Hello friends. I come to you in the wake of Pisces season (halfway through Aries season lol).
I’m thinking about this because I’m thinking about Braiding Sweetgrass, which I just finished and loved. The connection between the two is a very personal one for me. First, to explain the Pisces part:
As a Pisces, one of my biggest frustrations with myself is my wishy-washiness. I chameleonize based on context. I flip back and forth. Take, for instance, the thing I am most concerned about right now and probably will be until the end of my days: climate change.
As I’ve written before, I feel I am constantly vacillating between “I need to completely overhaul my life and live zero waste and scrub myself clean of it all” and “We live in a society, I am a small fish in a little ocean, and I can only do my best and have fun while I’m here.”
Usually, the first mindset is brought out when I have just finished reading something dire and eye-opening about the state of the planet. But soon enough, the urgency fades, the call of a quick, convenient, pretty thing grows louder, and my own little hobbies and desires feel so small in the vastness of it all.
I can’t promise that reading Braiding Sweetgrass will irrevocably change my behavior—that I won’t flip flop like the two little fish on my Pisces necklace—but I will say that it has transformed the way I see the world for the better.
Braiding Sweetgrass is a collection of essays by Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer (she/her). In the book, Kimmerer reflects on so many parts of her life—motherhood and teaching; Native folklore, tradition, and history; the tension and intertwining of Indigenous knowledge and science; the plants and animals that she has come to know intimately throughout her life; and the ills of society that she sees as the root of our current era of planetary collapse.
Reasons why I loved Braiding Sweetgrass from a writing (~craft~) perspective:
Firstly, it’s a beautiful book. The sentences have amazing rhythm, and the words sing on the page. The imagery and sensory experiences in these essays are awe-inspiring.
Secondly, it’s a book infused with love. The love glows from each chapter because Kimmerer so loves the things that she writes about: her daughters, her students, the places she goes, and all the living beings she meets and cares for. I loved the sheer effusiveness and unabashedness with which she communicates this love; the way it glows in every word.
“Straw spun to gold, water turned to wine, photosynthesis is the link between the inorganic realm and the living world, making the inanimate live.”
And reasons why this book was so powerful for me:
First. There’s this anecdote Kimmerer tells of teaching a class on nature writing. Her students are gushing about how much they love the Earth and nature, and then she asks them—”Do you think the Earth loves you back?”
Her students are kind of shocked. They’d never really considered it before, and now they don’t want to presume. Or, they don’t think it’s possible that the Earth could love us back after all the awful things we’ve done to it.
But then Kimmerer asks them how the world would be different if we humans believed that the Earth loved us back. And one student says, “You wouldn’t harm what gives you love.”
Wowowow!
That’s a running theme throughout the book. Even those who are dedicated to environmentalism and conservation and climate action can only see humans as being bad for the planet. We are scourge upon the Earth.
But in many cases throughout natural history, Indigenous people learned to grow with nature; to make it flourish, so that humans could flourish, so that nature could flourish, in a feedback loop.
The idea that we could only harm the Earth, Kimmerer believes, is itself harmful for the planet because it limits our view of what we can do. And it distances us from the land. It destroys our respect for and our intimacy with other living things. That in turn frees us up morally to do all kinds of horrendous things to the planet.
I’m thinking about this deer poem post I wrote a few months ago about humility and the natural world. I essentially wondered if we had moved too far away from nature—so far that the best thing we could do for nature would be to “leave well enough alone.”
Kimmerer, I suspect, would be super disappointed in this conclusion. The way to heal the planet isn’t to isolate ourselves from it, she argues; instead, we should build our relationship back toward it. To, as the Zoomers say, “touch grass.”
Kimmerer points out that we see loving relationships between humans as transformational—so what would happen if we transferred those ideas to a loving relationship with nature?
Only when we know living creatures intimately can we love them, she seems to say. And only by loving them can we really do right by them.
To be honest, I am far from a green thumb. You won’t see me bent down in a garden or camping in the woods anytime soon.
But Kimmerer’s thoughts on this really struck a chord with me. By recognizing our interdependence with other living beings, recognizing their beauty and selfhood and desires, we expand our ideas about what we can do and be to the Earth.
I’m starting to rethink this whole “leave well enough alone” perspective.
Second. Kimmerer has so much to say about gratitude. She explains how many Indigenous myths and traditions revolve around gratitude; around thanking living things, the land, the water, everything.
By giving thanks, we are acknowledging the gifts that each living thing grants to the world. It helps us realize that we are only here by the grace of others, and therefore it is our duty to give back.
Kimmerer is clear that gifting is not about receiving or even giving for free. We give because we’ve received, and we receive because we give, and the gifts that we have through the grace of evolution, God, the universe, what have you—these are actually responsibilities, responsibilities to use those gifts for the flourishing of others.
She writes:
From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the ‘gift’ is deemed to be free because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at the root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, land is understood to be a ‘bundle of rights,’ whereas in a gift economy property has a ‘bundle of responsibilities’ attached.
Capitalism and commerce is the opposite of a gift economy. There is no reciprocity, only exchange. There is no relationship in an exchange; or at least not one that extends beyond the pocketing of money.
Along those lines, Kimmerer writes:
In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.
That totally floored me. I think I’ve been thinking about this in a kind of roundabout way, but Kimmerer really clarified it for me.
Contentment + gratitude > feelings of/actual abundance > generosity + gifting > love and community.
Our current mode of capitalism is directly opposed to this line of thinking, Kimmerer writes. It thrives on the feeling of emptiness; of always wanting more. That’s the only way it can grow perpetually, as capitalists want and need it to.
This has totally made me rethink every desire I’ve had over the past few weeks. Where does this desire come from? Who benefits from this desire beyond me? What are the consequences of this desire?
I’ve done this before but mostly from a place of guilt; from the feeling that if I don’t do this thing, I will feel shame and plunge the world headlong into climate catastrophe.
This wasn’t a very #sustainable way of thinking, because shame doesn’t always make us (me) stop something: it just makes us (me) hide it. And the looming threat of climate apocalypse is often too distant, or too diffuse, and thus too easily ignored.
Alternatively, Kimmerer helped me to see the abundance all around me. Suddenly, desire for certain material objects seems gratuitous.
In the end, who benefits most when we feel emptiness and desires that can only be fulfilled by material objects? The Jeff Bezoses of the world. And who benefits most when we feel gratitude? When we build relationships with each other and with the rest of the world? Our communities, our friends, our planet.
Also, I want to make clear that this is a very personal journey for me, and for everyone. I’m not trying to be preachy—just to work all this out publicly, hoping that it helps someone else.
We are all living in a society. Advertisers literally do massive science experiments to optimize the shit out of their methods, for the express purpose of cajoling us into buying things we don’t need. And I also must acknowledge the privilege inherent in even thinking about this stuff, instead of, like, how I’m going to make rent or afford food.
But I think it’s kind of my duty to think about this stuff. As part of the like 10% of people in the world with the privilege to be able to think about this stuff, I feel I simply must. Because along with bad policies and a deeply flawed economic system, it is culture that got us here. A culture of scarcity instead of abundance, individual desire over generosity.
Luckily, we—as individuals and as a collective—have the power to shift that culture.
All this to say, thank you Robin Wall Kimmerer for writing this beautiful, essential book. Thanks to my friends’ book club for getting me to read it now and for the lovely, life-and-love-affirming chat we had about it. And thanks to Victoria (the brilliant @its_lit.erature on Instagram) for recommending it to me oh-so-graciously after that deer poem post. It was exactly what I needed.
Some parting words from Kimmerer:
“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.”
Thanks for reading, catch you soon,
—mia xx