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✨From Our Shelves: Feminist Book Review✨

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Review by Sharon L. Stebbins-Groene

It has been a few weeks since I finished reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass but during that time the words in the book have stayed very present to me.  So present that I wouldn’t mind carrying the physical book around with me because I found the knowledge, sentiment, and sacredness imparted in this book to be deeply resonating.  Like braiding, this book weaves together Kimmerer’s experiences as a botanist, teacher, mother, citizen of an indigenous Native American nation, and daughter of Mother Nature.  What she imparts in this book and what has stuck with me is a way of being in the world committed to gratitude and interdependency in the most positive of ways. Without giving away her stories, she shares with her readers how to discover gratitude in our most mundane of daily activities, like listening to birdsong, and how to recognize that the world gives to us with its very existence and therefore we are indebted to taking care of it and each other.  She shares the view of us humans beings as the youngsters of the world and therefore ripe for learning from the physical and spiritual world around us. She conveys examples in nature of reliance between beings and entities resulting in energy continually being passed on and recycled.  This concept is still sitting with me and especially in light of the recent passing of my own mother… Kimmerer’s Sweetgrass helped me to think about my mother’s effervescent energy returning to the earth to greet me in unexpected ways with each morning I awake when I am privileged to experience this world and its inhabitants anew.  Do I recommend reading ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’?  Yes, and wholeheartedly.  With Spring upon us, there might not be a better time of year to pick up this book and absorb its themes of hope, renewal, and love.