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BOOK CLUB: Part 4 - Braiding Sweetgrass (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-21 19:58:17
Edited:
2023-05-21 20:10:27
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

[Pictured: The edge of a flower field in the Smoky Mountains.]This is the fourth discussion thread for Braiding Sweetgrass the book and the first and only discussion thread for Braiding Sweetgrass the section within the book.We've planted tended and picked the stuff, so I guess it's about time to get braiding.I liked this section better than the last! I feel like it maintained some thematic energy a bit better, Creation/Destruction, educational expeditions with students, and the modern regeneration of old patterns within nonlinear circular time. I see it!It did occur to me at one point that perhaps this scheduled medium of consumption is not exactly doing me favours appreciating the individual essays. They might be designed for a kind of lax appreciation, and is rebelling slightly at the requirement I read it for work. This is kind of a pre-response to my general artistic reaction that it could be shorter, and some pieces are much stronger than others.I liked a lot though. Growing excited for the second Book Club Town Hall! (Wed June 7th at 4pm!, more info at the bottom)

---------------------

In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place:

I know I'm a slut for religion but I adore all the creation myth stuff, Nanabozho and Skywoman and the interactions between all the archetypical original animals.

There is something really wonderful and universal about knowing ourselves as children, immigrant arrivals to this world, stewards/students of Creation.

Good to know Kimmerer is on heptapod time:

"Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself - its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again." (p. 206)

The only right way to interpret religious wisdom I think:

"In the way of linear time, you might hear Nanabozho's stories as mythic lore of history, a recounting of the long-ago past and how things came to be. But in circular time, these stories are both history and prophecy, stories for at time yet to come." (p. 207)

Adore the lessons learned from the birds and cardinal winds, will not list all here but pondering in my heart.

"All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation." (p. 212)The Sound of Silverbells:

I like to hear Kimmerer describe students, and I'm charmed by her cringe colonial students touching eternity with their Christianity despite the tools of indigineous philosophy seemingly failing them.This quote at the end really rings of the holiness of consciousness that I've been circling in my other work:

"Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart." (p. 222)Sitting in a Circle:

My favourite to read of the bunch, once more because Kimmerer seems like a wonderful professor and I love to hear her knowing descriptions of students, building different kinds of affection for the different characters.

Shout out Natalie she soudns fucking awesome.

"Natalie takes the plunge as she shouts, "Become one with your inner muskrat!"

"Natalie still wades nearby; she calls out she's going to "Marsh-alls"

Cattails being called bewiieskwinuk in Potawatomi translating to "we wrap the baby in it" has me FERAL.

I think when Kimmerer relies on personal passion & poetic language to express the beauty of nature it really doesn't grip me but once I'm experiencing it through the lens of these incredibly sympathetic students I'm THERE.

"caring is not abstract" (p. 239)

Natalie gets the closer of course she does absolute legend

Burning Cascade Head:

[Ellen's favourite]

The story of loss and restoration is a bit self evident, I will just leave some touching quotes:

"Take only what you need and let the rest go by and the fish will last forever." (p. 243)

They thought they could make salmon without rivers. (p. 246)

I cannot tell you more of that high and holy place. Words blow away. (p. 247)

I suppose that's what it means when they put down the camera and stand on the headland, straining to hear above the wind with that wistful look, the gaze out to sea. They look like they're trying to remember what it would be like to love the world. (p. 248)

And this extremely CJ The X core quote does Attention/Ritual/Community/Service:

Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before you community, it holds you accountable. (p. 249)

Putting Down Roots:

Tragically shifting gaze away from tradition and modern reintegration towards the intentional cultural genocide of residential schools.

Two bits that embody the entirety to me:

When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world. Tom says that even words as basic as numbers are imbued with layers of meaning. (p. 258)

The twin grandsons of Skywoman had long struggled over the making and unmaking of the world. Now their struggle came down to this one game. If all the pits came up black, then all the life that had been created would be destroyed. If all the pits were white, then the beautiful earth would remain... Tom told us how in the final roll, as the peach stones hung for a moment in the air, all the members of Creation joined their voices together and gave a mighty shout for life. And turned the last pit white. The choice is always there. (p. 260)Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World:

To be 100% honest I skipped this chapter without remorse. i simply could not with the lichen

Old-Growth Children:The Franz Dolp sage was endearing.

"I call it 'anticipatory redistributive natualization.' Dawn calls it tinkering" (p. 289)

"I definitely should have met with a council of mice, boomers, bobcats, porcupines, beaver, and deer before I started this experiment," (p. 290)

Doesn't require much deduction to know I was really into the equivocating between reforesting and artistic creation.

