It’s that season! You or your children are headed back to school, or even if we’re done school, we’ve spent so many years of our lives in classes that we consider September a new year. A new season, new work, a chance to establish new habits and routines. Below are some ideas for helping both maintain a healthy, holistic life while studying and for taking this opportunity to develop some positive new habits.

Hildegard’s writings now exist mainly in two manuscripts: the Dendermonde, and the Riesenkodex. The first was copied under her supervision, and the second a century after her death. As well as three books of visions, she wrote several minor works, including gospel commentary and hagiography. She wrote Physica, about natural sciences, and Causae et Curae, about natural medicines that describes the uses of plants, stones, and animals in healing. As was common at the time, she believed that everything was put on earth to be of use to humankind. She was known for her healing abilities through her use of herbs, tinctures, and stones, and there were rumours that she could cure the blind with the water of the Rhind.

Hildegard von Bingen's feast day is coming up, on September 17th. This is a particularly special year for Hildegard: in May, she went through an "equivalent canonization" process, and this October, she will be named the 35th Doctor of the Church.

Born in 1098 in Bemersheim, West Franconia (now Germany), Hildegard was the tenth child born to a family of lesser nobles. She was sickly from birth, and began having visions at three years of age. She recognized them as visions by the age of five, but kept them to herself for many years. It was customary for noble families to offer their tenth child as oblate to the Church (where the term “tithe” comes from), and around the age of eight, Hildegard was sent to the 400-year old Disibodenberg Monastery in the Palatinate Forest, where she lived with Jutta von Sponheim, a nun of noble descent who had chosen the extreme, acetic lifestyle of an anchoress.

The next blue moon is August 31, 2012, but what does the term "blue moon" actually mean?

It doesn't actually mean a moon that is the colour blue (though that would be stunning). The term "blue moon" is actually very inconsistent:  If you're reading a traditional farmer's almanac, it will tell you that there's a blue moon only once every two or three years, when a "season" has four moons instead of the normal three (farmers traditionally measured seasons as three months, with one moon for each month). Every moon was given a folk name, and this extra, otherwise nameless moon was called a blue moon.

The next new moon is August 17 (2012). The period of the new moon is when the moon and the sun align in the sky (are in conjunction), making the moon dark from earth's perspective.

The dark time of the moon is a time for setting intentions and goals, and planting metaphorical seeds. It’s a chance to refresh ourselves and decide what projects we'll focus on in this upcoming moon cycle. The quiet energy of the dark moon is the energy before the manifestation of a new project, the waiting darkness that comes before creation.