Meditations on Life together, viriditas, and on falling down and getting up

Friends,

We send Spring greetings to you from a little parsonage in the state of Brandenburg, Germany, where I grew up as a child. The endless yards in the front and back of the home are brimming with viriditas, the greening life force the medieval Abbess Hildegard of Bingen has described so vividly. Everything is exploding into greening, most certainly the grass which has quickly overgrown the many gardens my father had planted and cared for so meticulously for so many years.

Now, my parents have grown old in the parsonage of my childhood, my mother has drifted into the graceful awkward joy of mid-stage Alzheimer’s where space and time begin to blur but where she still participates in family life at home.