Appreciate the mention of the Potlatch tradition. A social custom that I have always been really really really captured by. Regular redistribution of wealth, where the most fortunate members of a community bequeath gifts, earning themselves honour and repute by raw generosity, resetting the balance of resources before things accumulate again.

The Western settlers outlawed this practice and enforced its eradication with violence, because it was illogical and a waste of resources, plus the songs of celebration seemed to them barbaric and occult. Puts violence in my heart.

Witness to the Rain:

What a wonderful unexpected quaint closer. Kimmerer literally just vibing in the rain, noticing shit.

It feels good to be behind her eyes. The slow sorting appreciation and attention for dynamic detail, the impromptu experiments, the personal intuition about Time. Very reminiscent of the new Jenny Odell book (haweya tells me).

She also spends a paragraph wishing she was a tree, again.

Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It's what happens that matters. (p. 296)

If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. (p. 296)

If you didn't know better, you might not recognize raindrops and rivers as kin, so different are the particular and the collective. (p. 297)

One thing I've learned int he woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another. (p. 298)---------------------

I liekd it :] (mostly)

Our last meeting for this book will be two weeks hence, on June 4th!! Wowie!!! only took fucknig months!

I'm also settting down 4pm EST on Wednesday June 7th for the second Book Club Town Hall!! There will be a Zoom link and we will have a moderated talk about Book Club books and philosophy and stuff and things! Will likely run for 2-3 hours.

I will be with Ellen in Vancouver passing the virtual talking stick around, focusing on Sweetgrass and I'm sure spiralling out to everything conceivable to man.

Reminder that the goal is ultimately that Book Club Town Hall's will likely eventually be moderated by contributors from within the community, as doing everything I do plus being directly accessible over Zoom by a lot of people is not really something I'm comfortable with permanently. I aim to ultimately be a participant and facilitator not a star witness and parasocial mega church pastor. So we will be sorting that out as we go.Until then!...

Creation and Destruction below!!!

Files

Comments

sal3m

Helloo I really love this book(club) here's what I wanted to share :D p. 206: ‘looking up into the trees so often I stumble’. I do that, or at least I try to. What a pleasure it is to be able to get lost in the beauty of nature. Thinking about nature and keeping the book in the back of my mind, I’ve been renaming some familiar plants. So far the Geraniums I often see in elderly people’s houses have been renamed to ‘Old Person’s Company’, the house plant species Monstera is now called ‘Bringer of Nature into Homes’ and I’ve dubbed Samphire ‘Safekeeper of Salt’. Now all I need is a song to see their spirits (p. 209). (I accidentally included a bug in between the pages of my book. As I find her now, a couple of days later, I decide to write something for her. I tell her I’m sorry for killing her and I give her a word of prayer. This word of prayer is ‘Omnemashevaya’. This isn’t an existing word, though; it’s a vague memory of a sentence that my grandma said when she killed a bug once. She told me it was a way of making sure the bug went to a good place, and since she practices/takes inspiration from Hinduism it was probably something in Hindi. I don’t believe in a better place I can send this bug to through prayer, and even if I did I wouldn’t be using the right one, but still I have taken my grandmother's ritual and practiced it just because it felt right. I guess I don't want to waste an opportunity to honor this bug's life when I can give her my words. The bug stopped right above my annotation on p. 248 about the act of love for land being made visible at Cascade Head so I think she’d like me to share with you all that this part really touched me. Often when I see rituals I understand the mental/spiritual value of them for the people who execute them, but rarely do I see/understand that they’re really not for the humans but for the land/animals/etc. they pray for. Of course not every ritual in every religion has a purpose that benefits those who are not humans, but before I had read this chapter I hadn’t seen actively honoring other species by actually helping them as a possibility at all. Maybe there ís a better place the bug I took the life away from gets sent to when I mutter my nonsensical word. Deep down I hope there is.)

