The Greening of the Self
We have come through a great storm. Not just personally, but collectively; across systems, identities, and inner landscapes. And like any true storm, it has left behind its share of wreckage. But wreckage, too, reveals. It shows us where we were, where we are, and, most importantly, what is now deeply, urgently needed now to move on.
For many, this time has brought a quiet but unignorable truth: we are no longer nourished by the roles we once inhabited. Something in us has dried out. Cracked. Forgotten the sound of water. Like Estes says in her perennially relevant book.
“When a woman has gone too long without her cycles of return, too long from the sea, she begins to dry out. She begins to crack. Her ideas and dreams begin to wither. She loses her skin.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
There is a moment in the Sealskin, Soulskin story when the Seal-woman realises she has been away too long. Too long from the sea. Too long from her source.
This myth speaks to something many women feel, especially at times of transition, loss, or slow unravelling. When we’ve been holding too much, for too long. When we’ve adapted to roles, responsibilities, or systems that no longer nourish us. When we realise, sometimes suddenly, that we have boiled dry.
Estés writes of this as an ecological crisis of the soul. One that demands not a solution, but a return.
Joanna Macy, ecophilosopher and visionary of the deep ecology movement, calls what is needed “the greening of the self.” It’s a shift in perception and identity that comes when we reclaim our felt kinship with the living world. When we no longer see ourselves as separate, but as part of the sacred web. She writes:
“The greening of the self arises when the boundaries of the ego are expanded to include the world… It is a shift that brings us into communion,with life, with grief, with love, with action.”
This is at the heart of how Macy applied that practically, in what she called the work that reconnects; which represents a lifelong commitment to inner and outer restoration. Not just for the planet, but for our own lost ecology.
And so what I’m drawn to, thinking about and exploring, is how we go back. To the water. To the wild. To the soil. To the parts of ourselves we had to leave behind.
The Greening of Self
This idea of Viriditas, of greening, is a beautiful metaphor that can be applied to how we think about promoting wellbeing and healthfulness. The concept adds images and poetry so that we can cultivate conditions of fertility, greening, landscape and vitality – first in our imagination, then to our being, our work and our life.
Viriditas is a deeply felt word for that return.
It means vitality, fecundity, verdure, growth. It was beloved by Hildegard von Bingen, who spoke of it as the divine greening force; the animating sap within all living things. Not just physical health, but soul vitality. A sign that the spirit is alive and moving again.
Some words don’t just describe; they awaken. Viriditas is one such word.
It has become, for me, a guiding metaphor in this work of tending the Gift Field; the inner and outer ground we create to support regeneration. A space where women can reconnect with what is fertile, true, and quietly blooming within them, even if it’s been buried or cracked.
This idea echoes through the Gene Keys, whose language is not prescriptive but poetic; rooted in metaphor, imagination, and ecstatic emergence. Transformation through this lens is not a fix. It is a flowering of the ground of our work and soulful living.
To speak of greening the self is to speak of what grows when we restore right relationship with the earth, with our energy, with our soul’s ecology. First in the imagination. Then in the body.
Then in the life.
It is a work in progress; all I know is that I feel this call to return to sacred rhythm, to feminine ecology, to the slow, sure cultivation of a more vital way of being.
It begins, as all real beginnings do, with the greening.
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