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The miraculous 9-pointed blue Chinese bell flower that bloomed in my garden on July 4, 2010. These blossoms normally have only 5 points, and 9 is a lucky number for me. Hildegard's 900th birthday was the first full year that I knew I was she.
Spring Round

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by Carl Johann Schroeder

Lush green carpet soon shall roll here
Where once lay the ice and crystal.
Fertile fecund, this our nature
that doth command: grow ye all!
Take my hand and we shall wander,
Let this garden rule once more.


Having 12 measures, the Spring Round can be sung in 3 parts (every 4 measures), 6 parts (every 2), and maybe even all 12! Press shift and click on these links to play audio in the background: here's me singing 3 vocal parts with myself, which sounds decent thanks to the miracle of computer audio editing. I made a 6 part instrumental version to demonstrate the next step (6 vocal parts was a mess without a good timbral variety of singers), and I won't even dare try 12 at this time.




In April 1992, long before I knew that I was Hildegard, I wrote "Spring Round" for a round-singing group I was in. I had fun composing a few rounds - which are basically melodies that fold onto themselves to produce cycling chords - but this piece felt especially powerful, ancient, and prophetic. Now I can appreciate that it's just the sort of blooming Earth energy that Hildegard uniquely referred to frequently as "viriditas", the greening power of God.

What's especially interesting is that the color green was not always perceptible to humans. It's a known puzzle in classical studies that the earliest literature, most notably Homer's Odyssey, does not speak of colors as we would today. Colors are not particularly described, and certainly not employed as metaphors. Although the early Greek frescoes and textiles held vivid colors, it was as if a quality was being responded to and matched from life, without being truly perceived or named. For example, "chloris" gets commonly translated now as green, but Sappho has a poem in which she says her skin becomes chloris in the presence of her lover. Some translators now believe that "chloris" originally meant damp, and later became associated with green from the dampness of dewy grass. Chloris was also a nymph connected with Spring and fresh growth, who later became the Roman goddess Flora.

Julian Jayne's remarkable 1970's theory for the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which is getting scientific validation from brain studies even as it remains ahead of its time, says that with the collapse of the Bronze age around 1200 BC came an evolutionary shift in consciousness toward the individual's assertive identity, rooted in the language usage of the left-brain. Before that, as seen in Homeric narrative, when people obeyed the gods they were literally hearing their right brains tell their left brains what to do, experienced disconnectedly as divine intervention. Jaynes was not necessarily spiritual in his implications, but it's not hard to imagine that this was the time when the higher consciousness ruled human lives through an unintegrated perception of the whole mind toward which we are still evolving today. This recalls the epidemic of autism spectrum and other disorders that yearn to be explained holistically in left/right brain imbalances such as a visionary like Robert Melilo writes so simply and plainly about, but more rightly than wrongly as his skeptics charge I cannot say.

Channeled entity Lazaris teaches that human evolution is characterized by a placing of all responsibility in the higher consciousness (gods tell us what to do), which then for our eventual benefit moved the seat of power into the unconscious (nature happens to us), then subconscious (Freudian impulses), and finally the conscious (we create our own reality, hurray!) So Hildegard's viriditas becomes the celebration of a stage of in human divine development such as gave birth to Athenian virtues, which remain at the core of our western ideals. Furthermore, Rudolf Steiner says that the resurrection of Christ brought humanity into a perception of the blue sky that it had not previously perceived. I am reminded of the sapphire blue Christ that Hildegard saw, and the blue light I experienced from the eyes of Jesus as he rose in the tomb.

What mysteries then of violet and higher lightforms remain to be discovered, as we go up the chakras in the attainment of our full divine nature? What perceptions of energetic qualities that we value unconsciously today will have names and precise recipes for uses in the future that awaits with untold riches and benefits for all people? Oh, what a glorious New Age is truly leaping and sprouting forth now; thank you dear God, Goddess, and All That Is, for inviting us to be your kin and kind while yet we still walk the Earth!



"Spring Round" lyrics and music by Carl Johann Schroeder, copyright 1992, all rights reserved, when credited and not altered then permission is granted for public performance and free distribution of text to that end, no resale or commercial rights implied, contact author for further details. Text copyright Carl Johann Schroeder, all rights reserved.

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