Lou Corben

I love all the human creativity coming to bear in these chapters. -“I am a writer who works in the forest. And with the forest…. Artists as foresters.” -“grief can also be comforted by creation, by rebuilding the homeland that was taken. The fragments, like ash splints, can be rewoven into a new whole.” More comparisons between Christian and Native American creation myths highlight what stories teach us about our place in the world (Adam naming the animals vs Nanabozho *learning* their names) but also remind us what we forget about hegemonic myths (Skywoman was an immigrant, Jesus was a refugee). If time is a circle, then hope is not lost <3 Kimmerers use of the word “kinship” on page 227 reminds me of the fucking inpenetrable Donna Haraway book I tried to start a few weeks ago, “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene”. Has anyone read it? Having read around it a bit, I have the impression it's tackling a lot of the same themes and ideas but written much less accessibly. Would love to hear thoughts from anyone who's managed to get through it! **Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World** “It was only when they severely curtailed the resources, when they created harsh and stressful conditions, that the two would turn toward each other and begin to cooperate. Only with severe need did the hyphae curl around the alga; only when the alga was stressed did it welcome the advances. When times are easy and there’s plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival. So say the lichens.” Something I think about a lot is how individualistic online mental health discourse often is. I want to tread carefully here, but I'm concerned by the idea of putting our own individual short-term wellbeing above all else. Of course, I don't mean really severe MH conditions, but I fear we in the “West” have a tendency to turn inward at the first sign of distress. If we turn away from each other instead of toward each other, we not only isolate and exacerbate our own MH but can have unintended effects on the MH of our loved ones. Cancel on a friend so you can wallow in bed, and you're depriving yourself of support from your friend, but you're also cutting your friend off from *their* support network. Of course it's OK for this to happen sometimes, and there are kind ways to let someone down, but it can become an unhealthy pattern encouraged by half-baked “wellbeing” advice on social media. So what I'm essentially saying is Community Community Community.

Anonymous

I got a late start with writing down my thoughts- organization not being my strong suit. I've been listening to Robin read her book and I've liked it a lot. Getting to hear her speak with such love for her topics, hear her humor and own inflection has been invaluable. Makes the parts that could come off cringe more charming. Imo. Plus hearing her speak the indigenous words sprinkled in the book feels like a blessing each time one comes up! Still, I'm going to buy a physical copy and read that as well once I finish listening to the audio book. Because alas, it is much harder to directly quote her when I've got my elbows deep in dish water or am driving to work. And I very much want to quote her, that shit is so quotable! The thing that strikes me the most is her sense of peace in describing all the parts of her world. Even in speaking about Carlisle The atrocities committed and the wider systemic abuse colonizers have put the whole ecosystem through, through the pain and upset there is a center of calm in her work here that makes me cry from that tiny hopeful place in my heart. The place that says meaning might be possible, even now. Her drags towards the prominent culture (far more few and far between than truly they could be) hit me like a freight train for their deep, simple, obvious truth. I relate to her desire to be a tree, and I want a relationship like the lichens have "Grief can be comforted by creation" is sticking with me. Her blend of artistry with science feels so nice after a lifetime of watching the two ideologies fight. Can't wait to finish!

Alex Dian

When this book was first announced to be the next book of this club, I was very skeptical. It is completely the opposite of me. I am not a plant guy or outdoorsy at all. But I can now say that this book might be my new religion. I sincerely love it. I want to do my version of pouring coffee into the ground, grow strawberries, be grateful, be mindful with my language about plants/animals. In this section, I loved Witness to the Rain. This is equivalent to "if you don't stop to smell the roses..." but for rain. "I could not bear the loneliness of being dry in a wet world" My main takeaway from this section was: how nature does offer a sense of comfort and understanding. I think that I am often understood the most in nature because it does not ask anything of me. There is no expectation with the earth, i.e. it doesn't expect anything of me. Just to survive and live. And this motherly expectation to thrive is love. And when you receive love the only option is to give it back. To be grateful. To stop and smell the rain.

cedarwheat

I have been listening to the author read this book as I spend time alone in a cabin in the mountains. I'm sitting in the smoldering ruins of my former life, trying to both rest and figure out where to go next. Her voice has kept me company as I sand, glue, and finish a musical instrument that I hope will actually sound OK in the end. I think these are the exact right conditions to be engaging with this book. Stories told to you by an older aunt for you to chew on. Some more specific thoughts: - I have spent many years living in a part of the world where people come to make money and then tend to leave. I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have roots, and to try to set them down in a culture/time where it is expected that you will inevitably move and turn over friends/places as you go through life. Maybe it just means finding a chosen family who also wants to stick around? Establish your own community with its ceremonies. The mythic aspects and nonlinear time of that essay are also My Shit and I loved it. - I would really love to be able to take that class with her. Found it touching how the students figured out how to pay it forward. - Old-Growth Children is a nice story of hope. No deep thoughts, I just vibed with it. The idea that you could put nature and yourself back together. Will keep that in my heart.

