154 quotes
The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
For grief can also be comforted by creation, by rebuilding the homeland that was taken. The fragments, like ash splints, can be rewoven into a new whole.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
A people's story moves along like a canoe caught in the current, being carried closer and closer to where we had begun.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
To plant trees is an act of faith.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
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.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
Look at the legacy of poor Eve's exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
I think about grief as a measure of our love, that grief compels us to do something, to love more.
Interview with The Guardian (2020)
Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
Imagination is one of our most powerful tools. What we imagine, we can become.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
I don't have much patience with food proselytizers who refuse all but organic, free-range, fair-trade gerbil milk. We each do what we can.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
Nut butter: good winter food. High in calories and vitamins—everything you needed to sustain life. After all, that’s the whole point of nuts: to provide the embryo with all that is needed to start a new life.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
Gratitude plants the seed for abundance.
Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct.
Wild things should not be for sale.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
The plants are our oldest teachers.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children's future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)