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Robin Wall Kimmerer
218 quotes
“There is no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace of stories.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the Sun is the source of flow in the economy of nature, what is the "Sun" of a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it is love.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Regenerative economies that reciprocate the gift are the only path forward. To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants. They invite us all into the circle to give our human gifts in return for all we are given. How will we answer?”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“gift economies arise from the abundance of gifts from the Earth, which are owned by no one and therefore shared. Sharing engenders relationships of goodwill and bonds that ensure you will be invited to the feast when your neighbor is fortunate. Security is ensured by nurturing the bonds of reciprocity. You can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother. Both have the result of keeping hunger at bay but with very different consequences for the people and for the land which provided that sustenance.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The land is a sharp reflection of the worldview of the peoples who care for it, or don't.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are all related, woven together in webs of reciprocal connection, where what happens to one happens to all.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nuts are like the pan fish of the forest, full of protein and especially fat—"poor man's meat.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our people were canoe people. Until they made us walk. Until our lakeshore lodges were signed away for shanties and dust. Our people were a circle, until we were dispersed. Our people shared a language with which to thank the day, until they made us forget. But we didn’t forget. Not quite.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tahawus is the Algonquin name for Mount Marcy, the highest peak in the Adirondacks. It’s called Mount Marcy to commemorate a governor who never set foot on those wild slopes. Tahawus, "the Cloud Splitter," is its true name, invoking its essential nature.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History moves in a circle.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A people's story moves along like a canoe caught in the current, being carried closer and closer to where we had begun.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world has a way of guiding your steps.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To name and describe you must first see, and science polishes the gift of seeing.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. 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.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The maples carried the people through, provided food just when they needed it most.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage; for those, we need each other.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All moms have treasured ways to spend the few precious hours they have to themselves, curling up with a book or sewing, but I mostly went to the water, the birds and the wind and the quiet were what I needed.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“is a safe place, a nursery for fish and insects, a shelter from predators, a safety net for the small beings of the pond. Hydrodictyon— Latin for "the water net." What a curious thing. A fishnet catches fish, a bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sphere of a wise woman is beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the earth.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source