Maria Popova on MC Richards on Creativity

 

The Force and the Flower: Poet and Potter M.C. Richards on Creativity

In a recent conversation with my poetic physicist friend Alan Lightman, sparring over whether the creative spirit can be usefully divided into complementary arts and science (Alan’s view) or whether these are simply different side doors to our ongoing yearning to bridge matter and mystery in order to make meaning (my view), I was reminded of a forgotten speech by one of the most original minds and brightest spirits of the past century.

On Valentine’s Day 1971, a year after the publication of her classic Centering, the poet and potter M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) was invited to speak at an arts festival in Maine. Going “from horticulture to alchemy to the history of consciousness, with a few poems sprinkled in, and relying heavily on paradox,” the address she delivered, later included in The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings (public library), is one of the most honest, imaginative, and articulate investigations of creativity I have encountered — a bold defiance of the fracturing of culture anchored in the passionate insistence that “the center is everywhere,” that it is “made up of differences, uniquenesses, in a tissue of relationships, interactions, interpenetrations.”

Mary Caroline Richards at Black Mountain College (Getty Research Institute. Photographer unknown.)

At the center of her cosmogony of creativity are the connections between the life of the individual human being and the life of the universe; between the inner invisible realm, which she calls “the force,” and the outer visible realm of its manifestation, which she calls the “the flower”; between the different fields of study and work through which we explore these realms. She writes:

Artists are sometimes particularly attuned to these connections, scientists too, mystics too… There may be a message in this way of working. Maybe that’s what a subject is, a gathering of ideas as set in motion by a central impulse. Like a magnetic field. Start the field going, and elements begin to swarm. By what logic? By attraction. By resonance. Maybe that’s what relevance is: the feeling of attraction and resonance between ideas and people.

This feeling, Richard observes, is what we call creativity — the mystery to which we try to give shape in matter — and it begins not in the mind but in the heart. She considers the force by which the cabbage flowers:

Cabbage… grows a big heart. Out of this heart come leaves. As the leaves grow, the heart grows. The cabbage gets its leaves from the inside, where there aren’t any. Cabbages grow from the inside, from the heart. And by growing they create their hearts.

A neurophysiologist from Yale says that brains too are created in this way: from un-brain forces. He says that the human brain is created by thinking, that ideas and values create chemical reactions in tissue. Like a cabbage, somehow the physical form grows from an invisible realm.

This invisible realm must be a powerfully creative region. It furnishes us not only with cabbages and brains, but with our scientific hypotheses, religious experiences, and works of art.

With the recognition that works of art begin with “a feeling for things, a feeling which is a way of knowing about things,” she adds:

We tend to call any undertaking an art when it seems to be drawing upon the fullness of inner feeling and upon careful regard for physical expression. To live and to work in the world mindful of the processes which are necessary to infuse matter with soul forces, to use techniques on behalf of living forms, is a great art.

In this sense, she observes, living itself is an art — the art of connection. Just as Erich Fromm was formulating the ideas that would become The Art of Being, Richards writes:

Life is best understood and practiced as an art, the way that art is understood and practiced. We rely on inspiration, feeling for materials, knowledge of how to put things together well, patience, physical strength and awareness that we are part of a process which we don’t know much about yet but which we live within and are sustained by. The verbal arts we practice, or visual arts, or graphic arts, or theater arts, or musical arts, or liberal arts, are part of something. They are not the whole story. And they are interconnected at the center with all the other parts.

1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Pulsating beneath this interconnected totality is the essence of all creative work. While the young Jane Goodall was contemplating the indivisibility of art and science, Richards considers what creativity in all its forms asks of us and what it gives us:

Total concentration, total focus, enjoyment, discovery, inner effort, creating something, feeling secure in the process yet not knowing or demanding to know how it will come out. Many of the things we do may have this quality. Take gardening, for example, or making lab experiments, or working out a new equation, or cooking supper, or having a child, or teaching a class, or running a college, or praying, or going for a walk, or getting married, or dying.

This feeling of generative not-knowing — something the artist Ann Hamilton so beautifully articulated a generation after Richards — is also our best path to knowledge, integral to the creative process of science:

When we live in the spirit of science, we live in a quality of inquiry, of wonder. We put one foot in front of the other, standing firmly balanced on the earth, finding our way on. Each step is both an answer and a question. We both know and don’t know what we are doing… We need to learn to hear the yes in the no; the no in the yes. To hear what is not said. To see what is not visible.

