The Soilbound Almanac

A Rule of Life for the End of the World

This past term I have been taking a course on Medieval Women Mystics that has been a super fun class to take as I wrap up my M.Div. As with most of my classes I have a persistent nagging preoccupation with finding ways to incarnate my course learnings into something materially useful in the world. This is where the idea for the Soilbound Almanac emerged as I dreamed about what it would look like to faithfully compost things I learned in during this term within the context of my vocational life, and our present planetary crisis.

The Soilbound Almanac is an ecologically oriented rule of life that draws its primary inspiration from the theology, lives, and mysticism of Hildegard von Bingen, Clare of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Avila! The hope is that this rule will be useful for the work of resisting dismemberment, and becoming radically oriented toward the biosphere with a spirituality capable of helping us navigate the ever-worsening conditions of ecological overshoot.

The Almanac is a compost heap pf prayers, practices, art, composted-iconography and guiding principles packed into a forty-four page art zine full of scanned floral ephemera and DIY cottage-core aesthetics. It is not perfect by any means, and while I probably needed a good 16-20 more pages to fully round it out in the way I would have liked, I am indeed proud of it.

As with previous academic papers and projects this Almanac, and the accompanying artist statement paper are both available to paid subscribers with the links below the paywall!

Based on Hildegard’s painting of her Vision of Divine Love seeks to wrestle with the tensions between Hildegard’s assertion that divine love “flows through all of creation,” and the reality that we are living in a time of crisis that seeks to leave us, our planet, and even the sacred dismembered.