A friend sent me this Hildegard of Bingen quote years ago. I was immediately intrigued.

“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.”

I’ve been pondering this quote ever since, and it still feeds my mind and heart. I turn to it when hearing the call of my soul to speak up against injustice, or even to lean into living a life of authenticity.

What could I learn from a German Benedictine abbess, who challenged the patriarchy of her time to become the founder of scientific natural history in her country, as concluded by a number of scholars? The part of me that resisted religious influence and dogma had some trouble with Hildegard’s quotes mentioning “God,” until I could soften into what the word and ideology meant to her.

Over the years, I’ve gathered many of Hildegard’s quotes in my journal, and she seems now like a kindred spirit, a friend across the flow of time.

Here are some of my favorites offering hope to a sad and crumbling world:

“Humanity, take a good look at yourself. Inside you’ve got heaven and earth, and all of creation. You’re a world—everything is hidden in you.”

For me, each quote is layered with meaning. They take me down many philosophical and practical roads, opening me to perspectives sometimes lost within the complications of life.

Hildegard was born during the High Middle Ages (c. 1098 – 17, September, 1179) to a family of lower nobility, a sickly child offered as an oblate to the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg, where she was enclosed at the age of 14 in a female hermitage called a Frauenklause, attached to a monastery of monks. She claimed to have received visions from an early age, calling her spiritual path “umbra viventis lucis”—the reflection of the living light.

I am astounded by Hildegard’s reverence for the natural world. She truly understood the connection between it and the fragility of the human race; she was ahead of her time, open-hearted to all life forms.

“We shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.”

“Glance at the sun. See the moon and stars. Gaze at the beauty of the green earth. Now think.”

“The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed.”

As a mystic, composer, polymath, philosopher, medical practitioner, and prolific writer, Hildegard lived with a purpose and intellectual prowess at a time when women were rarely allowed a voice. It would be another article altogether to list all of her accomplishments, but these are easily researched.

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

“Even in a world that’s being shipwrecked, remain brave and strong.”

When I want to turn away from a world that is burning, I look at the quote above. I may not always be able to look without feeling overwhelmed and even sick to my soul, but finding my balance and strength again after taking care of myself, I return.

“Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.”

I long for connectedness and relatedness, for healthy community to be our united path. I think that deep down every human being wants this, but we come to it in different ways. I wish war was not a way we fought for community.

Even though I would express God as God/dess to include the Feminine, this next quote reminds me of my Wise Woman Path and of the Animism that informs my existence. I feel one with the elements, that there is consciousness in all things, and that I am the environment. And if I am the environment, would I wreak havoc on what I’m part of? Would I not seek to live a sustainable life, and to look to my neighbor as kin?

“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, the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all sustaining life.”

I wonder if we could see ourselves as the magical beings that we are, existing in two levels of consciousness, both earthly and part of the cosmic mystery; if we could zoom out and see a different perspective of ourselves, as creatives who manifest the world we live in—the mundane as sacred, the sacred as the mundane—could we live in reverence of each other and the world around us?

“Just as the mirror, which reflects all things, is set in its own container, so too the rational soul is placed in the fragile container of the body. In this way, the body is governed in its earthly life by the soul, and the soul contemplates heavenly things through faith.”

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