She was born in the mists of the Rhineland, the tenth child of minor nobles who offered her, as tithe, to the Church before she could speak. From childhood, she heard what others could not-the low hum beneath creation, the pulse of light in the seed, the hidden color of sound. The visions frightened her at first: great wheels of fire, rivers of living green, the voices of angels echoing like music made of wind. Yet they shaped her, calling her to a life that would not remain hidden behind cloister walls. As abbess of Rupertsberg, Hildegard von Bingen became many things the world did not expect of a woman: healer, composer, preacher, correspondent of emperors and popes. Her hands gathered herbs from the hillside; her mind wove treatises on medicine and the cosmos; her spirit set the Latin of her songs aflame with celestial beauty. She ruled her convent with both tenderness and unyielding strength, believing that obedience meant not silence but harmony-the joining of human will to divine order. In her presence, even the skeptical trembled.

Her voice-hoarse, commanding, sometimes impatient with the blindness of men-carried the weight of revelation. Yet those who truly knew her spoke also of laughter, of her delight in the scent of crushed mint, the shimmer of river light on stone, the fierce joy she took in life's smallest signs of viriditas-the greening force she believed was the breath of God. By the time death came for her, she had seen nearly a century of dawns, and her name had spread far beyond the Rhine. To some she was prophetess, to others visionary, heretic, or saint. But to those who knelt at her bedside that final morning, she was simply Mother-the woman whose light, once kindled, refused to fade.