Books › BRAIDING SWEETGRASS
BRAIDING SWEETGRASS
496 pages
A quiet, transformative meditation that permanently changes the way you look at the ground beneath your feet.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like taking a long, quiet walk through the woods with a profoundly wise elder. It is a deeply grounding and restorative experience, moving at a leisurely pace that demands to be savored rather than rushed. The prose is luminous and poetic, seamlessly weaving the sharp observation of a botanist with the soulful storytelling of Indigenous tradition. You sit inside an atmosphere of reverence and earthy wonder, occasionally touched by the sharp ache of ecological grief, but ultimately guided toward a profound sense of gratitude and reciprocity. It will delight anyone who feels a spiritual pull toward the natural world and longs for a more attentive, reciprocal way of living on the earth.
- Mood
- grounding
- contemplative
- earthy
- restorative
- Tone
- reverent
- gentle
- wise
- lyrical
- earnest
- Pace
- leisurely
- Themes
- reciprocity with nature · indigenous wisdom · ecological healing · the personhood of plants · gratitude
- The writing
- Luminous and poetic, seamlessly weaving the sharp precision of a botanist with the soulful warmth of oral storytelling.
- The arc
- Moves from a quiet ache over environmental disconnection to a profound, grounded sense of kinship and active hope.
- Who it's for
- Nature lovers and seekers looking for a deeply ethical, spiritual, and scientific connection to the living world.
Content notes
- ecological grief
- environmental destruction
- historical trauma
- indigenous boarding schools
About the book
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.
Description from Open Library.
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