This might be the most important book in our Library.
And when I say book, I actually mean author, because everything that Robin Wall Kimmerer has written resonates so deeply. But Braiding Sweetgrass is dear to me. It is as gentle as water, as sacred as fire, as wise as the oldest tree, as tactile as the loamy soil.
If not for this book, I honestly don’t think Wyld would exist.
Kimmerer is a scientist, but she is also a member of the Potawatomi Nation. She sees the world through the lenses of both scientific and indigenous knowledge. And she works to reconcile them whenever possible, braiding them together, along with teachings of plants, like three strands of grass.
The book is composed of essays on so many different subjects – from science and economics to motherhood and myth. And so much more. I don’t know of a more qualified person to speak on such subjects.
What I appreciate so much is Kimmerer’s ability to get to the heart of things. And I do mean the heart – our relationship to the natural world that is so often missing from conversations around climate change, land restoration, food, etc. Kimmerer goes all the way back to the origin stories that shape our worldview.
Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.
As someone with a lot of indigenous blood running though my veins, I went my entire life listening to people talk about the earth in business terms. I was thrilled when sustainability professions began to arise, only later to feel dismayed by the conversations. They were purely political. Those in the field spoke about the natural world as if it had no consciousness. And so our discussions always led back to campaigns, strategies, charts and transactions. And yes there is a place for that – we do need better policies and laws! We do need systematic overhauls! We need the right people in those fields! But there was something missing…
Our attention to the world, the acknowledgement of our place in it, the humility to learn from other beings with other kinds of intelligences, a love that burns and yet is as comfortable as home.
That’s it maybe, a homecoming. Becoming sensitized to life again. And not just to animals in factory farms, but to every single being that makes life possible, that fills life with wonder – and hardships too, yes – but with beauty and mystery and a sense of belonging. Only then will our hearts change. Only then will our minds shift. Only then will the notions of separation and superiority began to dissolve, so that we can release our obsessions with ease and convenience, power and control, and begin to re-wild our homelands, re-wild ourselves. Where were these conversations? I couldn’t find them anywhere.
Then Robin Wall Kimmerer entered my life. Someone who became a botanist because she had a question, Why do the purple asters and the yellow goldenrod look so beautiful together?
The two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school.
This hit home for me. A few years earlier, working full-time as a design strategist, I had a client who was interested in developing a service using artificial intelligence (AI), and I had some questions about why. I had some questions about intelligence in general and offered some insights about different plant and animal species that I believed were relevant to the discussion. Honestly, it was fascinating stuff! But in the next meeting with everyone on our teams present, he mocked me mercilessly and literally said that I “should have considered a career in gardening.”
But Kimmerer did find scientific insights about the plants by starting from her question. And I do believe I could have helped my client create something more meaningful if he had been open to other definitions of intelligence outside of his very narrow, human-centric one. But at the time I bowed my head in shame and embarrassment, and it took some time for me to reconnect with the wildness stirring in me. Kimmerer was among the very few to validate those stirrings and prod me to continue. Hence the beginning of Wyld, which has always, to me, been more of a concept, not a skincare company as it’s often bucketed, but a way of relating to and living within the natural world.
Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.
Braiding Sweetgrass is overflowing with wisdom – I will never do it justice here. Every time I pick it up, I discover something new.
I’ll share some snippets and just encourage you to dive into the book yourself. If only to learn about the Thanksgiving Address, a ritual that embeds gratitude into everyday life. It’s powerful stuff that’s too rich for me to get into here, but it’s definitely worth the full read.
On Language
I studied literature in university and feel quite confident with my language skills, but Kimmerer is the first to teach me about the grammar of animacy. Indigenous languages, like Kimmerer’s native Potawatomi one, were full of animacy. What does that mean?
English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things. Only 30% of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70%…. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.
… In English we never refer to a family member , or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.
This is huge. To refer to all living beings as subjects rather than objects is to say that they, too, are possessed of consciousness and entitled to rights. This challenges the tenets of western thinking, as Kimmerer talked about in another essay, and explains why indigenous people were forbidden to speak their native languages. It was an affront to the ears of colonists whose only initiative was to take.
Animate, as an adjective, means alive or having life. As a verb it means, to bring to life. The rocks can be animate. The mountains too. Yes, and fire, the swamp, the soil that contains all the life that has come and gone from the beginning of time, a living breathing entity. Native languages were structured to contain all of this life, whereas European languages deny everyone the right to personhood except humans. English, in particular, is the language of commerce, the tool of colonization, the mindset of human exceptionalism.
