Member-only story
All week, I’ve been reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and crying. It’s the strangest thing. I’m not a big cryer, ordinarily, but every couple of chapters or so, I well up with big, silent tears that roll down my cheeks for a few minutes and then stop. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and a botanist and ecologist. Braiding Sweetgrass is subtitled Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, but as far as I’m concerned, it should be subtitled How to Heal Fucking Everything, Including Yourself, and Get Ourselves Out of This Mess.
The book combines her vast scientific knowledge of plants and ecosystems with an indigenous understanding of not just the natural world, but a way of interacting with it, and with each other, that feels so gentle and right to me that I just want to build a big, soft nest in it and lie down there to rest for a while.
There’s so much in the book that I don’t even know where to start. I’ve only just finished it, and I already want to go back and read it again. But the thing that I think kept setting me off especially was the idea of a reciprocal love with the land and with nature. Patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism have combined to create a nasty cultural stew of abuse, entitlement and domination, that affects not only how we treat each other but also every other living thing on this planet. It’s a world where being vulnerable, being generous and open can make you an easy target.
The world that Kimmerer describes, though, I’ve realized over the past week, is the one that I’m so desperate to get to. You give to the land and the land gives back. You take care of nature, protect it, and it pays you back in kind. It’s a world where you don’t have to constantly watch your back or hold back on your giving for fear of being taken advantage of.
I try to be as open to the world as I can be. Being closed off, guarded, and fearful of the world and others in it is a trait that I’ve noticed in the people I am most afraid of becoming like, so a big part of my work on myself has been focused on making sure I stay open. It’s not a trait that comes naturally to me, or rather, I think it may have come naturally to me, but got damaged when I was very young.
