Quotes from Robin Wall Kimmerer

Even the surfaces of individual cells have their own descriptors—mammillose for a breast-like swelling, papillose for a little bump, and pluripapillose when there are enough bumps to look like chicken pox. While they may initially seem like arcane technical terms, these words have life to them. What better word for a thick, round shoot, swelling with water than julaceous?

I hadn't realized that I had come to the lake and said feed me, but my empty heart was fed.

Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.

Trees constitute the environmental quality committee--running air and water purification service 24-7. They're on every task force, from the historical society picnic, to the highway department, school board and library. When it comes to civic beautification, they alone create the crimson fall with little recognition.

The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves. I hadn't realized that I had come to the lake and said feed me, but my empty heart was fed. I had a good mother. She gives what we need without being asked.

But I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and reducing the possessed. If he truly loved mosses more than control, he would have left them alone and walked each day to see them. Barbara Kingsolver writes, "It's going to take the most selfless kind of love to do right by what we cherish and give it the protection to flourish outside our possessive embrace".

It was a kind of respect, a kind of thanks. On a beautiful summer morning, I suppose you could call it joy.

The Honorable Harvest asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given. Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us.

When I ask my elders about the ways our people lived in order to keep the world whole and healthy, I hear the mandate to take only what you need. But we human people, descendants of Nanabozho, struggle, as he did, with self-restraint. The dictum to take only what you need leaves a lot of room for interpretation when our needs get so tangled with our wants.

When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters?

A compass: "To find your new path.

We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don't have to avert our eyes with shame, wo that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth's beings.

Across the market stalls and blankets, warmth and compassion were changing hands.

But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.

It would be so satisfying to provide for the well-being of others— like being a mother again, like being needed.

objects . . . will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts.

That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low.

Clumsy at first, from generations of sitting on the sidelines, we stumble until we find the rhythm. We know these steps from deep memory, handed down from Skywoman, reclaiming our responsibility as cocreators. Here in a homemade forest, poets, writers, scientists, foresters, shovels, seeds, elk, and alder join in the circle with Mother Cedar, dancing the old-growth children into being. We're all invited. Pick up a shovel and join the dance.

Are all the pieces of the ecosystem still here and doing their duty?

We tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not a stranger or alien available for exploitation.

How generously they shower us with food, literally giving themselves so that we can live. But in the giving their lives are also ensured. Our taking returns benefit to them in the circle of life making life, the chain of reciprocity...We reciprocate the gift by taking care of the grove, protecting it from harm, planting seeds so that new groves will shade the prairie and feed the squirrels.

The behavior of these three blurs the distinction at the edge between life and death.

When we can no longer see the stars because of light pollution, the words of Thanksgiving should awaken us to our loss and spur us to restorative action.

Just about everything we use is the result of another's life, but that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society.