The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human…. Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world…
Imagine walking through a richly inhabited world of Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world.
Like Kimmerer, who laments that she cannot speak her native Potawatomi, most of us cannot speak our old languages either. But there is so much work we can do within. As Bill Tall Bull, a Cheyenne elder, told Kimmerer:
“They love to hear the old language,” he said, “it’s true. But,” he said, with fingers on his lips, “You don’t have to speak it here. If you speak it here,” he said, patting his chest, “They will hear you.”
On Science
Scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locked in isolation without communication. The possibility of conversation was summarily dismissed. Science pretends to be purely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer. And yet the conclusion was drawn that plants cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that animals use to speak. The potentials for plants were seen purely through the lens of animal capacity. Until quite recently no one seriously explored the possibility that plants might “speak” to one another. But pollen has been carried reliably on the wind for eons, communicated by males to receptive females to make those very nuts. If the wind can be trusted with that fecund responsibility, why not with messages?
Also, there are many indigenous cultures who had learned to speak the language of other species. Biologists are actually looking to these people – there are so few of them left – for guidance, because they’re coming closer to the realization that many life forms, animal and plant, tree and mountain, have their ways of communicating. And if we were on the inside of the natural world, rather than on the outside of it, we could even learn bits of their languages.
If you’ve ever learned a different langauge(s) outside of your mother tongue, you know how it expands your understanding of self, of the world. Each language holds not only words, but ideas. Imagine if we could learn to speak the languages of other species. Imagine what a totally new perspective we would have.
The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren’t these stories we should all know? Who is it who holds them? In long-ago times, it was the elders who carried them. In the twenty-first century, it is often scientists who first hear them. The stories of buffalo and salamanders belong to the land, but scientists are one of their translators and carry a large responsibility for conveying their stories to the world.
This next quote is so powerful! It has absolutely shifted how I navigate the world….
In the indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brothers of Creation, so like younger brothers we must learn from our elders. Plants were here first and have had a long time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground and hold the earth in place. Plants know how to make food from light and water. Not only do they feed themselves, but they make enough to sustain the lives of all the rest of us. Plants are providers for the rest of the community and exemplify the virtue of generosity, always offering food. What if Western scientists saw plants as their teachers rather than their subjects? What if they told stories with that lens?
“Puhpowee, she explained, translates as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You’d think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.
On Reciprocity
The notion of reciprocity is woven into every chapter, never forgotten. Just as reciprocity should be woven into our lives every day.
Kimmerer describes how a patch of wild strawberries first shaped her view of the world being full of gifts simply scattered at our feet. This idea transformed her relationship with everything, because when something is free, a natural self-restraint is built into the exchange. Not only restraint, but also a desire to give back, to reciprocate.
For indigenous people, gifts are not to be merely taken. They do not come with rights, but with responsibilities – not only to honor the gift, but to keep passing it on, to keep it in motion, so that its value increases with its passage.
The gift economy says that the world is full of gifts, not resources. It resists putting a price on things, unlike the market economy which says that everything is for sale.
How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers –– the living world could not bear our weight –– but even in a market economy, can we behave “as if” the living world were a gift?
… When I speak of the gift of berries, I do not mean that Fragaria virginiana has been up all night making a present just for me, strategizing to find exactly what I’d like on a summer morning. So far as we know, that does not happen, but as a scientist I am well aware of how little we do know. The plant has in fact been up all night assembling little packets of sugar and seeds and fragrance and color, because when it does so its evolutionary fitness is increased. When it is successful in enticing an animal such as me to disperse its fruit, its genes for making yumminess are passed on to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than those of the plant whose berries were inferior. The berries made by the plant shape the behaviors of the dispersers and have adaptive consequences.
What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal. A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.
On The Earth’s Oldest Beings
I’ve posted this on instagram before, but I’ll share it again now because it’s just so good.
In the span of centuries, the rock became glazed with a gray-green crust of lichen almost indistinguishable from the rock itself, a bare coating of life… its surface a last relic of the Ice Age. I come here sometimes just to be in the presence of such ancient beings.
Lichens are not one being, but two: a fugus and an alga. “These partners are as different as could be and yet are joined in a symbiosis so close that their union becomes a wholly new organism… a partnership in which both benefit equally from their association.” To the point where it’s nearly impossible to separate the giving from the taking.
