BOOK CLUB: Part 1 - Planting Sweetgrass (Patreon)

[Pictured: Moment In Flight / Skywoman by Bruce King]

Wow. What a lovely lovely collection.

Also woohoo we got a whole two weeks to read the next part! If you didn't get through this first section yet no worries just tune in when you have!

I'm going to just leave some of my favourite lines and most intense reactions to each piece in this first part:

Skywoman Falling:

Perhaps predictably moved by the comparison of Skywoman and Eve as Creation Myth protagonists.

"How to follow the Original Instructions will be different for each of us and different for every era." (p. 7)

Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us." (p. 8)

The Council of Pecans:

Not much makes me wanna kill myself and everyone else quite as fast as reading about the experience of Native Americans at the hands of colonialist whites.

The bitter, bitter humanity of the Indian leaders choosing to accept private property from the American government because property owners were actually protected under the constitution, only for their enrolment in the private property market to make them fair game to be bought and plundered to nothing, just has me ready for violent revolution.

((I'm reminded of the speech by Comanche Chief Ten Bears that was featured in Robert Pirsig's Lila, which I have to reread like 6 times every time I come across it. I'll post it in a comment underneath this main post.))

The Gift of Strawberries:

This was my personal favourite chapter. Practically every paragraph has highlights and underlines and stars and hearts. I will have to try to pick some bits and not just Command-C Command-P the whole thing here.

Strawberries first shaped my view of a world fill of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery-as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source. (p. 24)

The Gift Economy... this whole chapter getting close to some things I am working on for the main channel about... business...

That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. (p.27)

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 its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a "bundle of rights," whereas in a gift economy property has a "bundle of responsibilities" attached. (p. 28)

Lewis Hyde has made extensive studies of gift economies. He finds that "objects... will remain plentiful BECAUSE they are treated as gifts." A gift relationship with nature is a "Formal give-and-take that acknowledges our participation in, and dependence upon, natural increase. (p. 30)

Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is theft. (p. 31)

There are those who will try to sell the gifts, but, as Wally says of sweetgrass for sale, "Don't buy it." Refusal to participate is a moral choice. Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought and sold. Don't buy it. When food has been wrenched from the earth, depleting the soil and poisoning our relatives in the name of higher yields, don't buy it. (p. 31)

The commodity economy has been here on Turtle Island for four hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths. A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. (p.. 32)

An Offering:

True names are used only by intimates and in ceremony. (p. 34)

I imagined that this beloved place knew my true name as well, even when I myself did not. (p. 34)

Overall Offering didn't hit me as much as it hit the research team, but I'm touched in this piece like I am with The Grammar of Animacy with how human and honest Kimmerer about her struggle with the legitimacy and efficacy of some of her traditions and convictions.

Asters And Goldenrod:

My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide. But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer. Why two flowers are beautiful together would violate the division necessary for objectivity. (p. 42)

Gangster paragraphs on page 45 just throttling that professor who said "Why Asters And Goldenrod Are Beautiful Together" wasn't a "scientific question".

It's a testable hypothesis; it's a question of science, a question art, and a question of beauty. (p. 46)

Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception. When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purpose and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both. (p. 46)

Learning The Grammar of Animacy:

A very relatable and honest report of the brutal loss of indigenous languages, the irreparable damage of colonialist genocide of Native people and culture, and the incomprehensible value lost in that sin, and the desperate impossibility of retaining or restoring that value after it was actively destroyed.

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Well yeah. Wow. Quality stuffs.

So so so much to pull out and expand upon. What stood out to you? How you feel this connects with other stuffs discussed? I could riff about this in many directions but I'm sincerely more interested in what pieces are emphasizing themselves in your eyes.

Comment Material & Spiritual Reflections Below!