Cosmic Mother

Resplendent jewel and unclouded brightness
of the sunlight streaming through you,
know that the sun is a fountain leaping
from the father's heart,
his all-fashioning word.
He spoke and the primal matrix
teemed with things unnumbered -
but Eve unsettled them all.

To you the father spoke again
but this time
the word he uttered was a man
in your body.
Matrix of light! through you he breathed forth
all that is good,
as in the primal matrix he formed
all that has life. Scivias, Hildegard of Bingen

Nature takes shapes that repeat themselves at all levels of life. The orb, the wave, the elipse, and the spiral are found in plants and animals, in geographic and cosmic configuration, in quantum particles and animal cells.

Forms such as the seed, the leaf, the egg, are potent metaphors for life, as they relate to shapes we find in the human body. The womb itself, can take the shape of a branching tree; seed-bearing ovaries hanging ovoid from bilateral filopian branches. Or imagine the womb a germinating seed, as in the image of Mary above, a seed giving rise not simply to one life, but many, as she becomes the fruit-bearing tree.

The Sanskrit figure for the sound Ohm, can represent the shape of a bird in flight. Perhaps a dove. Spirit. Nature's patterns and forms give rise to a symbolic language that speaks to us of the unity of Life. We are held in a matrix of relationship, each level dependent upon the others to potentiate and sustain the sacred web.

From Hildegard, Prophet of the Cosmic Christ by Renate Craine: "According to Hildegard, the Mystery of God reveals one great pattern. All of creation, including the matter of the universe, emerged from God's Love (Caritas) and has Christ, the Wisdom of God, as it manifestation, goal and explanation. The entire universe is meant to reveal the interrelational, Trinitarian energy pattern of Love. Humans are meant to participate in this pattern of fecundity (viriditas), which is the work of the Son ['the work of the Word is fecundity']" Causae et Curae, 22, 15.

Hildegard's vision is fully articulated in the lovely words of this excerpt from Scivias, as she sings of the receptivity that makes Incarnation possible; praises for Mary, the matrix of the Good Man...and Eden, the matrix of "all that has life." And God saw that it was Good.

Artwork and original description: Joyti Art Ashram  http://jyotiartashram.blogspot.com/2011/06/elemental-symbol-of-life.html