This, of course, is why poetry and science so naturally meet, why openness to wonder may be the best measure and the deepest meaning of our aliveness, the wellspring from which everything that is creative springs.

Thanks to The Marginalian by Maria Popova, published June 21, 2026 

Hildegard of Bingen

 

Don’t Waste Your Greening Life-Force: Hildegard’s Prophetic Enchanted Ecology

The year is 1174.

Gravity, oxygen, and electricity have not been discovered.

Clocks, calculus, and the printing press have not been invented.

Earth is the center of the universe, encircled by heavenly bodies whose motions are ministered by angels.

Most people never live past their thirties.

Medicine abides by the Greek theory of the humors and treats all ailments with a combination of bloodletting, herbal tinctures, amputation, and the King’s Touch.

No university will educate a woman. In fact, no university exists.

At seventy-six, Hildegard of Bingen — poet, painter, healer, composer, philosopher, mystic, medical writer — has just finished writing and illustrating her third and farthest-seeing book: The Book of Divine Works, chronicling seven years of prophetic visions. God had first begun speaking to her in “the voice of the Living Light” when she was three, but she never suffered the hubris of a self-appointed prophet — rather, she considered herself “a totally uneducated human being,” a “wretched and fragile creature,” who is merely a channel for divine wisdom. She may be the Western world’s first great crusader against dualism — in the sermons she delivered to priests, bishops, abbots, and ordinary people all over present-day Germany and Switzerland, she preached that “God is Reason,” that “Reason is the root” from which “the resounding Word blooms,” but also that “from the heart comes healing,” that we apprehend the world and its wisdom most clearly through the intuitions of the “inner eye” and “inner ear.”

Hildegard was fifty-six when she began receiving the vision that would become her Book of Divine Works. On its pages, between writings about birds and trees and stones and stars, between reckonings with the nature of eternity and the fundaments of love, she conceptualizes something the word for which would not be coined for another seven centuries: ecology.

Long before Alexander von Humboldt invented modern nature with his recognition that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” before John Muir insisted that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Hildegard places at the center of her cosmology the notion of viriditas, from the Latin for “green” — a greening life-force pervading the world, mirrored in the virtues that enlush the soul.

Human beings, she writes, are “co-creators with God” in the operations of nature. We must cooperate with one another in the task of protecting and nourishing this interconnected creation, and we must do so by integrating the rational and the intuitive in us. Hildegard’s human being is “the fragile vessel where soul and reason are active,” filled with “the fullness of time.”

In one of her visions, collected in the wonderful translation Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works: With Letters and Songs (public library), she paints a menacing picture of a world in which we have grown disconnected from the greening life-force of our own souls. Seven centuries before Eunice Newton Foote discovered greenhouse gasses, and an epoch before we had any sense of climate change or our own hand in it, Hildegard prophecies:

Then the greening power of the virtues faded away, and all justice entered upon a period of decline. As a result, the greening power of life on Earth was reduced in every seed because the upper region of the air was altered in a way contrary to its first destiny. Summer now became subject to a contradictory chill while winter often experienced a paradoxical warmth. There occurred on Earth times of drought and dampness… As a result, many people asserted that the Last Day was near at hand.

She was unambiguous about what stands between us and such fate:

If… we give up the green vitality of [our] virtues and surrender to the drought of our indolence, so that we do not have the sap of life and the greening power of good deeds, then the power of our very soul will begin to fade and dry up.

And yet Hildegard believed in “the green vitality of human volition,” believed that “the soul knows what is good and what is harmful.” By integrating our rational faculty with our heart-honed intuition, by refusing to dishonor our own souls, we have within us the power to revivify this Earth. It what may be the clearest, most succinct manifesto for climate action, she writes:

Our thinking affects our greening power… The soul is the green life-force of the flesh… When we humans work in accord with the strivings of our soul, all our deeds turn out well.

This, indeed, is the beating heart of Hildegard’s viriditas: the insistence that the stewardship of Earth’s life-force is not merely our moral obligation to the universe but our spiritual duty to our own souls. And this can only be so — the words holy and whole share a Latin root; if an ecological conscience is a way of seeing the world whole, it is a way of seeing its holiness, of seeing our own holiness — not above it, but nested within it. Rachel Carson knew this when, picking up Hildegard’s torch eight centuries later to catalyze the modern environmental movement, she observed that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” that the task now before humanity is “to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.” It was Hildegard who gave us the original model of poetic ecology. 

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Source: Maria Popova's The Marginalian newsletter 

Sunday Jan 26, 2025  https://www.themarginalian.org/newsletter/