| It is beginning! |
The great greening happens so quickly in Napa! Within the week of the first substantial rain of the season, tiny green sprouts present themselves below dried vegetation. Within days the landscape changes from the brown and grey grace of summer and autumn to the benedicta viriditas of winter… so different in California! —the inverse of what I grew up with in the Midwest.
Carl Jung defines the benedicta viriditas, “blessed greenness,” as
…the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner, more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding of the promise of future harvests. (CW 14, ❡432)
The land we each live on offers this experience of renewal. For Donald and me, working with the Biodynamic preparations and cycles accentuates this psychic renewal of ourselves and perhaps of the land as well.
I would love to hear about your own experiences of the “blessed greenness,” whatever climate you may know.