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“Plants know how to make food from light and water, and then they give it away. I like to imagine that when Skywoman scattered her handful of seeds across Turtle Island, she was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us teachers. The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen.‖ –Robin Wall Kimmerer
FOREWORD May, 2019
I am the product of frozen lakes and birthday cakes, bare feet on grass and stones, long poems and broken bones. I was raised by the rain on the porch‘s wooden stairs and the books that felt like dares. I was made by blanket forts and cardboard castles, ponytails and braided tassels. I am the creation of rubber band guns with my siblings at war, and my horse under saddle by the old barn door. But, more than all of these, I am the product of trees.
Their rough bark has left brush-burns and lacerations on my skin every summer, their crackling leaves have tangled in my hair each fall. Winter decorated the white pine outside my window with snow that took on an ethereal glow when the moon was bright and brought one special tree into our living room to be adorned with an ever-growing ornament collection. Spring became, for my family, the season of the maple. As the snow began to melt, we would trek through the woods, dragging a jet-sled full of silver buckets, blue pipeline, and tools. Our hill became an orchestra of sorts, what with the tap tap tap of sap dripping into the buckets and the rush of it streaming from the pipes into the tank squatting behind the shack, accompanied by the birds‘ vocal anticipation for warmer weather.
Trees have always been both an escape from and a tether to the world for me. First, they made me a dreamer. From the rising maple-scented steam that made me a mystical being (most often an elf) to the low-growing branches that transformed me into a gymnast (of sorts),
imagination abounded among the leaves. Then they anchored me, marking my home and
drawing me and my writing back to the idea of place and reciprocity. Now they are my teachers.
I grew up in rural northwestern Pennsylvania, calling the Allegheny National Forest my neighbor and the Clarion River my childhood friend. My backyard is partially made up of State Game Lands, and the fact that my pacifist Christian college didn‘t consider the first day of hunting season a holiday was a culture shock for me.
My parents are Environmental Education and Resource Specialists at Pennsylvania State Parks, and they are both exceptionally good at their jobs. My mother has a passion for
salamanders and bats, and there was always some new creature in my home to rehabilitate or raise, from butterflies to great blue herons to baby snapping turtles and beyond.
I came to know my mother in what felt like a different dimension one evening in
early/mid-spring two years ago, back when I first started the ―red shoes‖ part of this paper. I‘ve always understood her to be independent, somewhat stubborn, and deceptively opinionated (she‘d left the ―obey‖ part out of her wedding vows—I now consider this to be a
misunderstanding of biblical submission, but that‘s a discussion for a different time), but when the lid of that old blue tub came away in her hands with a quick double shik shik, I realized that my mother was a feminist. And not just a feminist, but a thoroughly educated, well-read, deeply ecological feminist. In that moment I felt that the woman I‘d ―known‖ for twenty years was a
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stranger—she‘d just taken the lid off of my boxed understanding of her, and it was evaporating with the musty scent of old literature.
That musty smell turned out to be the perfume of mutual friends I hadn‘t known my mother and I had. But there they were: LeGuin, Griffin, Ehlrich—all waiting to teach me about the woman who had carried and raised me.
In the time since then, I have learned that my mother‘s dream was to start her own nature journal; she wanted to write. She was drawn to the natural world, seeing in it something deeply and inherently meaningful.
What she did not want was children. My dad managed to convince her that one child would be manageable—one child wouldn‘t hold her back. You should see the photo that was taken an hour after she found out she was carrying twins. I wonder if that was the moment she realized that her love of nature might not be expressed through her writing.
She named my brother and me—her creations—after the four basic elements of nature: fire, water, earth, and air (Ember Brooke and Sawyer Orion). Three years later, after my sister was also cut from her womb, my mother named her Sylvia Autumn, the forest maiden. My mother‘s creations have always been touched with deeply spiritual ecology.
