Reflections on the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
tl;dr
This is a love letter to the earth, acknowledging our failings and drawing on indigenous wisdom to light the path to a restorative, responsible, and prosperous future. The heart of this revolution is altering our relationship with nature and embracing a mindset of respect and reciprocity. Only with this cultural shift will our restoration efforts become sustainable. This is everyone’s work and should not just be relegated to science. We have a beautiful opportunity to share our gifts with the world and a responsibility to do so.
Personal Thoughts
One of my favourite reads so far. Robin writes beautifully and weaves personal anecdotes that introduce you to a beautiful culture and a terrible history. My heart was so heavy reading about the thoughtless injustice and cruelty that humanity has inflicted towards itself and the world. However, her story rekindled a fire to use my gifts in service of the earth and walk the path to rebuild the world.
Themes
The Windigo Way
In our present economy, we insatiably crave more wealth and belongings, propelled by greed and an ownership mindset. This mindset is an embodiment of the legendary Anishinaabe monster, the Windigo, a ravenous cannibal whose hunger grows worse the more he eats. The Windigo represents a positive feedback loop and is a symbol of the dangers of selfishness. We are currently on an accelerating path to destruction, having divorced our actions and our responsibilities. Instead of satiating our hunger, feeding this greed only leaves us hollow and wanting more.
Grief
Overwhelmed by the deluge of bad leadership and bad news, these are common responses to disaster. Despair robs us of agency, but we cannot allow ourselves to get stuck.
Restoration
Restoration is the antidote to despair. We are at the swell of a revolution, the Great Turning, to shift towards a sustainable civilization. While restoration will help the earth heal, we also need to address the root cause – our relationship towards nature and each other. We need to move towards respect, responsibility and reciprocity to make sustainable change. Reconnecting people with the landscape is equally as important as restoring the land.
Science
As a student of science, it’s difficult to imagine the primacy of the scientific worldview. However, this arrogance limits its potential. It is not the definitive authority on how the world does and should work. It is a practice. One that is still learning about the complex relationships in the universe. It is remiss to think of itself as the master of nature, rather than the student.
In addition, science has to accept its responsibility to the world. As translators of nature, scientists need to clearly communicate to the public to facilitate educated dialogue and decision making. Science today is shared in an enclosed, elite garden, gated to those who don’t know the code.
Reciprocity
gift economies of indigenous cultures. There is something transcendent about exchanging gifts versus exchanging money for commodities. Gifting establishes a bond between two people. It comes with the responsibility to give something in return. In exchange for our gifts from the earth, we are bound to reciprocate and share our own gifts with the world. One powerful way is to choose joy over despair. Joy is what the world gives us, so we must return the gift.
Conscious consumption
need and use everything you take, following the principles of the Honorable Harvest. Ask permission before you harvest. Take only what is given. Never take the first or the last.
Gratitude
Expressing gratitude is revolutionary. Contentment is a radical proposition in an economy that thrives on emptiness. Scarcity and abundance are not just qualities of the economy, but qualities of the mind and spirit. By shifting perspective and being grateful for what we already have, we can welcome abundance into our own lives.
Naturalization
One becomes indigenous to the land when they accept their responsibility towards it and engage in reciprocity with the land and its inhabitants so it will flourish for generations to come.
Indigenous cultures
There are so many beautiful perspectives that indigenous cultures can open your mind to. Below are just a few that are mentioned in the book, Braiding Sweetgrass.
Firstly, humanity’s place in the universe. Instead of our arrogant perch, indigenous cultures view humans as the younger siblings of civilization. We are related to nature. As the latest arrivals, we have a lot to learn from our elders – plants, rivers, rocks – on being through observing how they live. This is evident and reinforced through language. Many indigenous languages consider all natural objects and forces to be animate beings and ascribe them with personhood. They refer to the living world as family. The language continuously reminds them of their kinship with the animate world.
Another beautiful mindset is the Honorable Harvest. It is a collection of principles that describe how to interact with the natural world, so that the world is as abundant seven generations from now. These include, but aren’t limited to, asking for permission before you take something; taking only what is given; using what you’ve taken respectfully; minimizing waste; and giving in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Yet another is the Thanksgiving Address. This is a wonderful way to feel wealthy for all that we have and to expand our worldview beyond our inwardly focused human world.
Highlights
- On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her.
- We’ve accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging we crave.
- But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.
- 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.
- The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world.
- All flourishing is mutual.
- Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual.
- The syrup we pour over pancakes on a winter morning is summer sunshine flowing in golden streams to pool on our plates.
- Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable.
- Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.
- If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are.
- Asking permission shows respect for the personhood of the plant, but it is also an assessment of the well-being of the population.
- The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.
- In those days the ancient rainforests spread from Northern California to southeastern Alaska in a band between the mountains and the sea. Here is where the fog drips. Here is where the moisture-laden air from the Pacific rises against the mountains to produce upward of one hundred inches of rain a year, watering an ecosystem rivaled nowhere else on earth. The biggest trees in the world.
- Scientists used to think that the movement of oxygen from the surface leaves of lilies to the rhizome was merely the slow process of diffusion, an inefficient drift of molecules from a region of high concentration to low concentration under water. … [However,] the new leaves take up oxygen into the tightly packed air spaces of their young, developing tissues, whose density creates a pressure gradient. The older leaves, with looser air spaces created by the tatters and tears that open the leaf, create a low pressure region where oxygen can be released into the atmosphere. This gradient exerts a pull on the air taken in by the young leaf. Since they are connected by air-filled capillary networks, the oxygen moves by mass flow from the young leaves to the old, passing through and oxygenating the rhizome in the process. The young and the old are linkedin one long breath, an inhalation that calls for reciprocal exhalation, nourishing the common root from which they both arose. New leaf to old, old to new, mother to daughter – mutuality endures.