Often when I read books, I forget most of content of it after several weeks and only remember the most basic summary version of it. Sometimes I remember even less, and just remember how the book made me feel.
But I finished Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer a couple weeks ago now and it has really stuck with me. Oh my damn what a gorgeous gorgeous and important book that definitely has changed the way I view and interact with the world. I feel like this thought vomit won’t encapsulate all of the thoughts it has sparked for me because I could gush about it endlessly. But since I am writing this before my workday starts lol I will need to cap it off somewhere.
I have a vague memory of several people recommending the book to me. But the impetus to actually start reading the book was when I saw a reference to it while reading How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, the last book I read. Odell was quoting the passage where Kimmerer imagined Carl Linnaeus (the “father of modern taxonomy”) and Nanabozho (a co-creator of the world in Anishinaabe storytelling tradition) walking together, and complementing each others’ knowledges with their own: Linnaeus shares all the scientific descriptions of the plants and animals as they walk, and Nanabozho knows their personal names and has a spiritual connection to each of them. It stood out to me as the first time someone had held “Western” science and indigenous knowledge as ways of viewing the world that are compatible/mutually beneficial/able to work together non-hierarchically and non-violently. I was intrigued.
Almost immediately from the first chapter I was surprised by it. I wasn’t expecting the book to be so beautiful. She has beautifully braided Native American wisdom and worldviews with scientific understandings of the world into a form of nature writing that reads like nonfiction poetry. I legitimately teared up at passages at things that I never thought could be so beautiful: a description of lichen. A story about how pecan trees decide when to produce their nuts. A chapter about algae growing in a pond. And a story about grass growing. And heck, even a description of birds shitting.
It was the first time I had read a book that truly spoke about living things as beings with lives (and not as living “things”!) in a way that wasn’t tacky, or fictional. It was also the first time I was reading someone’s personal experience of forming a positive relationship to those beings, rooted in reciprocity and responsibility and respect for autonomy. I had known this was theoretically possible because indigenous people manage to live sustainably in the world even through to today. But reading this first-hand account showed me how it’s possible, or at least, how it’s possible to form more right relationships to nature given the current systems we live in. It was like reading about someone else’s healthy, loving relationship to their community or partner and realizing that I never knew such a kind of relationship to be possible. This book made me realize my “species loneliness”.
From her keen attention to the ways of the living world, both as a botanist and as a person with Potawatomi heritage, she knows them intimately and has drawn out larger (human) life lessons from them. There was a line in the book somewhere, about how “you truly understand something when you understand it with your mind, body, emotion, and spirit” and this book truly embodies that.
As I said before, I think it has also changed the way I view and interact with the world. I am starting to pay more attention to the bugs and plants and animals around me, and how they interact with the world, sometimes involuntarily. Without intending to I find myself stopping to look at a bracket mushroom growing on a manhole cover, or cool-looking bugs having sex on a leaf, or a lonely shrub with its leaves turned to the sun, or ants behaving curiously, or listening to the stupid sound of pigeons when the bird’s wings slap each other right after they take off, or a cool plant growing in the grass that has tiny white flowers on the underside. Sometimes I’ll use reverse Google image search (which is a DOPE feature btw) to learn the scientific and common names of things, but mostly I’ll just observe for a while. It’s been humbling and beautiful just to realize how much beauty I’ve been walking past all these years in Singapore as I’ve grumbled about how this country has no “nature”. It’s obviously no wilderness, but there are fascinating ecologies and thousands of kinds of living beings here too, even in the most desolate parking garages and in the most boring-looking patch of “grass” (which, in Singapore, is usually a bunch of different low-growing species). I’m so inspired to listen and learn.
(Regarding the photo above, I found this sweet baby cactus growing in the algae layer on the parking garage near my house like wtf!!!! A cactus growing on concrete?? This shit deserves poetry.)
My takeaways from this book also weren’t just the beautiful descriptions of nature, too; I think it has also shifted my understanding of what would be necessary to become more sustainable as a society over the long term, and mitigate/adapt to the worst effects of environmental collapse and climate change. In the sense that, being in right relationship with nature and with each other isn’t just a nice thing for me to seek out for my own wellbeing and quality of life, but something essential for us to do as societies, over the long term. Whether or not we (on the collective scale) can form positive, reciprocal relationships with the land and with nature and with each other can have implications for the survival of our species. Discourses of “sustainability” that are still ultimately rooted in a “how can we live exactly the same as before and still take as much as we want without causing environmental and societal collapse?” sort of view is, I think, never going to get us there.
Anyway. I loved this book but I feel I’ve barely scraped the surface of its depths here. There’s so much more to talk about but I have to start work now and I would just keep rewriting this and never moving on to reading other books if I don’t just post this now lol. I would highly recommend it to anyone and I would love to have more conversations about it. If you do read it, I suggest giving yourself the time and space to fully enjoy its beauty—that is to say, this is not a book to read on your commute, or during spare moments, but rather something that deserves a nice chunk of time with a cup of tea, in a patch of sunlight or on a cozy chair.