Composer, healer, artist and poet Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th century German abbess, a female superior of a community of nuns whose creative and spiritual legacy continues to inspire men and women today. The touchstone of return for all artists in this collaboration is Hildegard's Theory of Viriditas or greening the natural driving force toward healing and wholeness. The vital power that sustains all life's greenness. Organic and dynamic scholars associate Viriditas with creativity, nature, light and the feminine divine. Members of the Hildegard Project Collaborative view creativity as a practice rooted in an internal space that we as artists foster, nurture and sustain. Inspiration and articulation ways to kindle a spark. Tease breezes with fingers, distill sound into air, fan with a steady gaze and vision. The tender quickens cups of flame burst just as we draw down ideas with breath. I the fiery life of divine essence flame out over the beauty of the fields we work whirlwinds among us and the fire grows. Friends join us free and bound seeds fold into soil and swell with rain sprouting in the warm, dark shoots push through up and out earthbound yet hold by heat stems become vines vines become tethers That pulse as they find sky and loam cloud and seed reason is the root through which the resonant word flourish is vines, shimmering greeting Viriditas around which we spin and spin and spin. Ebb and flow man become what you already are a human being, fold, coil, curl, unfurl, straighten open. We push out into space and pull back across time We seek, we align, we break pause. Wind will trumpet through you listen. Rocks will sing, look suns will bloom within you tighten and burst cleave and render rejoice. For we are sacred mirrors, wax and wane. The sun blazes as a living light and moonlight shines to brightening night to night to night kindled and renewed by the sun's fire. Even when light thins to a slice and it disappears altogether, even when we can't see with naked eyes. The way the world works, the cycles of moon and sun still coalesce and pull our oceans tides.