Braiding Sweetgrass

wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment i ...

Winds. We hear their voices in the moving air as they refresh us and purify the air we breathe. They help to bring the change of ...

them the water that renews life. We bring our minds together as one to send greetings and thanks to our Grandfathers, the Thunde ...

soothing partisan fervor. Imagine if our government meetings began with the Thanksgiving Address. What if our leaders first foun ...

We gather our minds to greet and thank the enlightened Teachers who have come to help throughout the ages. When we forget how to ...

document, a social contract, a way of being—all in one piece. But first and foremost, it is the credo for a culture of gratitude ...

boundaries in sharing what I have been told, I asked permission to write about it and how it has influenced my own thinking. Ove ...

individual to send such greetings and thanks in their own way. And now our minds are one. Every day, with these words, the peopl ...

PICKING SWEETGRASS Sweetgrass is harvested in midsummer, when the leaves are long and shiny. The blades are taken one by one and ...

Epiphany in the Beans It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness. I was hunting among the spiraling vines that e ...

They complain about garden chores, as kids are supposed to do, but once they start they get caught up in the softness of the dir ...

provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do. I looked around at the garden and could fe ...

simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking. That’s hard for scientists, so fully brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to ...

We are linked in a co-evolutionary circle. The sweeter the peach, the more frequently we disperse its seeds, nurture its young, ...

It’s that she phones me to chat while she weeds. We water and weed and harvest, visiting happily as we did when she was a girl d ...

withered seeds you find in the bottom of the seed packet, the one who never touched the earth. I wonder if much that ails our so ...

always, “Plant a garden.” It’s good for the health of the earth and it’s good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery fo ...

The Three Sisters It should be them who tell this story. Corn leaves rustle with a signature sound, a papery conversation with e ...

expanding and the rush of water filling succulent orange flesh. These are sounds, but not the story. Plants tell their stories n ...

For millennia, from Mexico to Montana, women have mounded up the earth and laid these three seeds in the ground, all in the same ...