'What She Knows'

Hildegard von Bingen called it viriditas — the vital green force that moves through all living things, the same intelligence in the root system as in the hand that draws it. In the twelfth century she diagnosed illness as an absence of viriditas. The green force had withdrawn. The treatment was to restore it: plants, music, prayer — anything that called the green back into the body.

The interior of this ring is mostly green. Deep botanical vocabulary of things that grow low and dense and know the soil’s whole story. Bronze beads like a metalsmith’s notation in the margins. The index finger that wears this ring points at what others have walked past. Not dramatically. Matter-of-factly. She has been paying attention to the roots for a long time, and what she points at is simply: this, here, this thing you missed.

This ring is for the woman who learned the language no one else was studying.