Book Appreciation: Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
"All flourishing is mutual."
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, a professor, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a beautiful writer. Braiding Sweetgrass weaves together her intersectional identities while also braiding in scientific observation, Indigenous teaching, and living stories. Reading this book feels like having a soothing connective conversation with the natural world. We move through fecund and generous plants and dreamlike stories of conscientiously working to honor these offerings, and we center on this interconnected mutuality in flourishing. A clear, delicious vision rises up as we live with the earth as a gift shared with a sibling not a resource.
This concept is worthy of sitting inside. Reciprocity feels very relevant and nourishing to me in therapeutic work. Mutual interconnection correlates with strong markers of psychological health: similar to play or wonder or psychological flexibility. Our interconnectivity with each other reflects our oneness with the natural world. As Kimmerer describes, receiving something fully calls for something from us in return. Gratitude could become a devoted practice where the more we sit with it, obligations are revealed. How are we called to connect and what are we called to do if our experience with the living world is a gift? Living in a flowing and ongoing exchange reflects a healthy state of aliveness, a dynamic that is abundant in the natural world. Just as mycelium are the seams of connection in the forest’s Wood Wide Web, we are in ecological and energetic exchange with our bodies, with our partners and with the world. Letting go of the hierarchical and transactional interactional patterns in our stance with ourselves and the world can be profoundly healing.
I’ve found much of the couples and inner relationship work in therapy is about this paradigm shift. Couples can lean into living centered around sustainable flow and values based connection. The ‘we’ not the ‘I.’ The sustainable inter-thriving in Kimmerer’s soulful book is something we can grow. We can cultivate where we are living from in our daily lives in an empowered and choiceful way. We can practice kinship both inside and outside ourselves. Many of the positive outcomes in therapy leave people more able to foster giving and receiving generously and enjoyably.
Truly transformative therapy comes when folks are using their energies and aliveness in an open hearted reciprocal stance in the world and with ourselves. This lands for me as a strikingly clinical insight dressed in ecological language. So much of the work I do with clients is about exactly this: learning to receive without guilt, to give without depletion, to understand a relationship as a living exchange rather than a transaction to be balanced and closed. Mutual ongoing connection that enhances the wellness of all participants is sustainable and beautiful.
Braiding Sweetgrass is also a book about grief and repair. Kimmerer unflinchingly describes what colonization and industrial extraction have done to land and to the people who belonged to it first. With her steady gaze at all of this, she doesn’t land in despair. Instead she emphasizes restoration. We could support the restorative growth of wetlands, language and interrelationship. She holds this as a skill to be practiced with imperfection and with community over time. There's a lesson in there for anyone doing their own internal restoration work: healing is a relationship you tend.
Kimmerer’s insistence on attention as a form of love deeply resonated with me. She writes about learning to see a growth of sweetgrass or a mossy clump the way you might learn to fully and deeply see a person. We could take in these living beings with patience and openness, letting it teach you what it is, without deciding beforehand if it has utility for you. This kind of unhurried, curious presence is the kind of stance I help folks cultivate toward their own inner and interpersonal lives. Less extraction, more relationship. Less “fixing" and driving a situation, and more being together.
Braiding Sweetgrass isn't a fast read, and it isn't meant to be. It asks you to slow down the way its subject matter does. You are invited to sit with plants and stories and gratitude and grief long enough for it to work in you, to metabolize it on deeper levels. For anyone interested in ecology, Indigenous knowledge, or relearning how to submerge into deep attention, this book an abundant and radically liberating companion.