I have always seen this light, in my spirit and not with external eyes, and I name it 'the cloud of the living light.' But sometimes I behold within this light another light which I name 'the living light itself.'
Hildegard of Bingen

The Living Light Itself
Topic: Truth & Purpose
From my infancy up to the present time, I now being over seventy years of age, I have always seen this light, in my spirit and not with external eyes, and I name it ‘the cloud of the living light.’ But sometimes I behold within this light another light which I name ‘the living light itself.’ And when I look upon it, every sadness and pain vanishes from my memory, so that I am again as a simple maid and not as an old woman.
Hildegard of Bingen OSB (1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Saint Hildegard and Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath. She is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.
Hildegard was elected magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136; she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play. She wrote theological, botanical, and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias. She is also noted for the invention of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota.
[From Wikipedia]
Easwaran, Eknath. God Makes the Rivers to Flow, Nilgiri Press. [Ford-Grabowsky, Mary. Prayers for All People. Hildegard of Bingen. Doubleday, 1995].

Hildegard of Bingen
Resources
- Saint Hildegard, German Mystic, written by: The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica
- Healthy Hildegard
- Hildegard of Bingen, the Mystic, Healthy Hildegard website
- Wikipedia, Hildegard of Bingen
- Mary Sarratt, Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen
- Nature as a Mirror of God Monday, March 12, 2018, Richard Rohr with John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety
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Eknath Easwaran, Hildegard of Bingen
Richard Rohr, Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias [Excerpted from his commentary]
Visionary theology [Excerpt]
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