Quotes from Robin Wall Kimmerer

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. Like the stars themselves, the words can guide us back home.

Like the stars themselves, the words can guide us back home.

Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten.

To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.

When we forget how to live in harmony, they remind us of the way we were instructed to live as people.

This is the grammar of animacy.

beginning with where our feet first touch the earth, we send greetings and thanks to all members of the natural world.

the role of land as renewable resource of knowledge and ecological insight

It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird's gift song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music.

all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.

map of balance and harmony.

I love to hear elder Tom Porter hold a circle of listeners in the bowl of his hand.

I am afraid. As afraid today as I was then. For my children, and for the good green world.

The organic symmetry of forms belongs together; the placement of every leaf, the harmony of shapes speak their message.

How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can't imagine the generosity of geese?

This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn't this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?

Respect one another, support one another, bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.

Let us pile up our thanks like a heap of flowers on a blanket. We will each take a corner and toss it high into the sky. And so our thanks should be as rich as the gifts of the world that shower down upon us

Traditional Onondaga understand a world in which all beings were given a gift, a gift that simultaneously engenders a responsibility to the world.

cooperating, not competing.

In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she.

Had the new people learned what Original Man was taught at a council of animals—never damage Creation, and never interfere with the sacred purpose of another being—the eagle would look down on a different world. The salmon would be crowding up the rivers, and passenger pigeons would darken the sky. Wolves, cranes, Nehalem, cougars, Lenape, old-growth forests would still be here, each fulfilling their sacred purpose.

transformation is slow.

What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it's hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts.