The first passage in the book Braiding Sweetgrass that stood out to me was within the first chapter. Kimmerer talked about how the scientific community remains baffled at how pecan trees appear to talk with one another. Pecan trees act as a collective unit and produce mast fruiting all at once. It is not just a few groves that yield a harvest, it is groves all over the state in an all or nothing display. While there a several theories that attempt to explain this phenomenon, researchers are unaware of what causes the mast fruiting. This passage stood out to me in particular since Kimmerer compared pecan trees to a family that looks out for one another. The trees communicate to one another to decide when the time was right to produce the pecans. If one tree fruits alone out of season, it will be easy for it to become picked off by hungry animals and the chances of the tree surviving become slim. The pecan …show more content…
For something, like a tree, to be a noun that something has to be dead. When you turn tree into a verb, to be a tree, it shows that the tree is alive. The Potawatomi language allows nature to be alive and does not reduce it to a simple thing. When you stop calling something an it and you give it life, it becomes difficult to display disrespectful behavior. One thing I would like to do in sessions, is introduce the idea that nature is alive and perhaps provide some brief education on how the Potawatomi language respects nature. By introducing the concept of nature being living, it may make it easier to create nature based metaphors in session. An example would be comparing feelings of anxiety to a living storm. The third passage focuses on how nature and humans display love for one another. Kimmerer states that humans show the earth love by doing something simply like caring for gardens. In return, the earth provides us with gifts, normally in the form of