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ShareIn my own teaching as a naturalist, as a botanist, as an ethno-botanist, the first thing people want to know is “What’s the name of that thing?,” which goes back to our grammar of animacy, right? Once they have a name for it, it’s almost as if I can see shades go down on their brain, like, OK, I’ve labeled it. Good. That’s all I really need to know. And so what I do with a lot of my students is to say, “I’m not going to tell you the name. Get down on your hands and knees. Smell it, touch it, watch who it interacts with: What’s its story? And if you fully engage with that being, you will come up with a name after having gotten to know it a little bit.” They’ve all commented, of course, that “I will never forget that plant because I entered into a relationship with it. I used my whole self to come to know it. I didn’t just go, ‘Yep, that’s Abies balsamea. That’s all I need.’” So I think reawakening and trusting the knowledge that we can gain just by looking and sensing and smelling especially—that’s such an underused way of experiencing the world.
An Interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer
-Janice Lee
(The Ari) was overflowing with Torah... He was expert in the conversation of trees, the conversations of birds, and speech of angels.
- Rabbi Chaim Vital- (student of the Ari (Isaac Luria- 1538-1572)
Know that this whole of being is one individual and nothing else… The individuals of the human species, and all the more so the other species, are things of no value at all in comparison with the whole that exists and endures.
Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed 1:72, 3:13
Not Eating Other Animals
§ Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: Meat was not permitted to Adam, the first human, for consumption, as it is written: “And the Source said: Behold, I have given you every herb that brings forth seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree that gives forth seed; for you it shall be for food, and for every animal of the earth, and for every fowl of the air, and for everything that creeps upon the earth, in which there is a living soul, every green herb for food. And it was so” (Genesis 1:29–30). It is derived the Source told the human: Eating vegetation is permitted to people and animals, but eating the animals of the earth is not permitted to you.
How to Eat Other Animals
For the life of all flesh—its blood is its life. Therefore I say to the Israelite people: You shall not partake of the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood. Anyone who partakes of it shall be cut off.
Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Lummi tribal member Harlan James prepares to release the remains of the first salmon into Hale Passage
The rabbis taught: Every person must say, “The whole world was created only for me.” (Sanh. 37a) But if the world was created for me, then I must constantly pray for the world and learn how to fix the world and fulfill its needs...
Rebbe Nachman Likutey Moharan I, 5:1
