Spring 2022 Book Group Discussion

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer - Friday, April 8 at 10:30.

**UPDATE - Sawyer Free Library has a Book Group Kit available for our use. The kit includes 10 books and possibly an audio book or large print copy. Books from the kit are available to us for one month. Pat Cronin will pick up the kit on Saturday, February 26th. Please let her know if you would like a book and she will try to arrange a delivery to your home. **

Below is Amazon’s description of 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 two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of 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 will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.