[this book captures my love for the world in so many ways and has given me the language to see that the world loves me too. Some ideas not included in the quotes: how to become a naturalized person in the land you live in, the three sisters.]
"On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast."
"Nuts were designed to be brought inside, to save for later in a chipmunk's cache, or in the root cellar of an Oklahoma cabin. In the way of all hoards, some will surely be forgotten - and then a tree is born."
"Such communal generosity might seem incompatible with the process of evolution, which invokes the imperative of individual survival."
"Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it."
"But that is exactly the point. A gift is something for nothing, except that certain obligations are attached. For the plant to be sacred, it cannot be sold."
"That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage."
"Gratitude was the only currency accepted here. It was all a gift. It was like picking strawberries in my field: the merchants were just intermediaries passing on gifts from the earth."
"It's funny: Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I probably would have scooped up as much as I could. But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn't want to take too much."
"Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft."
"There are those who will try to sell the gifts, but, as Wally says of sweetgrass for sale, 'Don't buy it.' Refusal to participate is a moral choice. Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought and sold. Don't buy it. When food has been wrenched from the earth, depleting the soil and poisoning our relatives in the name of higher yields, don't buy it."
"That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist."
"After the drumbeat of my mother's heart, this was my first language."
"I simply gave myself up to the task. I remember the liberation of just walking right in to my waist the first time, the lightness of my T-shirt floating around me, the swirl of the water against my bare skin."
"What I'm looking for, I suppose, is balance, and that is a moving target. Balance is not a passive resting place - it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in."
"The pond built my muscles, wove my basked, mulched my garden, made my tea, and trellised my morning glories. Our lives became entwined in ways both material and spiritual. It's been a balanced exchange: I worked on the pond and the pond worked on me, and together we made a good home."
"A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all of life's beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother."
"In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."
"Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them."
"Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond."
"Something essential happens in a vegetable garden. It's a place where if you can't say 'I love you' out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate, in beans."
"Traditional harvesters recognize the individuality of each tree as a person, a nonhuman forest person. Trees are not taken, but requested. Respectfully, the cutter explains his purpose and the tree is asked permission for harvest. Sometimes the answer is no."
"The work of being a human is finding balance, and making splints will not let you forget it."
"John keeps to the tradition of the Honorable Harvest: take only what you need and use everything you take."
"Just about everything we use is the result of another's life, but that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society."
"For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me. And now there's another layer of responsibility, writing on a thin sheet of tree and hoping the words are worth it."
"What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it's hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts."
"When my kids were in school they had to memorize the Bill of Rights, but I would venture to guess that maple seedlings would be schooled instead in a Bill of Responsibilities."
"But this generosity is beyond my realm, as I am a mere heterotroph, a feeder on the carbon transmuted by others. In other to live, I must consume. That's the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world."
"Collectively, the indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest."
"One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence."
"Isn't this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?"
"Instead I just stand there, tears running down my cheeks in nameless emotion that tastes of joy and of grief. Joy for the being of the shimmering world and grief for what we have lost."
"When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. Is is a prism through which to see the world."
"A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit."
"I suppose he achieved what he had been taught to want, a better life for his children and grandchildren, the American life he was taught to honor. My mind thanks him for his sacrifice, but my heart grieves for the one who could have told me stories of sweetgrass. All my life I have felt that loss."
"Ear of stone, will you hear our anguish when we understand that we have done? The harsh post-glacial world in which you began may well become our own unless we listen to the wisdom carried in the mutualistic marriage of your bodies."
"To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it."
"Inside looking out, I could not bear the loneliness of being dry in a wet world. Here in the rainforest, I don't want to just be a bystander to rain, passive and protected; I want to be part of the downpour, to be soaked, along with the dark humus that squishes underfoot."
"When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are. So I stretch out, close my eyes, and listen to the rain."
"And we think of it as simply time, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story."
"Is is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave."
"Human beings made this happen, not a faceless corporation. There were no threats, no extenuating circumstances to force their hands, just business as usual. And the people of the city allowed it to happen."
"The breath of plant gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine."
"But standing on the roadside, you can hear the pop of the body, hear the moment when a glistening being following magnetic trails toward love is reduced to red pulp on the pavement."
"I fear that a world made of gifts cannot coexist with a world made of commodities. I fear that I have no power to protect what I love against the Windigo."
"Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world's wealthiest peoples. The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated."
"I believe the answer is contained within our teaching of 'One Bowl and One Spoon,' which holds that the gifts of the earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon."
"Each of us comes from people who were once indigenous. We can reclaim our membership in the cultures of gratitude that formed our relationships with the living earth."
"A gift is different from something you buy, possessed of meaning outside its material boundaries. You never dishonor the gift. A gift asks something of you. To take care of it. And something more."