I am convinced that this naming set us all on the course of environmental studies, each in our own unique ways. Robin Wall Kimmerer came to the conclusion that ―being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world.‖1 My mother (and my father) instilled in each of us an enchantment with and respect for the natural world. My brother builds and manages, implementing sustainable solutions in business. My sister, at the age of 19, is trained and certified to build and install solar panels and wants to one day run her own sustainable bed and breakfast. I read and write, intrigued by the idea of place and the twin oppressions of women and Earth. I think ecofeminism is in my blood, and in the trees of my childhood—those maples from which Jo could not seem to separate my words.2
This particular composite is intended to delve into feminism steeped in ecology—to examine the ways in which women can learn to flourish together by imitating the innate wisdom of plants. My first step in this process is to introduce you to my friend Jo, and to present you with the ―anxiety of authorship‖ with which the female creator is faced—to demonstrate the division in the female community brought about by societal expectations and self-imposed ideas of competency, role, and success. Then we will spend some time looking closely at Yahweh‘s3 Creation in Genesis and with Robin Wall Kimmerer, reveling in the intricacies of mutuality in plant flourishing and discerning the parallels between women and plants, learning from them as natural reflections of our femininity. We‘ll round out our foray (or metaforay, as Kimmerer would call it) with a (hopefully) semi-conclusive statement on what it might look like to live well in the world, as women and nature flourishing together within our communities and ecosystems.
This piece is not only a reflection of my particular brand of ecofeminism; it is also a comprehensive collection of my college career. ―I Am the Product Of…‖ was the first paper I wrote freshman year. ―Red Shoes‖ was the crowning achievement of my sophomore year.
Braiding Sweetgrass became my constant companion during my semester in Oregon in the fall of
1
Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 95.
2 More on this later. 3
Yahweh refers to the Trinitarian Christian God; I prefer to use Their name so as to more clearly identify Them as a real and active character in the story of plants and people.
3
my junior year, in the midst of my research on the concept of the spirituality of belonging to a place. This composite is the culmination of my undergraduate writing experience—four years of thought on the world and my place in it as a woman, writer, and person of faith.
That being said, this is an exploration and compilation. It is not a definitive feminist theory. Not yet, anyway…
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In Reciprocity: An Ecofeminist Composite
―I stared into my teacup, wondering what it was like to have what Minnie had. To have somebody love you like Jim loved her. To have two tiny new lives in your care.
I wondered if all those things were the best things to have or if it was better to have words and stories. Miss Wilcox had books but no family. Minnie had a family now, but those babies would keep her from reading for a good long time. Some people, like my aunt Josie and
Alvah Dunning the hermit, had neither love nor books. Nobody I knew had both.‖ –Jennifer
Donnelly, A Northern Light
―The real red shoes, the feet punished for dancing. You could dance, or you could have the love of a good man. But you were afraid to dance, because you had this unnatural fear that if
you danced they’d cut your feet off so you wouldn’t be able to dance… Finally you overcame your fear and danced, and they cut your feet off. The good man went away too, because you
wanted to dance.‖ –Margaret Atwood
It was the red shoes that decided me, ultimately. It seems to me that we—as women—are faced with a choice between two pairs of red shoes. In one corner of the room (we‘ll say the left for the sake of order), there are Dorothy‘s ruby slippers4
, sitting in an elegant glass case, glittering and inviting, despite their history in different hands—on different feet—and their challenging journey down the Yellow Brick Road. Inviting perhaps because they are the iconic symbol of fulfilled dreams and returning home. The ruby slippers encase feet, protecting them and returning the wearer safely back to her family at the end of the day.
On the other side is what seems like a very different pair of red shoes: the bleeding feet of Margaret Atwood‘s dancing girls, grotesque but intriguing, poised on shattered glass. Intriguing perhaps because they are not hiding—they are bare and bleeding, ugly but freely exposed. Poised because they cannot stand still for too long or their wounds will begin to scab over and heal, making it even more painful to begin to dance again—to convince their throbbing feet that movement is worth the abandonment of comfort. Poised because stillness might allow them to catch up and cut off your feet altogether.
It would make more sense, perhaps, if the ruby slippers (tough and heeled and protective as they are) were resting on the shattered glass and the bare feet (vulnerable as they are) were framed by the smooth glass that could not hurt them. But it seems that all those who would choose the ruby slippers do not want to walk on the shattered glass and, even if they did, it would make no difference to them since they wouldn‘t feel anything through the soles of the shoes; and those that would choose the bare feet do not want the simple, smooth showcase of safety. They do not want their openness to be only skin-deep and set into a neat glass box to be admired. The ones that choose to go barefoot want to feel the edges pressing into and past their skin—they want to see what color pours out of their calloused toes when they dance ―because the
transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.‖5
They want the pain to promise the depth of their experience. This is a manifestation of Gilbert and Gubar‘s ―‗anxiety of authorship‘—a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‗precursor‘ the act of writing will
4
The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum
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5 isolate or destroy her.‖6
To bleed and hurt is to know that one is creating—to know that there is
something coming out of their desire to create. This is why they cannot rest. Should their feet
heal, they would have to overcome the ―anxiety of authorship‖ and begin again. To step out of the box—out of the ruby slippers—and scar her feet, disfiguring them in such a way that does not allow the slippers to be put back on, is the risk with which a woman creator is faced.
