Some Notes on Wisdom,
Science and Plants

"It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story – old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with the earth, a pharmacopeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.
– Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass, preface










Aug. 17

When you are exposed to a book that serves answers to the most profound of questions, you feel quickly honored to be in such company, to be given insight and story that seems to match the level of what is needed for our time. Kimmerer asks the question early, the very one that forces us see our interface with earth in the largest possible picture, so that we might re-evaluate (or what she refers to in just a few more paragraphs along, to come up with 're-story-ation'), our place and time on earth right now, "How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can't imagine the generosity of geese? The students were not raised on the story of Skywoman". We may quickly come to see that many or most of our seers of the past and of today, have generally come back around, seemingly in a full circle to some degree, of realizing that as long as we continue to see issues of sustainability as a technical problem also, we are really only offering a materialist answer to a materialist problem: if the oceans saturate in acidity due to climate pollution, maybe we can save the oceans by creating enormous ocean filters. This is literally an example of a 'one track mind,' and indicates to many of us who work hard at maintaining as many fragments of spiritual concern for the earth around as we can, that maybe we have lost, finally, all remaining spiritual ties to the earth, ties that might look something like sweetgrass itself, very fibers that grow from the earth upwards and offer themselves for all to either admire from the outside, or, as Kimmerer shows us right away, as a means to touch and connect. In these first few pages both the most critical questions and answers are offered: how do we re-establish a spiritual connection to earth at a time when we sense that this relationship has unfortunately (evolved / devolved?) into one that is chiefly materialistic – as Leopold summarized it: land as commodity not community. And that the answers, although we know are abundantly true, feel fleeting, temporary, and that takes so much extra effort in our contemporary times in which time is filled with activity that is often primarily self-serving and based on gaining not giving. The answer to the question above, the one that the students were unable to answer in a simple and positive way, is to simultaneously both touch and believe in creator earth. This doesn't take much, but ironically it takes everything also, to achieve. For those who garden, for those who still farm, for those who research a species, who fish, who dig, who seed, who swim...regularly, we are all a good ways along the great path, for the person who only things of a love of nature will quickly lose her momentum in these matters. The poet or teacher who presumes that teaching nature can be done from the front of a classroom, will at some point lose steam, so to speak. There's no real substitute for mud on the hell, a sunburn, or the cool touch of a fresh spring that bubbles up off Lake Wingra. In fact, we could stop right at that very junction between think and touch, and say that is the great bridge between the wanting of sustainability and the doing of sustainability. We have hundreds of thousands of young people moving through hundreds of widely acclaimed college programs across American in any given year, but how many would respond, after their four years, with the very same answer that Kimmerer shares with us: they cannot fathom a true and fundamental relationship with nature. The answer, of course, is the title of the book: braiding sweetgrass. Through a long process of cultural conditioning, our 'touching of the earth' has moved away from fundamental need to luxury (if that's the right word?) To braid sweetgrass would have been not only a useful task / art form, but the time that it would have taken to practice this would open up the human ability to create story, love, dedication, and belief surrounding it: enter the story of Skywoman. We want so badly in these times for a bundle of braided sweetgrass to have already been created, laying on a table, and perhaps study it is a vestige of some other time, some other groups' conception of art, trade, story. We are forever looking at the surfaces of things, assembling bits and pieces of information that might allow for brief understandings of things, or for moment's of appreciation. While the reality of contemporary time plays out in a kind of barely manageable hurry, from thing to thing, and that hands-on crafts and vocations are seen as either idiosyncratic or for folks who have a lot of 'time on their hands.' Again it is at this instant of thought, where an outward appreciation is stirred but incapable of following through with one's own connection, that is the crux of Kimmerer's most essential question: how to get to sustainability without a positive relationship with the very thing we would like to improve upon..the condition of the earth. Educators who are self-trained in the subtleties of knowing what their students need, might here say that curriculum, them, must cover some of the 'underneath' techniques in any given course: the botany class certainly must come know the plants, the accurate sighting, the accurate make-up, components, conditions, and structures; but under that what are the stories, the histories, spiritual references, and, what are the uses of such plants that we could engage in ourselves in order to experience 'plant-time?' If our calculations are correct, it will be, ironically in many cases, 'time' itself, how experience it, what comes from it as we engage in a discipline (braiding), that will be the deeper educator than even the original intentions of the memorization of plants. The Land Ethic came to call for our folding of the 'land' into our conscious mind, creating a personal and public ethic that would elevate soil, for example, into our daily system of care. Many readers saw that one of the challenges of this call to ethics was bound to be that it didn't necessarily call for hands-on right now. To think and to do are two parts of an ethical sequence. Every class in botany or environmental studies should devote a quarter of itself to a craft, an art form, or whatever is chosen not only 'to touch' the earth but maybe more importantly to open up time of devotion. In those minutes and hours, the students will have formed a positive relationship with earth that will alter their answers to the same questions.