valentin

bookclub baby! I'm sitting on a sofa next to my cat as I'm writing this. She's sleeping and seems to be having a dream of some sort, her leg is twitching. the room is quiet except for the crackling embers in the furnace and the clicking of the nintendo switch my sister is playing on across the room. I had trouble with this part of the book. I was getting less and less motivated to read it, choosing other books or my phone over reading this one and, as a consequence, falling behind. so I decided that I needed a change of scenery. I'm lucky. my family owns a house in Rohrbach and der Teich (a village, a 2 hour bus drive away from Vienna, where I live) so i went there. my mother was already there when I arrived and my sister joined us today. I've been feeling a little more connected to nature again. I read in a field today, for around an hour, it's incredible how many sounds a meadow makes when it's windy. you just have to listen. there the rustling of the individual blades of grass against one another,the humming of beetles and the chirping of crickets. a great sonic background for a book like this. (for those interested; heres a picture of my reading spot in the field) https://imgur.com/a/Sc0VZxq IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NANABOZHO: BECOMING INDIGENOUS TO PLACE: I found this chapter really interesting. time is a circle and so on and so forth. if you look at the repeating patterns in history, that becomes apparent. this is usually said as a warning. learning from history usually means being cautious of the mistakes our ancestors have made. but kimmerer asks what we can learn from our past. “the footprints of First Man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead.” they lens kimmerer views this through is that of becoming indigenous. if you want to live on land you must respect its past and therefore its ways. i feel like this applies to everything though. music, painting, fashion, mechanics… its all built on the shoulders those who came before us. if you want to take inspiration from something, respect it and learn it. the numerous rock albums by rappers show that, without respecting the source material, the final product will not be Good. THE SOUND OF SILVERBELLS & SITTING IN A CIRCLE these are both very similar. two stories about Kimmerer teaching, paying attention to your surroundings and learning from them. singing is also a prominent theme between these two stories. singing together in a forest seems really beautiful to me. I should do it sometime. if I had superpowers I would teleport all of the book club people into a forest with some guitars or something and then we would all sing or something. I have some quotes that stuck out to me in these chapters, here they are: “Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world” (p.222) There is something sacred about just looking at a bird or any being really. just looking, taking in what it does, recognizing the shared experience of being alive. you can also pay attention to non-living things. stones will always have a story to tell if you look closely. water moves gracefully, drips off of leaves or forms little pools. just the act of paying attention creates a connection and helps you appreciate the world. “Brad arrives at our wilderness field station for ethnobotany class in loafers and a polo shirt.” (p.223) classic brad move. remember to always dress for the occasion guys. looking suave wont help you dig through the dirt faster. “Some of the hairy rhizomes have a stiff white shoot emerging from their end, a more than vaguely phallic organ of horizontal propagation.” (p.227) that one´s just extremely funny. smut writers take notes. “`The plants adapt, the people adopt” (p.229) also, i loved the ending to this chapter. Natalie wakes up and speaks thanks to the new day. I feel like Kimmerers joy about teaching and watching her students learn bleeds from this pages in a way that makes me really happy. BURNING CASCADE HEAD I love what Kimmerer says about Ceremony in this chapter. “Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable.” (p.249) “To have agency in the world, Ceremonies should be reciprocal co-creations, organic in nature, in which the Community creates Ceremony, and the Ceremony creates Communities.” (p.250) “I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world.” (p.251) ummm… yes please? we should have more Ceremonies. these days all you get is christmas, easter and maybe your birthday. but why not have ceremonies for nature, for life, for anything really. I also want to stand next to a river with my community and sing. I do volunteer work for the church (youth group) and that is where I get most of my Community moments from. The youth group has a couple of dances that they teach the children. They are really simple “line dance type” routines that are easy to learn but fun to execute. at my prom this year, one of the songs we dance to was played. everyone that had ever been to the youth group or just participated in one of the dances ran to the dancefloor and joined us. the song (sing hallelujah – dr alban) has a part with a build up and drop where in the choreography you just stomp to the beat as loud as you can. Its at around 3:32 in the song if anyone is interested. at my prom, there were about 40 people doing the choreography. ill never forget the sound of 40 people just fucking eviscerating the floor. definitely a highlight of recent memory for me. PUTTING DOWN ROOTS & UMBILICARIA: THE BELLY BUTTON OF THE WORLD Im going to skip these two, I don’t have much to say about them and ive already written a bunch on the other chapters so ill leave these two to the ones who are passionate about them. OLD GROWTH CHILDREN I really like the ties between art and nature that are pointed out in this chapter. Kimmerer has talked about plants and storytelling before and it turns out im always a sucker for that shit. Europe has a spruce problem. we´ve been planting a bunch of spruce trees because they are economically viable, meaning they grow quickly and therefore make a lot of money. however, in recent times, due to climate change and bugs, spruce forests have been dying. the solution obviously is restoring forests to their natural state. it turns out having a diverse range of trees in your forest doesn’t just make it more beautiful, it also protects it against all the little goobers that want to eat trees. Scientists have known this for a while, but only now that its having an impact on their profits are companies trying to diversify (some just switch to other types of monoculture, different trees, similar to spruce but not as affected by the climate and pests) Cool stutff right?? :) WITNESS TO THE RAIN Kimmerer is in the rain. Very nice ending chapter, really tranquil and beautiful. Kimmerer is once again asking us to pay attention. So tahts all from my end. im very excited for book club town hall number 2 baby. thank you for hosting it at an accessible time. thank you for doing book club, it has been a great exercise for me, to read a book and summarize my thoughts every two weeks. and one last thank you for providing us with a huge amount of patreon stuff these past months, us CJ the X Patrons are drowning in content and im very grateful that you care so deeply about all this. GoodBye