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Jo7 grew up in Dorothy‘s slippers, in love with Oz, and found as she grew that she could create her own Oz—she discovered that she could write her way into any world she wanted to experience. She is, in every sense, a writer. But she also desperately wants to be a mother. She wants to dance, but does not want to let go of her beloved ruby shoes.
Tillie Olson (quoting Sylvia Plath) writes, ―A woman has to sacrifice all claims to femininity and family to be a writer.‖ This is unfortunate news for a woman like Jo, who so values both her femininity and her creativity.
Perhaps this is why Jo, as she writes her own feminist composite, can only compare me to men—a raiding Native American in a stolen wedding veil with blood dripping off the ax
clutched in his fist and a Templar Knight holding tight to his sword as everything but his hands, and thus his precious livelihood, is pressed into baptismal waters.8 She wrote of me:
―My very first knowledge of her was the maple trees and her words9, how they existed simultaneously together, as if splitting them apart would be splitting her spirit. She held that part of her spirit above, as if she were baptized with her pen out of the water like the knights Templar who used to hold their swords above their heads as their bodies were submerged. It seemed to say, you can have me, my body, my spirit, but not my words. She held on to the demons and the idols in order to keep her authorship. The thought of giving up her writing even for freedom from these crawling demons, even for a husband or child, even for God, was hard.‖10
She believes that I would choose being a writer over being a wife and mother—that I would take up my weapons and bloody my hands like a man to justify the blood on my feet.
It occurs to me that we who are dancing on broken glass treasure the pain inherent to our abilities so much that we cling our red shoes, holding them aloft, practically idolizing them. We take on that Templar Knight‘s unwillingness to allow all of ourselves to be submerged—taking on a resemblance to men—as vindication for our choice. But our glass came from some other showcase being smashed to bits by our refusal to conform. By staying on our shards, we are still holding ourselves captive to what was once a box. We instead conform to the masculine image of strength while keeping ourselves confined by the remnants of past feminine expectations.
6 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pg. 451. 7
A friend and co-creator
8
Newman, pg. 8.
9 “We first shared our writing from our Freshman Seminar course where we both wrote essays modeled after C.S
Lewis’s ‘I Am the Product Of…,’” (Newman, pg. 8) the result of which you read in the Foreword.
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My feet are the hands of the Templar Knight11, holding onto the bloody sword/dance/pen that marks me and my fight, never dipping into the baptismal water. Jesus is quoted saying, ―If I do not wash you, you have no share with me,‖ and ―The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but is completely clean.‖12
How ironic for me, then, that Jesus claims the feet the only thing that needs to be washed, even when Simon Peter asks for his head and hands to be cleaned as well.
I know that clinging to the undoubtable pain in my feet means missing out on a place with other women and Yahweh. But I don‘t want Dorothy‘s ruby slippers, either. I don‘t want red shoes at all, if I‘m being honest. I want my words to be baptized—sanctified—with me. If I cling to my writing, my sword, my bleeding feet, I will be stuck in that room, a room of my own13, talented but unsatisfied, separated from my trees and birds and sky, separated from other women (women like Jo), separated from my Jesus.
I think Jesus knew about my feet, and my reluctance to submerge them.
Audre Lorde said that ―…it is not the difference which immobilizes us, but silence.‖ This silence is what creates the binary of the red shoes. Women pick a pair and hold fast to it, talking only to those who have made the same choice. But perhaps Jo and I begin with
―sympathy of thought,‖14
spanning the gap in communion with one another, telling the truths about our red shoes and realizing that they are not so exclusive, or even really worth clinging to.
