Book Review and Nature shots

Lovely view seen on a hike in Alabama

Braiding Sweetgrass

If I had to list my favorite books for the year 2022 the book Braiding Sweetgrass would be number one.  I first started reading it as a library book, but almost right away I knew this was one I wanted to keep.  I wandered into a great bookstore in Knoxville, bought my own copy and was invited to a bookclub meeting to discuss this book.  Unfortunately the meeting fell through, and now I have no one to discuss the book with.

The author is a professor of biology, focused on botany.  She is also Native American and balances the science and the native wisdom and teachings of the plants in her writings.  She is studying the language of her people, and writes about how the language shapes the thinking processes and understandings of nature.  She uses family stories as a mother, as a naturalist and a daughter and granddaughter.  Her grandfather was a victim, or product of the Carlyle Indian School, a place designed to teach the Indian out of the man.  His language was lost, his history stolen and his place in the world redefined.  Now the author is trying to rediscover and enjoy the teachings she should have inherited.  Lucky for us, she wrote this book and we can enjoy the journey with her.

Trees show age and experience in their shapes

In the beginning she writes about The Beginning, comparing the creation stories of her Native tribe with the Christian story of the Garden of Eden.  Sky woman fell from above, was rescued by the geese and given mud to live on by the animals.  She spread the mud over a turtle, creating land, and gave the gift of seeds brought from the tree of life.  I was instantly hooked with the ideas she shared, and didn’t stop reading until I had turned the last page.  She writes, “One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a co-creator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants.  The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.”  She is comparing Sky Woman, who fell from above with gifts that created the plants, the land and everything needed to sustain life,  to Eve, who ate of the forbidden fruit and has been blamed for everything bad in the world ever since.   The lessons are different, making a different focus in which to view the world.  The descendants of Sky woman are taught to share with nature, to live in balance and generosity, and the descendants of Eve are taught to subdue the earth and all its inhabitants.  How can we be humble and thankful for what the world gives to us when we see it as punishment, as the land of exile?  Why do we take joy in the beauty of nature when this is not our true home, but a test to see where we will be sent?

This tree has quite a strong arm, seen in Alabama.

 This book has helped me to grow, to learn about various viewpoints towards nature.  These viewpoints come from our creation stories, our experiences and even our language.  In the native language our author is learning, all living things, trees, animals, plants, all are spoken of as he or she.  She reminds us how rude it would be to see our grandmother in the kitchen and say, “It is cooking.”  The very idea makes me shudder, of course grandma isn’t an “it.”  In her language the same rules apply to animals, to plants and trees.  Imagine the way we would view nature if we didn’t use the pronoun “it” to describe the tall oak tree shading our house.

Scarlet Tanager seen in Alabama.  

A few years ago my husband and I had to move to another state, and we had to move into an apartment.  We were sad to leave our home, and our house, but we chose an apartment building shaded by a large oak tree.  The entire complex was centered around green lawns and older trees, and I felt at home in the landscape.  Even though we no longer had our own house and yard, we enjoyed the shade of the tree, the ripples of light through the leaves, the bird visitors such as hawks and songbirds that landed on her branches.  At the end of the day I could sit on my couch and look out the window and be comforted by the tall old oak tree.  I watched the leaves fall off, and the wind bend the branches.  One day I came home from work to find the tree gone, the huge old oak had been cut down, broken limbs and branches scattered all over the yard.  Men were cleaning up from the carnage, and a huge machine was chipping wood, roaring and digesting right under our window.  In one day our lovely apartment changed, shade and life and beauty gone.  I asked the men why, and they said the tree was diseased.  I looked at the giant trunk and saw nothing but healthy rings and wood.  I think the owners of the complex didn’t like leaves falling on the roof of the building, and feared branches falling.  I was heartbroken, and we moved pretty soon after.  That beautiful tree, “it” was in the way of the owners and we lost our friend, the oak tree.

This hawk was photographed outside our apartment, in the oak tree before it was cut down