Book Specs 📖

• Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Genre: Nonfiction/Ecology/Memoir
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Pages: 408 pages

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Non clout chasing relationship advice from plants and living beings via indigenous lens.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• This is the second read of this book (this time for work book club)! It was just as good the second time but it felt much heavier/slower this time? Ever since I ditched the quantitative reading goals for a deeper understanding through book reviews/anotation, I’ve been surprised to find that there is some frustration in being comfortable with slowness…which gets me thinking, is this why things that take time i.e. planting a garden, reading etc. are becoming rarities in our hyper-speed world? I’m not learning if I’m not a bit uncomfortable so this is a great sign that new critical thinking pathways are being developed.
• Gift economy vs. private property – what we view as our responsibility versus something we own/have rights to determines how we treat/interact with the other entity. It requires a mind/spirit shift as much as a societal shift so that we see the earth as someone that is invaluable, a home that we should protect.
• The importance of language in the formation of our relationships: It’s referred to in the book as the “animacy of grammar” – Humans ultimately determine through language who gets to be a “someone” vs. an “it”. The fact that English is a noun-based language (only 30% of words are verbs, Potawatomi is 70%) further confirms the type of relationship humans have with each other and other beings.
• Science vs scientific worldview: former is the curiosity to learn through inquiry vs. the latter is the how we use science to achieve self-centred human agenda to achieve “the illusion of dominance and control, the separation of knowledge from responsibility”
• Writing as an act of reciprocity – let’s get on this, stat!
• Some questions to think about:
  • “how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take?”
    • voting with your dollar! what we decide to consume matters!!
  • “what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me?”
    • one way: ceremonies – they help us remember to remember
  • “what happens when we truly become native to a place, when we finally make a home? Where are the stories that lead the way?”
  • “For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring?”
    • what do we actually “know”?
  • “Asking what is our responsibility is perhaps also to ask, What is our gift? And how shall we use it?”

“Quotes”🗣

“Leave this place better than you found it.”

“The land knows you even when you are lost.”

“The questions scientists raised were not “Who are you? but What is it?” No one asked the plants, “What can you tell us?” The primary question was “How does it work?”

“Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.”

“Food plants and people act as selective forces on each other’s evolution–the thriving of one in the best interest of the other. This, to me, sounds a bit like love. “

“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.”

“Alone, a bean is just a vine, squash an oversize leaf. Only when standing together with corn does a whole emerge which transcends the individual. The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone. In ripe ears and swelling fruit they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship. That is how the world keeps going.

“Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask.”

“The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.”

“When times are easy and there’s plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aide become critical for survival. So say the lichens.”

“To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.”

“One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another. “

“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”

“Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance.”