Robin Wall Kimmerer

Quotes

1. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents.

2. 

   The world is more than your thoughtless commute. We, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family. Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation.

   p. 359

3. 

   It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness"—estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.

   p. 358

4. 

   Naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see.

   p. 357

5. 

   The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all.

   p. 382

6. 

   If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

   p. 359

7. 

   Our histories are inevitably braided together with our futures.

   p. 365

8. 

   In an essay describing peoples with few possessions as the original affluent society, anthropologist reminds us that, "modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples." The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. The artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings: this is a economy.

   p. 376

9. 

   The earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon. This is the vision of the economy of the commons, wherein resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified. Properly managed, the commons approach maintains abundance, not scarcity. These contemporary economic alternatives strongly echo the indigenous worldview in which the earth exists not as private property, but as a commons, to be tended with respect and reciprocity for the benefit of all. And yet, while creating an alternative to destructive economic structures is imperative, it is not enough. It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance.

   p. 376

10. 

    So he walks the path at nightfall with a bundle in his hand. Into a nest of cedar bark and twisted grass he lays the coal and feeds it with his breath. It dances and then subsides. Smoke pools darkly as the grasses melt to black and then erupt into flame, climbing one stem and then another. All around the meadow, others do the same, setting in the grass a crackling ring of fire that quickens and gathers, white smoke curling upward in the fading light, breathing into itself, panting across the slope until its convective gasp sets the night alight. A beacon to bring their brothers home.

    p. 242

11. 

    Black against the golden grass and many inches deep into prairie earth, the trail follows the natural contours as if centuries of footfalls have preceded my own. It’s just me, the grass, and the sky, and two bald eagles riding the thermals. Cresting the ridge releases me into an explosion of light and space and wind. My head catches fire at the sight. I cannot tell you more of that high and holy place. Words blow away. Even thought dissipates like wisps of cloud sailing up the headland. There is only being.

    p. 247

12. 

    The plants are our oldest teachers.

    p. 213