Book Review - Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
A year or two ago, it seems like everyone in my pagan circles was reading Braiding Sweetgrass, but it took me a while to get to it. Now, having read it, I’m sorry it took so long. This book struck me, challenged me, and inspired me. I can already feel how it’s reframing my approach to how I talk about and interact with the world around me. I only wish I hadn’t read it during a cold winter, since what it really made me want to do is go outside and sink my paws into the dirt.
Braiding Sweetgrass reads like a collection of essays, weaving (as the title and subtitle suggest) science writing, indigenous culture, and memoir into one beautiful reflection on the world and the places we take within it. Dr. Kimmerer is a professor of botany and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the personal part of the story talks in part about how those two worlds collided. The world of academia is not always kind to other ways of understanding the world, but Kimmerer provides a beautiful perspective on how it’s vital for all these different approaches be brought in contact and support of each other.
This is a topic that’s really dear to my own heart; I grew up immersed in a love of science and have kept that with me; I’m the type of person who watches math and chemistry lectures for fun in my free time, who can ramble at length about tiny little taxonomical details, who actually bought a new copy of their college physics textbook to have as a reference. But at the same time, I’ve always felt a pull toward the spiritual as well. I grew up possibly as immersed in the stories of the indigenous Southwest as anyone of a non-native upbringing could be, and those stories made a kind of sense out of the land around me that went deeper than knowing the scientific name of the plants, or the strata of rock. Even as I was earning a Bachelor of Science in the desert, I was feeling a pull to better understand my non-human nature, and connect with the beings and forces I experienced subtly in my dreams and imaginings.
I see these both as different ways of looking at the world, each with their own benefits and drawbacks, and the important question is always which one is important when, and how can they support each other. While reading Braiding Sweetgrass, I found my notes always going back to those questions, and reflecting on how effortlessly Kimmerer combines does it herself. In this book, the observed ’scientific’ facts about a plant end up making it feel more like a person, and the indigenous stories about an ecosystem shed light on its observable, measurable existence. The idea of ecology is unified with the idea of a gift-based culture, that asks us: What can we give, in return for all that the world gives us?
One of my pagan traditions makes space each ritual for healing. After focusing intention on healing for the other individuals present, and for our communities, we turn our attention to healing our connection to the Earth. Not the Earth itself, but specifically our connection to it. For a long time, this struck me as strange, and a bit frustrating. Even if the Earth itself is too big for my own little bit of healing to be anything more than a drop in the ocean… doesn’t every drop help? But that same theme is repeated over and over in this book, in a larger concept that helped the idea make a new sort of sense. In the stories in this book, from the tales of sky people giving their all to enliven the place where they landed, to the recounting of students learning to use the gifts of a marsh to feed and shelter themselves, it’s clear that it’s the connection, the relationship, that comes first, that lays the groundwork for all the good that can come after. If that connection were healed, the rest would follow, and focusing on the connection helps us think of the concrete things we can do to reaffirm it.
That’s probably why this book made me want to garden more than I’ve ever wanted to before, in ways I haven’t before. To help transform our yard from lawn to meadow, to make a little place to one side where corn, beans, melon and squash can all support each other, as our family supports them, and in their time they support us in turn. To change the way I speak to and about the beings I share the world with, and help others do the same (My very favorite chapter was called “The Grammar of Animacy”, combining thoughts about my special interests of linguistics and spirit in ways that seemed practically written for me). To create ritual that helps share these braided ways of seeing and thinking and knowing with anyone else who will listen.
I’m so glad I read this book, and if you haven’t read it already, I am happy to give it an unreserved recommendation to anyone else reading this. I went into it thinking I basically knew what it was about, looking forward to good prose, inspiring story, and cool science facts… I got all that, but somehow it all weaved together in a way that made it so much more, to the point that It’s going on the short list of books that have fundamentally altered my perception of the world.