This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR. The book is “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
There are a lot of books whose writing draws me in but few whose writing grabs me into the flowing poetry of its prose from the first syllable. For that matter, few prose books are so poetic that you can't really separate the emotional pull of poetry from the expository nature of prose.
She writes, "Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair."
And then to my dance-world conditioned senses she writes, "…the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations." And all I can think of is dance, passed from teacher to student to dancer to choreographer through the years, in person, carefully, exuberantly, with total involvement and body sense in movement from ground into air.
"In the beginning there was the Skyworld."
From Skyworld a woman falls through a hole in her world, down a shaft of light, turning like a maple seed, as Skywoman sees below her only darkness. But in that darkness eyes look upward at the light. Seeing Skywoman, geese rise to break her fall.
"Far from the only home she'd ever known, she caught her breath at the warm embrace of soft feathers, and they gently carried her downward. And so it began."
The geese can't hold her forever, so a turtle offers her his back to rest on. The animals know she needs earth, so, working together, the animals provide earth for Skywoman. They start by putting earth on the turtle's shell.
"Skywoman bent and spread the mud with her hands across the shell of the turtle. Moved by the extraordinary gifts of the animals, she sang in thanksgiving and then began to dance, her feet caressing the earth. The land grew and grew as she danced her thanks, from the dab of mud on Turtle’s back until the whole earth was made. Not by Skywoman alone, but from the alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude. Together they formed what we know today as Turtle Island, our home."
Not geologically accurate, of course, but an immersion of our senses in the philosophy of cooperation with the world at large and nature directly. Robin Wall Kimmerer places this sweetgrass in our hands, and the responsibility to see all nature as the whole within which we humans exist. Kimmerer is a woman of multiple worlds, a university teacher of botany and ecology, a writer, a scientist, an active member of the Potawatomi nation and, as she says, "a carrier of Skywoman's story."
She relates giving a survey to a class of some 200 third-year students. Rate the relationship between humans and the environment, she asked. Kimmerer tells us that almost every single student thought "humans and nature are a bad mix."
In writing the book, Robin Kimmerer enrolls us into her classroom, and in a larger way enveloping us in the "Original Instructions" of her people, flexible prescriptions which differ for every person and every era but are always centered in a cooperative democracy with nature. To read "Braiding Sweetgrass" is to be embraced.
This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