Halley

I love reading the context that people are reading this in! I think it is apparent that this is a book that benefits being experienced in a natural environment. I listened to these chapters while working in my garden- transplanting tomatoes, harvesting herbs, collecting slugs, and sometimes pausing to take note of a resonant quote. I'm still absorbing the lessons and threads of previous chapters so my response may not be limited to this section. Something that I've been contemplating is this question of what we owe the earth in return for her gifts. I remember she asks this of herself and her students in "sitting in a circle"- Is gratitude enough? I want to extend this question to the arts, because I find the relationship between artist and audience quite intriguing and also based on a kind of reciprocity. What do we owe each other, as artist and audience? Is gratitude enough? I wrote down the same quote about ceremony that valentin and CJ already quoted: “Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable.” I think ceremony is so important and often lacking or overlooked, but it can be created quite simply with intention. For one year I was part of a group of women who would meet for a full or new moon ceremony once a month, sharing food, checking in, and talking about our intentions and feelings. It was really special and transformative and I haven't been able to find something like that since, but sometimes I take elements of that experience and try to bring ritual into my life in small ways. I often try to do something to celebrate seasonal changes/earthly holidays, to ground myself with intentional awareness of the rhythms of the world I'm a part of. Ritual creates reverence for the mundane. Ceremony creates *an experience* out of what might otherwise just be experienced. There's this awareness and reminder that death is a part of life, needed to sustain life, and not shunning this truth but embracing it with honor and reverence. Maybe fish farms and plastics are a societal way of trying to avoid this truth, to sanitize the destruction by abstracting it away from the lives whose deaths sustain us. Here's a quote I liked. I'm not sure what part it's from: "One thing I've learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships. One thing with another." And this one: "If we are looking for models of self-sustaining community, we need look no farther than an old growth forest or the old growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them." Re: putting down roots- I've been thinking a lot about assimilation, that insidious method of cultural genocide, and how much it has affected mine and my husband's lives in ongoing ways. It's too much to get into here, but I think it is important to be aware that colonization is not a thing of the past but it is ongoing and ever-present all around the world. The last two minutes of "witness to the rain" was my favorite part of this whole section. "Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life. And we think of it as simply rain. As if it were one thing. As if we understood it. Maybe there's no such thing as rain. There's only raindrops, each with its own story. ... Listening to rain, time disappears. If time is measured by the period between events... this forest is textured with different kinds of time. And we think of it as simply time- as if it were one thing. As if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time. There are only moments. Each with its own story. ... Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn, from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop." The line 'as if it were one thing' makes me think of how mycologists struggle to distinguish the individual fungi from the collective, how that assumption of separation is disrupted by these life forms. (on a related note- this is a conversation I really enjoyed listening to this week, maybe of interest to some of y'all too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVpVc7VKOrM&list=LL&index=5&t=2s&ab_channel=CRASSHCambridge) Kimmerer has a gift for teaching and communicating, and I liked how the two field trip chapters showed her transformation into that role, some of her own learning and unlearning. The process of becoming the person wise and confident enough to write this, integrating all of those experiences. I'm thinking that much of life's work is learning to balance seemingly opposing aspects. I think this book resonates so widely because she has succeeded in carefully and skillfully balancing the apparently conflicting traditions of western scientific and indigenous knowledge systems, while showing that they might not actually be as oppositional as we thought.

CJ The X
>>109016003

I appreciate the inevitable humility that comes from looking closely at the bits of life we are willing to sacrifice. Like the pond restoration from earlier where Kimmerer was saving tadpoles even though it made everything take forever. I do think that the energy of gratitude and ritual suggested throughout the book are important ways to honour little life, big life, but not as causal forces that mystically dance their way to objective rational value, but as nonlinear experiences intrinsically, psychologically, spiritually potent that must be linked to practical utility. At the very least a more fulfilling life and deeper appreciation for the minute wonder of existence (what a waste of time!!)

CJ The X
>>109028866

very with you on the mental health thing. Rayne Fisher Quann wrote a nice reflection on it earlier this year: https://internetprincess.substack.com/p/no-good-alone Strangely the mental health self care thing kind of reflects a stark duality, where you need to tactically ensure that your Mind is clean and nice separate from the world you live in. Part of mental health is existing in harmony with others and your environment, and if your mental health is deteriorating you may not need to opt out of communal experiences but to lean into them a bit. Productivity kind of has this consumptive association but another way to think about the word is just...... to produce something? To be with people and produce relationship, to make art, to write in a journal or clean a place or think about somethign new. idk.

CJ The X
>>109030171

I feel like listening to her speak the words out loud might help me appreciate the passion and sincerity when it gets to particular onslaughts of plant particularities. I do enjoy the tone. Different tones work for different things, but I think there is something really potent about vulnerability, peace, eloquence, in the face of even the most egregious damages. We really have to try to face them directly, subsume them into a new narrative, plant meaning in their cursed soil and redeem them, which isn't possible if you spend all of your energy damning the scorched earth. It's the only way to actual transform things. "Grief can be comforted by creation" honestly can be pretty quickly upgraded to "Grief MUST be comforted by creation". I do think a kind of rebirth and recontextualization is what healing is. If grief is inconclusive loss of something valuable, something like honour, legacy, lineage is the connective tissue back to being and becoming.

CJ The X
>>109036665

i also was skeptical about this book lol I was talking w a couple people recently about how the whole emphasis on Body as equal to Mind thing is actually EXTREMEMLY uncomfortable for me, I am not a nature person I love cities and laptops and art and I think bugs are gross etc. But it felt like some sort of inevitable extension and interaction based on the way philosophy had taken me, some lesson I had to learn. This thing that Kimmerer is good at, stopping to smell the roses, sniffing rain, asking flowers questions, I am quite poor at. But I'm trying to learn, because I feel like I have to. I'm inclined to create and build and constantly look forward, disastisfied with the present, and that probably makes me a very hard worker and a leader and an innovator but it also makes me unable to appreciate the beauty around me, and makes me reckless and arrogant in my pursuit of value, when value is coursing around me constantly. So I know my lessons are where my talents are not. Anyways sorry for the DIARY ENTRY

CJ The X
>>109037876

I also feel like she's a fuckin awesome professor. I would love her class. Type of passion that hooks you no matter what your individual interests are, since the 4 dimensional passion is so intoxicatingly human and transcendent. It's hard to understand the laying down roots thing. My mother and I discuss it a lot, since she moves jobs and cities every few years. There's kind of a dichotomy between growing roots and A D V E N T U R E ! pros and cons to both. I'm not sure how my life is going to go yet. It does feel like people and places always leave and change. Hard to tell what precentage of that is natural extension of the cycles of life / seasons and what percentage is our artificial resistance to growing meaningful community, our lack of connection to our land, etc.

CJ The X
>>109051685

sounds like wonderful wonderful scenery. I never grew up with a secondary location to retreat to, but it's somethign I hope to provide for my kids someday if we end up in a city. People should be hear quiet, see stars. I did notice that this book really started to grate on me if I didn't walk through a small wood and smell some cedar or something. Once I did all of sudden the empathy surged back into my body lmao. Ellen made a joke to me about how Robin really hated Brad in Sitting In A Circle and i really disagreed!! I felt like her representation of the city slicker deeply uncomfortable with nature was funny, yes, but also really loving and gentle and honest. I find that she (like Pirsig) is really good at being 100% sincerely herself and also acknowledging she is not quite like everyone else, without diminishing her convictions or looking down on people who have different experiential realities. Re diverse forests being sustainable...>FKHDFJJHF okay i cant get into it all right now but I have very intense economic opinions that have been developing as a result of all this philosophy and the way that diversity is necessary for sustainable business but doesn't grow as FAST and extreme efficiency, but also that extreme singularity is business inevitably explodes and forces your extreme optimization to just make an ugly tectonic shift to some completely different area...F KJDJH...... cultivating a successful economy is a lot like cultivating a forest. Its art. Not math. Town hall will be fun. I also honestly have some visions for Book Club/Social No Para to push forth into the physical realm somehow. I want to do in person events. I am pressing out with my psychic value tendrils to see how this may manifest.