In western science, lichen is known as rock tripe, or Umbilicaria. It often looks dry and crisp, but after a good rain,
it is transformed from a dry scab to tender green skin, as smooth as the inside of your arm… Where the umbilicus anchors the thallus to the rock, the soft skin is dimpled with little wrinkles radiating about its center. It looks to all the world like a belly button…. Even the tiny thalli are dimpled with navels. How fitting that this ancient being, one of the first forms of life on the planet, should be connected to the earth by an umbilicus. The marriage of alga and fungus, Umbilicaria is the child of earth, life nourished by stone.
Kimmerer goes into the success of lichens as a species, how it hinges on reciprocity and, well, minimalism actually. They carry teachings in the ways that they live and are important for every life on earth in subtle ways.
While lichens can sustain humans, people have not returned the favor of caring for lichens. Umbilicaria, like many lichens, is highly sensitive to air pollution. When you find Umbilicaria, you know you’re breathing the purest air. Atmospheric contaminants like sulfur dioxide and ozone will kill it outright. Pay attention when it departs.
… For millennia, these lichens have held the responsibility of building up life and in an eyeblink of Earth’s history we have set about undermining their work to usher in a time of great environmental stress, a barrenness of our own making. I suspect that lichens will endure. We could, too, if we listen to their teachings. If not, I imagine Umbilicaria will cover the rocky ruins of our time long after our delusions of separateness have relegated us to the fossil record, a ruffled green skin adorning the crumbling halls of power.
On Restoration
There are some heartbreaking stories in this book that illustrate just how much damage has been done to the earth. Lakes that were once pure and sacred, that sustained entire tribes of people, are now beds of industrial waste sixty feet deep. Old growth forests where millions of giant trees stood are now enormous concrete lots. The ancient pathways of birds and fish are blocked. At one point, she visits an Onondaga watershed poisoned by methylated mercury and other toxic waste from the nearby industrial activities, and..
There she was – sweetgrass – growing in one of the last places I might ever have expected. Tentatively sending out rhizomes through the sludge, slender tillers marching bravely away, sweetgrass is a teacher of healing, a symbol of kindness and compassion. She reminded me that it is not the land that is broken, but our relationship to it.
Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land and the land restores us. We will continue to need the insights and methodologies of science, but if we allow the practice of restoration to become exclusive domain of science, we will have lost a its greatest promise, which is nothing less than redefinition of human culture.
On Motherhood
Paula Gunn Allen, in her book Grandmothers of the Light, writes of the changing roles of women as they spiral through the phases of life, like the changing face of the Moon. We begin our lives, she says, walking the Way of the Daughter. This is the time for learning, for gathering experiences in the shelter of our parents. We move next to self-reliance, when the necessary task of the age is to learn who you are in the world. The path brings us next to the Way of the Mother.
This is a time when “her spiritual knowledge and values are all called into service of her children.” Life unfolds in a growing spiral, as children begin their own paths and mothers, rich with knowledge and experience, have a new task set before them. Our strengths turn now to a circle wider than our own children, to the well-being of the community. The net stretches larger and larger. The circle bends round again and grandmothers walk the Way of the Teacher, becoming models for younger women to follow. And in the fullness of age our work is not yet done. The spiral widens farther and farther, so that the sphere of a wise woman is beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the Earth.
So it is my grandchildren who will swim in this pond, and others whom the years will bring. The circle of care grows larger and caregiving for my little pond spills over to caregiving for other waters. The outlet from my pond runs downhill to my good neighbor’s pond. What I do here matters. Everybody lives downstream. My pond drains to the brook, to the creek, to a great and needful lake. The water net connects us all. I have shed tears into that flow when I thought that motherhood would end. But the pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn’t end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother.
Though I want to keep going, I need to end here. Because I must get back to my own mothering. I’m in this phase with my full heart and body. Yet I’m eternally grateful to teachers like Kimmerer and other indigenous people, to the land and waters and all the non-humans who are teaching me now, and I acknowledge them as the knowledge keepers.
I wish Braiding Sweetgrass was required reading, but I’m encouraged by the fact that it has become a bestseller. According to the New York Times, she wrote the first draft of the book in purple pen on long yellow legal pads. She prefers working outside, of course.
The other day I was raking leaves in my garden to make compost and it made me think, This is our work as humans in this time: to build good soil in our gardens, to build good soil culturally and socially, and to create potential for the future. What will endure through almost any kind of change? The regenerative capacity of the earth. We can help create conditions for renewal.
