"The question of goldenrod and asters was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe." #BraidingSweetgrass#RobinWallKimmerer#Wildflowers
As I struggle to live a more enchanted and animistic life, and to nurture those innate tendencies in my young son, I find the two things that trip me up the most are the automatic use of "it" to refer to nonhumans (he/she is only slightly better but not always applicable) and not knowing how to talk about death in ways that aren't completely disenchanted and mechanistic (we found a dead snake yesterday in the woods). Any ideas?
Author Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks to the fact that Nature needs a new pronoun in this Orion Magazine article! And the scene opens in, of all places, a graveyard.
I’m going to leave the joy of discovering how she resolved this with you and share just this sentence:
“Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness, an opening to kinship.”