CJ The X
>>109067143

"Ritual creates reverence for the mundane. Ceremony creates *an experience* out of what might otherwise just be experienced." I think your entire post is wonderful and I haven't much to add, except the silly anecdote that I was at a wedding last year where Melvin Sheldrake was present lol. Saw the silly guy. He played jazz piano??? Author of Entangled Life, same guy. The family was doing his mushroom book in their family book club, I'm not sure how he's related to them. Anyways, havent read the book, but I know the face!

valentin
>>109377591

oh god yesss!! I totally agree., this capitalistic myth that growth is the number 1 priority in everything is so damaging and just tends to turn everything (including forests) into homogeneous-soup-entities. those tend to 1: not be Good and Beautiful and 2: not be sustainable. I really understand the FKHFHJJF feeling you have about this, I feel it too. if I remember correctly you said that you'll talk about business at some point in the future if that's still the plan, I'm super excited about that stuff!! also: Book Club/Community stuff in person sounds awesome! I do unfortunately happen to live in the little country of Austria, which probably means I won't have access to those events, but I nonetheless am very excited about the prospect of the beautiful people in this community meeting in person. also final note if you got this far: back in our social no para talk we briefly talked about subjective vs. objective style and ever since then which has snowballed butterfly-effect-stlye into some thought about fashion I've been tinkering on in recent times. just wanted to thank you for sparking that idea in me because it has now lead to me starting a substack and beginning to formulate my thoughts which is very exciting to me!

Alex Dian
>>109036665

In return… sorry my diary entry. ”my lessons are where my talents are not” 100%. But in reading this I reflected on if this book has taught me anything or if I’m just proud that I read it. Like I keep telling people about this book, and then proceed to follow none of its teachings. I’m a phony. And the next part of the book covers it, but I have not once yet stopped to enjoy the rain. To listen to teachings of plants. I’ve just sat back and let other people do that. I question if reading is enough.

valentin
>>109051685

oh shit right i forgot, that's wild and makes me even more excited d the substack is called extra chrome, it's currently under construction but im working on my first essay as we speak (will come out soon I hope)

valentin
>>109051685

the link is extrachrome.substack.com my dumbass didnt realise its virtually impossible to find a substack just by putting in the name oops

annie liz

I’m late! Stuff do be happening! But also time is an illusion (you FU-) and perhaps I was just working with bigger raindrops than bookclub raindrops. Regardless, as such, my thoughts are a little bedraggled (u kno, from the rain) and I feel I have less to capital C Contribute, but I care about the participation and I care about the things you all have to say :) Becoming Indigenous to Place: having moved around a bit, it’s interesting to find a juxtaposition of feeling like I’ve found a little piece of home in every place I’ve lived, yet simultaneously never fully rooting in one spot. What does “rooted” mean for someone in that context? Like she asks, “what are the stories that lead the way?” (p. 207). Probably Nanabozho, traveling every direction and simply learning from each group that IS from there? Did Nanabozho ever settle in one place, or did he roam forevermore? "Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself - its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again." (p. 206) Oh I love it. You knew I would love it. The visual is scrumptious. Linneaus’ and Nanabozho’s “conversation” on page 209 warmed my heart maaaan “yes, that is also our way!” And neither of them are lonely!!! Kimmerer’s interactions with students make up some of my favorite moments in the book. She clearly spends a lot of time alone thinking and preparing and theorizing and poeticizing, but it’s always going work differently in execution, when interacting with other whole ass people who very clearly don’t have that exact perspective. And yet, I think this is when her lessons come through clearest? I “get” it along with the students, I understand Kimmerer on the same timeline as the students understanding the land. Sitting in a Circle really captures how relational the marsh really was/is to the people who needed and used it for survival in a very practical way. Kimmerer has spent the whole book talking about how the land provides and you provide in return, and that’s great, but yeah wait shit Wal-marsh really does have everything, checking off every item on the list (ipod notwithstanding). The practical application really helped emphasize the lesson, and the good faith interactions of the college students with the environment brought me whole-hearted joy, phallic-looking cattails and all. Burning Cascade Head: I drew some connections regarding ceremony and the value of cultural events that focus everyone’s attention to one moment with The Offering chapter in the first section, just on a bigger scale. Loss and recovery, the love in the past and the hope for the future, tittering on the present’s knife edge of choice. Franz Dolp’s story is sweet and a quite hopeful testament on one guy having the means to doing something and doing something about it. “This was an exercise in personal forestry. But it was also an exercise in the creation of personal art. I could have been painting a landscape or composing a cycle of songs… Given my lack of technical expertise, I could not reconcile myself to the title of ‘forester,’ but I could live with the idea that I am a writer who works in the forest… who practices the art of forestry and writes in trees… Perhaps that is what we need. Artists as foresters” (p. 290). I think I really needed this passage right now. I’m not really die-hard for the “all art is in everything all the time” perspective, which is fine or whatever but for me negates the import of Art on Purpose; but the fact that he found himself, as an artist, working in forestry the way an artist would, and that approach being VALUABLE? And was Art on Purpose in of itself because he made it that way?? Oof. I’m lacking in Art on Purpose atm, and this was a beautiful dedication to artist perspectives and applications being important and transformative, regardless of the context. Lovely stuff. Witness to the Rain is probably the best iteration of Kimmerer translating her pure delight in being outside and amongst the world; it plops you right in the center of her brain and it just feels… calm. I always loved getting caught in the rain (when I didn’t have anything on me that was rain-spoilable) because it always puts you in that place of oh, the sky is on me and I’m the sky and it’s breaking the rules and it’s free and it’s wet and I’m here! I’m here!!! She seems to have worked out that mindset down to a (lol) science, and I’m glad she shared that sliver with us. Can’t believe there’s only one more section left! I hope to make it to the town hall again, schedules hopefully working out in my favor :)

