Wisdom from Braiding Sweetgrass: How Do We Talk About the Living and Nonliving?
An invitation to reflect on worldview and language. Your Friday Nudge: listen to the natural world and to God.
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As you read these words, I am on a canoe camping trip with my family. We are completely off-grid, and I can guarantee that when you read this, we have dirt under our nails and sand in our shoes. Clothes are hanging on the line, and the food barrel, which hangs from a pulley system in the trees to be away from bears and raccoons, is becoming lighter every day. We’ve been on and in the water, and are sleeping better, on the ground in a tent, than we usually do in the city in our air-conditioned rooms and comfortable beds. The forest soothes our jangled nervous systems in a way that nothing else does. For all of our failed efforts to get our kids off their screens when we’re at home, they absolutely love our time off the grid and on the water.
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I needed this time away. What about you? Have you taken time out of your usual routines and schedules to rest and renew? To allow the knot that is your nervous system to become loosened and maybe untangled completely?
In our time of climate crisis, it can be difficult to ‘get away from it all,’ especially when we, as people of faith, are committed to witnessing the pain of the world and responding. Yet we all need time to rest, time to recharge, time to be in the natural world with the rest of the Earth community. We all need a chance to get out into nature to pray and listen to what God is saying to us.
What are you doing this summer to get some time in the natural world? You don’t have to go camping or be off-grid (my friend Lynne is an Airbnb fan all the way!), but I encourage you to get outside to spend some extended time in nature, pay attention to the more-than-human community around you, and pray. Listen to the natural world, and listen to God. This is your Friday Nudge.
Do you like to get off-grid, too? Tell me about your camping experiences.
Wisdom from Braiding Sweetgrass: How Do We Talk About the Living and Nonliving?
This week’s essay is a reflection that I wrote before this newsletter migrated to Substack. Since so many of you weren’t around then, I’m offering it to you this week. Here I consider what I was learning from the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Have you read the book? It is one that I keep nearby and turn to again and again. I’ve brought it with me on this camping trip so that I can learn from her wisdom about the flora that surrounds me in the bush.
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