Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Intelligence of Plants (On Being with Krista Tippett)
Few books have been more eagerly passed from hand to hand with delight in these last years than Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Krista Tippett interviewed her in 2015, and it quickly became a much-loved interview as her voice was just rising in common life. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She’s written, “Science polishes the gift of seeing, Indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss — a bryologist — she describes mosses as the “coral reefs of the forest.” She opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate. [Text Source: On Being with Krista Tippett]
“In Indigenous ways of knowing, we say that we know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing—of emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge. And that’s really what I mean by listening, by saying that traditional knowledge engages us in listening.”
