136 quotes
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)
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)
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)
A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate—once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
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.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
Being a good mother doesn't end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. 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.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.
Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)