Quotes from Robin Wall Kimmerer

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist. What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

The question of goldenrod and aster was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.

we make a grave error when we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole.

It's such a simple thing, but we all know the power of gratitude to incite a cycle of reciprocity

Paula Gunn Allen, in her book Grandmothers of the Light, writes of the changing roles of women as they spiral through the phases of life, like the changing face of the moon.

There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage; for those, we need each other. My mother and Hazel Barnett, unlikely sisters, I suppose, learned well from the plants they both loved - they made a balm for loneliness together, a strengthening tea for the pain of longing.

Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth, its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman's hand. Accordingly, it is honored as one of the four sacred plants of my people. Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten.

But just because we don't think of them as humans doesn't mean they aren't beings. Isn't it even more disrespectful to assume that we're the only species that counts as 'persons'?" The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.

How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers—the living world could not bear our weight—but even in a market economy, can we behave "as if " the living world were a gift?

When we braid sweetgrass, we are braiding the hair of Mother Earth, showing her our loving attention, our care for her beauty and well-being, in gratitude for all she has given us.

Children hearing the Skywoman story from birth know in their bones the responsibility that flows between humans and the earth.

the thriving of one in the best interest of the other. This, to me, sounds a bit like love.

A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language.

Images of Skywoman speak not just of where we came from, but also of how we can go forward.

Let us pledge reciprocity with the living world.

The students all demonstrated a deep respect and affection for nature.

and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species. It's all in the pronouns.

But the pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn't end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all of life's beings can flourish.

What I'm looking for, I suppose, is balance, and that is a moving target. Balance is not a passive resting place - it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the taking out and the putting in.

They said that nature was the place where they experienced the greatest sense of belonging and well-being.

beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world.

You wouldn't harm what gives you love.

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species.

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.