Braiding Sweetgrass

I love to ask questions. I love it even more to hear other people’s questions. I love it most when we can wonder about the same ones.

Questions are such simple ways to seek help, learn something, and bring people to together.

In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks some of the most beautiful, concerned, and generative questions that I’ve heard in a minute:

“Hands joined by grass, can we bend our heads together and make a braid to honor the earth?”

“What if you had language at all and yet there was something you needed so say? Wouldn’t your every movement tell the story?”

“Can we extend our bonds of celebration and support for our own species to the others who need us?”

“How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?”

“In return for this gift of a world on Turtle’s back, what will I give in return?”

These questions remain with me weeks after I finished the book. And so does Kimmerer’s poetic language and infectious love for the earth.

I could have read this book forever. I didn’t want it to end. And yet, Braiding Sweetgrass feels like the beginning of cultivating better relationships with the more-than-human beings around me.