Beech Tree News Network

“If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow.  When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.”  Robin Wall Kimmerer made that statement in her book, BRAIDING SWEET GRASS.  Robin is a Native American Indian, a member of the Potawatomi Nation.  She is also a scientist, a botanist and a professor.  Those titles have not taken away the lessons she learned as a Native American Indian.  Her education and training have instead bolstered the lessons learned from her elders and the earth itself.  The knowledge that the earth is a gift to be shared.

As I grow older, I recognize more and more what a gift the natural world is.  I see the offering of the Walnut trees in my back yard.  I have gone from griping about stepping on walnuts to becoming grateful for nuts the squirrels and I can use as food.  I don’t want those trees cut down, as I once did, especially not the smaller one near the storm cellar that gave up several of its roots in order for us to have a storm cellar.  As a result, the tree became a bit disfigured, but it still struggled on and kept producing walnuts.

“It’s my garden.  I planted it.  I hoed it.  It belongs to me!”  That was my attitude for a long time.  I despised the weeds.  “How dare they invade my row of beans, of corn, of tomatoes!”  I chopped at them with a vengeance.  Weeds are still not welcome in my garden.  I still remove them.  Now, however, I tend to my garden.  I don’t see it as my due.  I see it as earth’s gift to me.  I learned this attitude from my husband, Garey..

If you live near us, you will see Garey in our garden daily.  He will have a hoe in his hands, steadily, carefully removing weeds, pulling dirt up around the plants, watering the dry earth.  He is tending to the plants that will offer the gifts that we will use, the gifts that he will offer to our neighbors.

He and our granddaughter raise sweet potatoes.   They pull the plants that have sprouted from the previous year’s crop.  They mud the roots.  They put them into the dirt that Garey has prepared especially for them.  They weed them.  Water them.  Fertilize them.  Dig them.  They sell them and give them away—food for our neighbors and friends.  

I plant sunflowers that produce seeds for birds.  I love watching Goldfinches stand on the backs of the giant flower heads, heads that have become too heavy to hold themselves upright.  The heads become platforms for the small birds, who pluck the seeds from the flowers—themselves having to lean over nearly upside down to retrieve them—then rest there to remove the husks and eat the kernels inside.  The sunflowers thrived last summer.  The birds ate their fill.  It was earth’s gift.  I got to be a small part.  I was grateful.  

The Native American Indians have a legacy of gratitude.  It was a way of life.  They taught it to their children.  Robin Kimmerer recounts the years when the Indians were removed from their lands, their children sent to white schools in the name of better education, each family given an allotment.  There was no longer common ground or resources.  Their society was forced to become a commodity society.  The earth, and everything it produced, was no longer seen as a gift to be appreciated.  

Everything was for sale.  

Robin sees a change on the horizon.  “But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths,” she writes.  “A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts.”

I understand what she is saying.  She is talking about attitude, an attitude of seeing the earth and what it provides as a gift, not as our due.  The earth was not pulled up by our own bootstraps, no matter how hard we work to prove otherwise.  

I am a part, not the whole.  

Merriam-Webster defines partner as, “a person with whom one shares an intimate relationship.”

That’s who I am, a partner with the earth.