Robin Wall Kimmerer

Quotes

1. Wabunong—the East—is the direction of knowledge. We send gratitude to the East for the chance to learn every day, to start anew.

   p. 208

2. 

   I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That's what good mothers do.

   p. 122

3. 

   Sustainable harvesting can be the way we treat a plant with respect, by respectfully receiving its gift.

   p. 165

4. 

   Reciprocity is a matter of keeping the gift in motion through self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving.

   p. 165

5. 

   Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.

   p. 208

6. 

   A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate—once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself.

   p. 126

7. 

   A theory, to scientists, means something rather different from its popular use, which suggests something speculative or untested. A scientific theory is a cohesive body of knowledge, an explanation that is consistent among a range of cases and can allow you to predict what might happen in unknown situations.

   p. 159

8. 

   Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

   Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.

   Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.

   Take only that which is given.

   Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.

   Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.

   Give thanks for what you have been given.

   Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.

   Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

   p. 183

9. 

   The ultimate reciprocity, loving and being loved in return.

   p. 123

10. 

    Getting scientists to consider the validity of indigenous knowledge is like swimming upstream in cold, cold water. They’ve been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds toward theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough. Couple that with the unblinking assumption that science has cornered the market on truth and there’s not much room for discussion.

    p. 160

11. 

    I’ve heard it said that sometimes, in return for the gifts of the earth, gratitude is enough. It is our uniquely human gift to express thanks, because we have the awareness and the collective memory to remember that the world could well be otherwise, less generous than it is. But I think we are called to go beyond cultures of gratitude, to once again become cultures of reciprocity.

    p. 189

12. 

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

    p. 158