We are called not simply to submission, but to submersion. Not giving up our desires, talents, or the unique elements of individual womanhood, but allowing them to be sanctified with our bodies, made full, steeped in spirituality. It is upon this baptism that we come into
communion and truth.
Jennifer Donnelly, through the narrative voice of Mattie Gokey, declared, ―I have read so many books, and not one of them tells the truth about babies. Dickens doesn‘t… Bronte
doesn‘t… There‘s no blood, no sweat, no pain, no fear, no heat, no stink. Writers are damned liars. Every single one of them.‖
Writers are not truthful about the female experience of motherhood because they hold it at a distance—they stay on their shards, completely denying half of womanhood. Until we let go of our white-knuckled grip on authorship or motherhood, we will only be able to hold one at a time—we will exist in the binary. To move forward, beyond the binary, is to walk with bare feet, open hands, and lifted eyes.
Thousands of years after the banishment of the first humans from the Garden, Yahweh, in the form of Jesus, offered Their15 own body up, in place of plants, as sustenance for mankind in a gift that we now celebrate as communion. ―Eat me. Drink me. Love me,‖16 he said as he handed his disciples bread and wine—his body and blood, broken and poured out for the potential of
11
Note: reciprocity > the reciprocal; feminism cannot just be the inverse of the patriarchy—flipping something on its head (bloodying feet instead of hands) doesn’t lead to healing; we’re still bleeding. Jesus knew this—he said to
wash the feet—to find a different way through the world that wasn’t just an inverted mirror of a harmful societal
structure.
12 John 13: 9 13
Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own
14
H.D. Notes on Thought and Vision
15 When capitalized like this, “They” refers to Yahweh, as They are an un-gendered Trinitarian Being. I use “he”
when referring directly to Jesus.
16
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flourishing. In receiving that gift, however often one does, we are reminded of the responsibility that comes with it: to live well in the world—to seek the betterment of one another.
Jo once memorized Catherine Givings‘ monologue from In The Next Room for an acting class, which, at the time, was simply uncomfortable for me to hear her rehearse, but now fits into the puzzle of this composite and holds some seemingly unrelated pieces together. This is a paraphrase of it:
―…I want more children and my husband desperately wants more children but I am afraid of another birth, aren‘t you? When I gave birth I remember so clearly, the moment her head was coming out of my body, I thought: Why would any rational creature do this twice, knowing what I know now? And then she came out and clambered right onto my breast and tried to eat me, she was so hungry, so hungry it terrified me - her hunger… And then I thought - Isn‘t it strange, isn‘t it strange about Jesus? That is to say, about Jesus being a man? For it is women who are eaten - who turn their bodies into food- I gave up my blood - there was so much blood - and I gave up my body - but I couldn‘t feed her, I couldn‘t turn my body into food, and she was so hungry. I suppose that makes me an inferior kind of woman and a very inferior kind of Jesus.‖
Women‘s bodies and blood, broken and poured out for the potential of the future, turned into food and sustenance for the next generation of mankind.17 When Jo asked me to listen to her practice that monologue, I didn‘t enjoy it. I didn‘t want to hear about the ―ugly‖ realities of childbirth, since motherhood was not, at the time, something I‘d even considered desiring. I‘d rather she have remained silent about the whole affair. Yet it was because of her openness that I came to value her and her experiences and desires as I have. Jo told me the truth, not from her own experience, but by valuing and sharing the story of another woman.
And it was worth my discomfort. This woman‘s experienced helped me to understand the unity between the two pairs of red shoes. For mothers, those ―homemakers‖ in Dorothy‘s ruby slippers, to bleed and hurt is to know that one is creating—to know that there is something coming out of their desire to create. This is why they feel they cannot leave their smooth showcase. To step away is to leave one‘s living, breathing, needing creation behind. It is to let their bodies heal and question why ―any rational creature [would] do this twice.‖
As I wrote this original piece two years ago, Jo commented that ―the ruby slippers are only obtained through blood, the death of their previous owner. Atwood‘s shoes are based on a fairytale, which even though in reality is rather gruesome, fairytales still have this image of sanitized childhood. I would encourage you to not fully box each symbol as purely one or the other.‖
So why then must we choose between them? Must we choose?
