audrey’s Reviews > Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants > Status Update

Now, when the red leaves are all down and the geese are gone, I go looking for witch hazel. It never lets me down, always carrying the memory of that Christmas and how their friendship was medicine for each other. I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around

the grammar of animacy

But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives. the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don't have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be

Imagine walking through a richly inhabited world of Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world. We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species.