Quotes from Robin Wall Kimmerer

Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we "remember to remember," and so sweetgrass is a powerful ceremonial plant cherished by many indigenous nations.

Every one of them is beautiful. Every one of them is different and yet every one of them began in the same tree. They are all made of the same stuff and yet each is itself. That's the way it is with our people, too, all made of the same thing and each their own kind of beautiful.

The landscape has changed, but the story remains.

I wanted to know where he felt most nurtured and supported. What is the place that you understand best? That you know best and knows you in return?

Cada día está plagado de regalos. Para respetar su naturaleza no tenemos que guardarlos celosamente para nosotros. Su vida se realiza en el movimiento, en la inhalación y la exhalación de un aliento compartido. Nuestra labor y nuestra alegría se encuentran en la transmisión de los dones que recibimos y en la confianza de que aquello que lanzamos al universo siempre regresará.

The atmosphere is possessive of its water. While the clouds are generous with their rain, the sky always calls it back again with the inexorable pull of evaporation.

It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder. We get good training along the way. We learn to say "Have a great time, sweetie" while we are longing to pull them back to safety. And against all the evolutionary imperatives of protecting our gene pool, we give them car keys. And freedom. It's our job. And I wanted to be a good mother.

If we are going to grow good citizens, then let us teach reciprocity. If what we aspire to is justice for all, then let it be justice for all of creation.

Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.*

I am trying to understand what it means to own a thing, especially a wild and living being. To have exclusive rights to its fate? To dispose of it at will? To deny others its use? Ownership seems a uniquely human behaviour, a social contract validating the desire for purposeless possession and control.

In a garden, food arises from partnership.

People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, "Plant a garden." It's good for the health of the earth and it's good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate—once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself.

Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection "species loneliness"—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship

toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to.

They taste good together, and the Three Sisters also form a nutritional triad that can sustain a people.

The process of ecological succession is like a positive feedback loop, a magnet of life attracting more life.

G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a pioneering ecologist, spoke eloquently of the living world as "the ecological theater and the evolutionary play." This decaying log is a stage, and the scenes take place in the gaps, where the colonists act out their drama.

the Honorable Harvest: take only what you need and use everything you take.

there is something like a mycorrhizal network that unites us, an unseen connection of history and family and responsibility to both our ancestors and our children. As

Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion -- until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation.

a way that contributes to the good of the whole.

but by the rules of reciprocity none can take more than she gives.

It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder.

Doing dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows that that's where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms relationships.