GAZZETTA
A journal and note-garden of herbal musings, fragrant reflections,
cultural curiosa and wild growing inspiration.
GAZZETTA – a news sheet – comes from the Italian name gazeta, a copper coin from the city of Venice that in the 1600’s was the price for reading a certain pamphlet or bulletin published there – a half penny of news.
The word could also possibly be derived from the Latin gaza meaning ‘a little treasury of news’.
Later, in the 18th century, the name traveled abroad and turned into gazette, which is the term for a newspaper in both the French and English language, even in use today.
GREEN ALTAR
Hildegard’s ‘greening’ medicine
Part 2
29-November-2019
By Ingvild Vinje
The extraordinary 12th century mystic and philosopher Hildegard of Bingen wrote several books about God and the universe. Almost a millennium before todays physicists she understood how everything is inseparably connected and related in the cosmic web of the universe. In her remarkable visions she saw the Divine Light in all living things and stated that everything in heaven and on earth is penetrated with connectedness. Every creature alive has radiance, and we are the light green heart of the living fullness of nature.
In her first book Scivias, ‘Know the Ways’, she talks about the interconnectedness of man in the universe, where she describes a philosophy full of archetypical images.
As a work it has impressed many who later came across it, including C. G. Jung, who drew much of her ideas into his thinking.
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A VOICE OF THE LIVING LIGHT
Hildegard von Bingen
Part 1
26-October-2019
By Ingvild Vinje
I first came across Hildegard of Bingen one and a half decades ago through her music which was introduced to me by a dear friend in Italy where I lived at the time.
I was familiar with monastic Gregorian chants, although they had been with male voices singing in harmony, not female vocals like these.
Hildegard’s medieval hymns were different, her music had a different intoning, like another pitch or vibration and the songs were more complex and multi-faceted.
As the music flowed through me there in that old stone house sitting high up on an enchanting Tuscan hilltop with huge majestic Cypress and Mulberry trees, I was filled with awe.
And with awe follows gratitude.
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GREEN BREATH OF LIFE
The beginning
12-October-2019
By Ingvild Vinje
At a time unimaginably long ago, roughly between four to six billion years, something seemingly small yet radical happened that was vital to the evolution of life on Earth. The ‘little’ miracle that took place was that special types of micro-organisms (bacteria) self-organised into living cells capable of performing photosynthesis by using sunlight as a source of energy to make their food. This revolutionary process opened up for a carbon exchange that initiated the successive life forms of the plant and animal kingdom and even made possible our own coming into existence here on Earth as Homo sapiens about 200.000 years ago.
It all started with the mechanism for converting light energy into chemical energy as our cohabitants and green alchemists -the plants – do for a living.
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