Life and depth with Hildegard and Heaney

Bog bodies, mushrooms, magnetic fields and holiness

Gothic Windows in the Ruins of the Monastery at Oybin, Carl Gustav Carus, 1828

Here in the green valleys and deep old Devon lanes in winter, I can feel like I’m trying to pull sun and hope out of the mud. It is there, but I wish it were easier to get hold of. I have been thinking about the things we pull from the depths.

Hildegard of Bingen is, I think, my favourite mystical saint. She was a 12th century German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, medical writer and practitioner, and a composer (scroll to the end for some quotes and a piece of music by her). (She also wrote a cookbook called “foods of joy” which, even without her mystical, musical, Earth-loving ways, makes me want to be friends with her).

She became leader of her monastery, which was the size of a town. In one of her many visions, she saw a way to create a septic system underneath the community. As a result, the place became healthy and plague-free. Though the details aren’t available to the same depth as her theological or medicinal writings, historical records suggest a system that used natural principles (gravity, filtration through sand, plants to break down organic matter) to dispose of waste, re-use it, and also improve hygiene. Her practical work reflected her writings, many of which emphasise balance, harmony with the natural world, and the cyclical nature of life and decay — she wrote about these things almost a thousand years before modern environmental awareness. Hildegard was a celebrated mystic but also deeply engaged in the world as it is. She decomposed waste — which was never meant to be waste, but resource for elsewhere — to bring about balance and health; a state that has the same root as the words holy and wholeness.

Mushrooms know this too, that there is no such thing as waste, that nature is all resurrection. Mushrooms live a kind of practical holiness, perhaps. They are fruiting bodies, the end point of an unseen underground lattice of mycelium. The mushroom says, fruitfulness comes from what is unseen or overlooked — hidden networks, decomposition. In old books, Jesus said the same thing — the least shall be first, the weak strong, what is unseen will be seen by those who have eyes to see. In its own way, the mushroom lives this.

The spiritual and the practical, the body and the soul, should never should have been severed. Our society often tells us otherwise.

I saw waste turned into holiness this past week too, in my local library. Working in the corner, I overheard people come in and ask about books and printing and then, when there was a lull, their voices would quieten and they would ask when the next surplus food delivery would arrive. Over the course of about half an hour, a queue began to form. Finally, a delivery of waste food from various local food outlets arrived. The food was arranged into sections: bread, cold foods, fruit and vegetables, and so on. Volunteers guided the queue of people so that each had a chance to collect a bag of food. The queue shortened, the food diminished. By the end, the only things left were bags of ’carrot baubles’, presumably leftover from Christmas — each person picked up a bag, exclaimed “carrot baubles”, paused, put the bag back down, then picked up some carrot-shaped carrots and left.

Jake and I recently watched Simon Schama’s latest BBC series, Story of Us, about the way culture has shaped who we are. The final episode, Our Contested Land, featured Seamus Heaney’s poem The Tollund Man. Heaney wrote the poem after learning of the early Iron age bog body of the same name discovered in Denmark; a man about 30-40 years old who had been hung, probably as part of a ritual sacrifice, and buried in a peat bog (the peat preserved his body so that even 2,500 years later you can still see the stubble of his beard). The Tollund man becomes a symbol of violence: Heaney looks beneath the nowness of war in Ireland during the Troubles and found a heavy common ground between this brutality and that of people elsewhere — in the 5th century BC, or perhaps everywhere, always.

Heaney dug down beneath what was expected of him, beneath time- and life-consuming tribalism, refusing to use his art to support either side and instead digging to find something older and truer: that we are not so different as we might like to think. He pulled it back up, formed it as poem, and with it, confronts us.

I hear Hildegard and Heaney, in their own ways, say that if we are prepared to dig beneath culture and time — perhaps beneath the urgency of the news cycle, or the myths of ‘normal’ we find ourselves in, or the ephemera of algorithm-driven social media — we might open ourselves up to a world “all alive, awake, and aware” as Hildegard describes. We might find wonder, wisdom, direction.

The Earth’s magnetic field has lately been accelerating toward Siberia. The magnetic field exists because the planet’s outer core is a layer of molten iron and nickel that starts about 1,800 miles beneath the Earth’s crust and mantle. As its fluid dynamics change over time, so too does the magnetic field. We locate ourselves with this field — satellites need precise geomagnetic data to maintain their orbits and function properly. Birds do too, using magnetic fields to navigate. The earth’s outer core is deep down, unseen, but helps us and some of our non-human neighbours find ourselves.

Illumination, I think, often comes from the depths, the outside, the unseen. A septic system that brought health and a kind of wholeness; a mushroom that lives largely in the dark but knows there is no such thing as waste; schemes that operate outside of economic systems to keep people fed; a bog body that brought a poem and with it, lament; an unseeable geological force.

In this age, where depth but also distraction are everywhere, offering themselves, we must I think become diggers, seers, navigators — holding up our compasses until we align with unseen things that might separate us from the current of the age, but which also locate us and maybe even show us how to conjure holiness, even when the light is dim and the world feels like mud.

Where are you finding hope, light, depth at the moment? I’d love to dig with you.

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Some of my favourite Hildegard von Bingen quotes:

• “We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.”

• “Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep, You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.”

• “The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.”

• “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.”

• “Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of the Earth's greenings. Now, think.”

AND she wrote words and music, like this haunting piece:

Thank you for being here! I’d love to know more about you — what do you love to read, to think about; what are you navigating at the moment and what helps you do so?

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Finally, a poem from 1898 which offers a magnification of the often-overlooked world of grass (perhaps though as children this is the kind of world we spend ages peering into?)

The Depths of Grass, by ‘Michael Field’ (a pseudonym of English poets Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper; itself a kind of layer to dig under)

Look, in the early light,
Down to the infinite
Depths at the deep grass-roots;
Where the sun shoots
In golden veins, as looking through
A dear pool one sees it do;
Where campion drifts
Its bladders, iris-brinded, through the rifts
Of rising, falling seed
That the winds lightly scour—
Down to the matted earth where over
And over again crow’s-foot and clover
And pink bindweed
Dimly, steadily flower.