Braiding Sweetgrass, Part 2

Witch hazel, maple syrup and water lilies

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Hello,

As many of you pointed out in the comments of last week’s post, reading Braiding Sweetgrass is an incredibly poignant experience at this particular moment in history, when it seems as though any commitment to reciprocity with nature is being violently dismantled, with its most careful custodians losing their livelihoods. I opened Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book, The Serviceberry, earlier this week, and found it hard to get past the first page. It said, in large letters:

All
Flourishing
Is
Mutual

I am grateful for the mutual flourishing of this community, as we bear witness to a bitter transformation; grateful, too, to the repeated insistence in Braiding Sweetgrass that we don’t have to see humans as interlopers in the landscape. It is possible for us all to fit into the same ecology.

This part of the book - Tending Sweetgrass - has some of my favourite chapters. It is nearly awash with watery images, from the sap dripping from the maple trees to the clearing of the pond and the efflorescence of water lilies. There are many stories, too, of mutual dependence and generosity, from the exchanges of kindness and wisdom with Hazel, to the gifts left by Robin’s cousin as she returns home from dropping her daughter at college. Perhaps that mindset of shared abundance is inevitable in a people whose children begin and end their school week by giving thanks to the animals and plants that surround them, the winds, the water and the skies.

Look at the little tent hats on these syrup-collecting buckets! I love them. (Image: Shutterstock)

I’d love to know your thoughts at this point in the book. There is so much here about raising the next generation, and not just as parents but as a broader community. Do you have any similar practices of gratitude? How would we change if we pledged allegiance to the land instead of a nation or a monarch? Could you sit up for half the night, tending a pot of maple syrup?

Coming up next in our reading schedule:

24th February - 3rd March: Picking Sweetgrass

4th March - 9th March: Braiding Sweetgrass

10th March - 16th March: Burning Sweetgrass

Kaitlin Curtice, author of Native and Living Resistance, is going to join us on Tuesday 25th February for a mid-read live event - details are below the paywall. Do join us!