I began growing kumquat trees after my German hairdresser—who fixes BMWs and fills his salon with large, flapping plants—pulled a pale fruit off one of his containers’ branches and told me to keep it in my pocket for three days to ripen. I wrapped the kumquat, the size of my thumb pad, into a Kleenex to be transported in my winter coat. It was a new year. I drove back to a house built in the 1700s—owned by a woman in her nineties who worked full-time and kept a fridge filled with Celsius energy drinks—where I was living in the attic. The pocket kumquat, forgotten until I unpacked from the holidays, tasted like a flower.

A year later, no longer attic-bound, I bought three varieties from a nursery recommended for its eclectic catalogue, which includes honeyberries, yerba maté, oyster leaf (which tastes like oysters), and a sweeter, stronger blackberry developed by the University of Arkansas that has the “potential to change the blackberry market.” The happiest plant of my life was an unspecified citrus tree that I rescued from a greenhouse sale at age eleven. The citrus and I grew equal in height until I went off to college and it surpassed me, and though it never bore fruit, its leaves were glossy and in wintertime it towered at the end of my childhood bed, which was also in an attic.

Citrus trees have always stalked me, with a meaning similar to what can be read in Saint John Climacus’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent: “The natural property of the lemon tree is such that it lifts its branches upwards when it has no fruit, but the more the branches bend down the more fruit they bear.” In humility and trials, fruit can emerge. In the time between when my German hairdresser gave me a kumquat to put in my pocket and when I received three varieties of kumquat trees in the mail, my childhood home, with its citrus tree and attic, burned down, and was rebuilt.

***

For Hildegard of Bingen, the famous twelfth-century Benedictine abbess and mystic, the earth produces goods commensurate with every need of the human body. This conviction was rooted in her broader theological framework of viriditas, or “greening power,” a divine life force that animates all creation and expresses itself in various ways, including in the healing properties of plants. In her encyclopedic book Physica, she sought to codify the natural world—plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, reptiles, and metals—according to each component’s effects on the four temperaments. Citrus trees (more “hot than cold”), signify chastity. When boiled in wine and consumed daily, their leaves alleviate daily fevers. Radishes cleanse the brain. Horseradish makes a lean person strong. Chamomile is calming to the intestines, and mullein is good for those who are sad. Wild lettuce, whose milky sap would later be studied in the nineteenth century for its mild sedative quality, extinguishes “uncontrollable lust.” It can be made into a kind of lettuce soup, the liquid of which is to be poured upon hot stones in a sauna while placing the cooked leaves on one’s belly.

The four temperaments, originally defined by the Greeks but interpreted by Hildegard in a more spiritually inflected way, are no longer reasonable medical categories, though I would be considered melancholic—the “iceberg temperament.” If not careful, I might be brought down by poisoned daydreaming. In the arduous process of rebuilding the house, we discovered that it had already burned down years before we moved in. My father recalled finding what may have been an arm bone when he dug around the side yard. The year of rebuilding was a task of inventorying and replication; insurance requires that the new house be the same, more or less, as the house that has been demolished.

To Hildegard, spiritually, we are not far from Paradise. God leads us there, through the thick walls of our earth. “I was no longer the center of my life and therefore I could see God in everything,” wrote the Venerable Bede. When I experience instability in the world I at first try to find stability in myself and am told, by a woman at church, about Hildegard’s “cookies of joy,” made of spelt, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, the warming spices meant to strengthen the heart and lift the spirit from its frozen, weighted state. Hildegard concocts entire recipes designed by these principles, including violet wine for melancholy and a fennel-based tonic to stabilize vision and digestion. At the market, I’m happy to enter into Hildegard’s definitions of celery, ginger, and horseradish. And why not? Don’t our symptoms and decisions have vast implications across many simultaneous systems? Isn’t it a kind of arrogance to believe that anything can be exempt from the deeply tangled and patterned networks of reality, what Hildegard simply called the mind of God made visible in matter?

***

Also known for nostalgia, house fires, and recurring fruit (most of his films feature apples) is Andrei Tarkovsky, whose films I watched over the course of Great Lent, the yearly stretch when Christians, deliberately fixing their eyes on the Cross, decrease through fasting so that God can increase. The idea to watch Tarkovsky each week was presented to me by a friend, as a means of consuming media that is demanding and contemplative instead of entertaining.There are seven films for seven weeks, which we moved through chronologically: Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and finally The Sacrifice (1986), which was completed months before his death. Each film grows longer and stiller and airier, as though he were gradually removing something from them to allow for an immensity to emerge, which is also the logic of Lent. It is better to watch his films in a group, the way it is easier to fast in a community. When I was a teenager, Tarkovsky was screened in an abandoned temple with a live synth score. After Stalker, a friend turns to me to say that watching it is the most ascetic thing she’s ever done.

Tarkovsky himself was fixated on sculpting in time, his phrase for cinema’s unique capacity to preserve the texture of lived moments via the pressure of duration itself. The idea is resonant with Hildegard’s viriditas, her sense that divine life is not an abstraction but rather a quality that saturates matter and can be felt, tasted, and in Tarkovsky’s case, seen. His filmography ends how it begins—in war, in a robbed childhood, and with a slivering possibility of rebirth. Both his first and last films end with an image of a tree.

On the fourth week of Lent, during which we watch Mirror, the kumquat trees arrive, and I pot them in large planters with a soil mix for citrus. There is a Nordmann variety, thin-skinned and sweet; a variegated centennial, for its juiciness and striped leaves; and, for its sweetness, a small Meiwa, which looks most like the citrus tree from my youth—wiry and spare, sensitive to little winds.

Fire irreversibly consumes, but also purifies and delivers. After Easter Sunday comes Pentecost, the descending of the Holy Spirit, embodied as tongues of fire. The fruits of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) are inaugurated through flame, then produced through the ordering of one’s life, over time. The house I currently live in has no attic, and my reconstructed childhood home—now built according to code—no longer does either, but it is ten feet taller than it used to be. On the second floor, where my childhood bed would have been, through a window that would have been my window, I can see a wide spot of Lake Erie and into a neighbor’s yard I’d never been able to glimpse before. It is filled with strange pieces of wood and potted plants.

Nicolette Polek is the author of Bitter Water Opera, Imaginary Museums, and the forthcoming novel Ackermann.