Lou Corben
>>109028866

"The best thing about tripods, I’ve heard, is that they can’t hurt your feelings" !!!!! How do I send this to a friend without sending it to them?

Dor

The chapter on Umbilicaria represents to me the relationship between co-dependency and poverty. Something I've been trying to learn more about beyond my own experience and that of my poor peers, but haven't found much written or studied about this. We experience an intensification of relationships and the general affect depending on the quality of every little thing that happens or that is. Our lives are inherently more complex and our ability to hold complexity is increased. But we are humans and the GIANT humans that eat us think it is funny to watch us jump thru hoops before we die, making things worse than they should have to be. The lichen's may be experiencing something more akin to interdependency- though the giants still come to grow off of the remains of their life force. I wonder what it is like for the fungus and the algae inside their tiny homes, to need each other so much and so indefinitely. I think it must be hard, but there is something about the quality of stability and knowing how to live by small means that can turn poverty into the stuff of just peacefully existing. So maybe that is what they're doing? I don't care what anyone says, poverty can and should be glorious if it can be.

phil e the theyby

One thing I find super interesting with this book is that I think I have a lot of similar reactions to CJ around the more poetic language; the flowery (pun intended) descriptions of specific moments don't particularly grip me as someone who was raised thinking in Abstract and Absolute terms. I tend to scan through and underline stuff that I feel speaks to a broader, universal truth. But I've been making myself just continue to read the chapter and trying to stay engaged, and I find that, no matter which chapter or section, I *always* get something out of it. And the poetic language isn't secondary; I feel like Kimmerer is speaking her own language, and then at the end of the chapter/section/paragraph/whatever is translating it for Rationality-Pilled Fucks like me. In a weird way, I see reading this as a process of opening my heart. This was my experience with "Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World." I struggled to read the chapter, but I came away with this profound feeling of reciprocity and interconnectivity being abundant in the world, when I've been socialized to see the world as competitive and individualistic. And the great part about Kimmerer is that *she doesn't shy away from the reality of the competition for resources*. She recognizes that cooperation and interdependence are individual survival strategies. This really stood out to me in "Old-Growth Children" too: "The pioneers produce a community based on the principles of unlimited growth, sprawl, and high-energy consumption, sucking up resources as fast as they can, wrestling land from others through competition, and then moving on. When resources begin to run short, as they always will, cooperation and strategies that promote stability--strategies perfected by rainforest ecosystems--will be favored by evolution." (284) I promise the first sentence there is written in the context of PLANTS (although she obviously is drawing an intentional parallel with colonial/capitalist humans). She doesn't frame this colonial tendency as some sort of aberration that's wholly unnatural as a lot of people do; she contextualizes it as one survival strategy that is adaptive in certain contexts, but is also profoundly detrimental to long-term survival. And I think that's a better and much more accurate view of "human nature" than I'm used to. We absolutely have the tendency to extract, exploit, and dominate hardwired into our DNA. But we also have the tendency to nurture, support, feel gratitude, and live in interdependence hardwired into our DNA. The question isn't, "are humans good or evil?," because we are all unquestionably both. The question is "how do we create systems that promote our specific tendencies that benefit our long-term survival and flourishing, and discourage our specific tendencies that threaten it?" What I love about this book is that it demonstrates how, in both Native American cultures and in the natural world, those cooperative tendencies have been fostered and have thrived.