I can‘t imagine Jo entirely retiring the pen for the sake of a baby bottle. No, I imagine that she‘ll have a baby on one hip and a book propped against the other. Someday, I expect to be reading a piece of Jo‘s non-fiction (disguised as fiction with some changes to names and
settings) that tells the truth about childbirth and motherhood. And I expect she‘ll capture both the pain and the beauty of it as explicitly as any dancer ever could. But it will be something that no dancer has ever expressed, because they have never washed the blood from their feet and
17
In Cassandra, Florence Nightingale actually made the claim that, were Christ to come again, it would be in the body of a woman, largely for this reason.
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allowed themselves to bridge the binary, or simply to leave it behind. She will not solely be a writer; she will be a mother and wife as well.
Her eyes are on Jesus, and she submerges herself and her work daily in grace; she is not clinging to an identity as a mother or writer. I think it is this upward shift in focus that allows her to hold all other pieces of life together—because she is not the one holding them. With this freedom, she breaks the binary silence and speaks into my life, pulling my gaze up, beyond my feet, out the door, into the grass and under the water.
―We can sit in our safe corners, mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid,‖ Lorde says. So we begin with lifting the silence that sits between our glass boxes, and, as we
communicate, we can begin to commune, sharing our stories, leaving our corners to pursue a united womanhood—a mutual flourishing—free of the fear and confinement this binary room seems to offer us.
I wonder, if I could step away from the shards—if I could leave my sword on shore—and Jo could leave her ruby slippers behind, what kind of women would we be? What would it be like to walk barefoot in the grass, scarred or blistered feet washed and healing, broken bodies baptized?
This healing comes in the form of mutual flourishing—bridging the gap, not just between red shoes, but between a room laden in expectation and the natural world, open and inviting, ready and waiting to teach those who would press their bare feet into grass and soil and wonder at it, seeking openly the lessons it has to offer.
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―Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection ―species loneliness‖—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated,
more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.‖ –Robin Wall Kimmerer
In the Potawatomi tradition, the story is told of Skywoman falling ―like a maple seed‖ from Skyworld, clutching a handful of seeds, landing on Turtle‘s back, upon which she spread mud to make Earth with the help of the animals. She then scattered the seeds across the Earth, giving rise to plants.18 Plants, in this story, are divine, brought from the realm above, the woman‘s one gift to her new home.
In Christian tradition, the story is told of Yahweh creating all things in six days. As the story goes, as soon as there was land, Yahweh filled it with plants of all kinds, all able to
reproduce and thrive, even before night and day are separated. Then came the birds and the fish, flying and swimming, leaving the land still solely to plants.
When Yahweh did fill the land with creatures to live among the plants, They then made man and gave them ―dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.‖19
Notice that nowhere in that dominion are plants mentioned. On top of that, Adam was given the privilege of naming the creatures, but Yahweh named the plants, designating specific trees as off-limits to Their human creations.
18
Kimmerer, pg. 1-3.
19
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It is in the next verse that Yahweh says, ―Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.‖20
Plants were—and still are—designed to be provision, not possession.
We make an anthropocentric assumption that plants were a gift, given over to human control. On this count we are wrong. ―And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food,‖ says Yahweh, immediately after providing those same plants for mankind.21 Yahweh provided plants as sustenance for every living thing. And it is the last thing They do before They rest. It is with that shared provision that Creation is complete.
Genesis 2 elaborates, saying that man was created from the land itself and placed in Yahweh‘s Garden ―to work it and keep it.‖22
Mankind was assigned the task of stewardship, not control or possession. Humans are intimately tied to Earth—born from the dust and called to steward the land, actively working it (getting soil under our fingernails, if you will)—and preserving its good provision through that intimate work.
Unfortunately, the first humans were tempted to take from a plant that has not been given to them, to reap more than they had harvested, and they are cast out of the Garden. The serpent first tempted the woman, Eve, to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—one of the plants Yahweh had kept for Themselves. I believe that the serpent targeted Eve first because he knew the severity of consequence that would result from separating Woman from Nature. And Woman took what she had not been given, breaking the bond of trust, provision, and reciprocity she had built with the land as its tender and keeper. It was in this turning of Woman, setting her against Nature, convincing her that she should take more from Nature than had been given to her, that set our current culture of isolation and domination into motion. When Woman interacted with Nature in a way that was outside of the provision of a gift and the reciprocity of work, she set them at odds with one another, allowing herself to become isolated, and Man stepped in to dominate both of them.
