Summary
Humans need to be in reciprocal relationship with earth, plants, and animals. The book speaks of Animism, removing the clinical nature of scientific/botanical study that removes personal and spiritual relationship from nature, and of many different instances where plants have provided gifts to humans and humans in turn, through harvesting and tending to these gifts, benefit the plant world.
How I discovered it
This book was read very widely amongst friends years ago but I am just catching up now!
Who should read it?
Anyone forging a deeper relationship with nature and wanting to grow awareness in how the divide between nature and humanity in order to “protect” nature has been more harmful than helpful
How it changed me
Behavior, ideas, perspectives, emotional shifts
- A gift is something for nothing, held sacred by not selling it. The value of the gift increases with passage. Gifts are meant to be given away again, not privately held
- Ceremony and ritual are vehicles for belonging, making the mundane spiritual
- Science separates for objectivity whereas the observer and observed are both present in art. Think of the songs, relationships, poetry of plants!
- Energetic reciprocity seen in the afterimage (e.g. complementary colors of asters and goldenrods together)
- Metaphor as sacrament (“meta”foray)
- Dance of cross-pollination
- Animism: grammar as relationship, separating being from human. How can we respect non-human living entities?
- Maple sugar: gift of earth is half of it. The other half is our work and gratitude that turns sap into syrup.
- Paula Gunn Allen’s framework: way of daughter (learning), self-reliance, way of mother (service), way of teacher (role model)
Quotes
We are showered everyday with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and exhale of our shared breath.