For decades, walks on wooded trails pleasured me with intense beauty, but simultaneously left me aching to articulate the experience. I did not have exact words to name trees, wild grasses, birds, flowers—indeed the seasonal world around me, Creator God’s continuous gift.  

Then, a friend alerted me to Braiding Sweetgrass—Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (2013), written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a SUNY professor of botany, a researcher, an author, an ecologist, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. This collection of essays is not book to finish but to savor as antidote for the global ills that sap our humanness.

Critical to this process is Kimmerer’s ability to intuit stories of healing in the natural world, as did her ancestors, who left rich legacies to supplant the wash-out technologies that imperil our world even further.

The sacredness of the land is also central. With its accompanying mindset of gift, gratitude, and generosity, braided within stories of her tribe, her students, and her ongoing ecological research, the author enlivens fresh hope in her readers who continue buying her book. Indeed, all of life contains modalities for this restoration and embellishment, if sought after.

I wonder what would have happened if the Native Americans had colonized the European settlers to the New World, rather than what occurred.

Braiding Sweetgrass empowered me with its simplicity and wisdom of language; its spiritual nourishment. I’m glad whenever I peruse its pages.