with many names, many stories, but under the tree all becomes one, together and apart, and we delight in the soulfood we grow to bring to this banquet.
Mine is a green path. It is earth and dust and flower and fish. It is a bird on the wing, a whale descending, the silvery moon rising. It is the baby being born, and the fluttering of a soul departing, just like the butterfly wings opening in the moments before it is ready to fly.
Near the abbey that bears her name, Saint Hildegard comes and sits with me on moss under the whorl and gnarl of tree. Gently she pulls the greening bough towards us and together we take the verdant eucharist of leaf and dew.
The path I walk is this green way. Here I am writ large and sacred in cosmos and earth. We ask for guidance so we may understand death, and yet the simplest way is to share stories of life. Egret, goat, cow, cowslip, rose, heron these are all saints to me.
Mine is a green path. A living prayer for all times.