It is my thought that if Woman and Nature were to enter back into provisional and reciprocal relationship, both would flourish, bringing not an uprising or tipping of the scales, but a good and mutually beneficial balance to the natural world and humanity‘s role in it.
With gifts comes responsibility. To respect and to reciprocate. Kimmerer talks about this gift economy with the example of hand-knit socks, saying that you are far more likely to take care of a pair of socks made by a loved one with you in mind as the recipient than you are to care for a pair of mass-produced socks that you bought at a store.23 In a market economy, reciprocity ends when money and commodity change hands. In a gift economy, reciprocity creates a lasting relationship. In the case of handmade socks, for instance, you as the recipient are much more likely to put thought and personal care into the next gift you give to that loved one. In this way, we come to know and value our gift-giver as one who knows and values us, and as the subject of 20 Genesis 1:29 21 Genesis 1:30 22 Genesis 2:15 23 Kimmerer, pg. 26.
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our care and appreciation. Familiarity with a gift-giver instills a sense of responsibility towards them. We leave behind wastefulness, forgetfulness, and selfishness in the wake of being provided for and remembered selflessly.
In our current society, we tend to be fairly far-removed from the gift of plants. We have objectified them, put them in cages of plastic and price tags. We have turned gifted provision into a commodity, ending any potential relationship with Earth when we pay for its provision. Kimmerer once made the comment that she would feel outraged if she were to see the wild strawberries, for which she grew up thanking the Earth they grew in, being sold in a convenience store.24 She built a relationship with Earth when she picked its wild fruits and gave back to it by only taking what she needed and reciprocating its care by working the land.
We have done a similar thing with women, particularly women‘s bodies. Yahweh gave Eve to Adam as a partner, as a good and provisional gift, to help him work and keep the land. With Eve‘s separation from Creation, her role shifted away from the land, but in parallel to it, under the foot of man. Through objectification, women‘s bodies have become commodities, rather than gifts, and reciprocity ends when Man takes from Woman without trusting,
reciprocating, and providing for her.
Yet how are they to learn how to trust, reciprocate, and provide? Who will teach them when those who were provided to help them are under their feet, keeping themselves trapped there by assuming their only choice is between a pair of red shoes? The purpose of women is not to be the workers of men, but to be the workers of Earth, living out an example of reciprocity and provision for men, living with and in appreciation for the gifts they have been given, submitting to the teachings of Yahweh‘s first gift. When women listen to and imitate the mutuality and reciprocity of plants, so might men listen to and imitate the mutuality and reciprocity of women.
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―The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together… All flourishing is mutual.‖ -Robin Wall Kimmerer
I first encountered Robin Wall Kimmerer‘s book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous
Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, during my semester living in a cabin
in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument just above Ashland, Oregon. There were 15 students total, plus four professors and their families living on an old mill property. We students relinquished our phones and access to the internet from Monday morning through Friday
afternoon. None of us had cars, and the only place to go (other than on a hike) was The Greensprings Inn, which sits three miles uphill (and I mean completely uphill, not even a flat stretch anywhere) from campus. We studied one subject at a time, all 15 of us reading the same book at the same time (generally over 100 pages a night). If we wanted to go somewhere, we had to walk or bike. We went to town—a 45-minute, gut-turning ride down the side of the mountain—once a week to eat dinner and get groceries.
Shortly after the temperature turned towards cold in mid-October, driving all of us inside to the comforts of our woodstoves, we were introduced to Braiding Sweetgrass. If you ask any
24
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of us 15 students which book of the many we read has stuck with us most, I am confident that every single one of us would say Braiding Sweetgrass with hardly a thought.25 This book became the center of nearly every conversation in every cabin, over every meal. Kimmerer approaches the world with a sense of awe and familiarity, as if it were a friend or mother to her, and her writing changed the way we interacted with each other and others outside of our
community. It changed the way we saw and interacted with the world in all of its intricacies. It is from this book, specifically its teachings of plants, that I pull most of my inspiration for this piece of ecofeminism, the piece in which we learn how plants teach us to live well in the world.
Chris Cuomo, Professor of Philosophy and Women‘s Studies at the University of Georgia, stated that ―a defining feature of ecological feminist thought is its commitment to the
flourishing, of well-being, of individuals, species, and communities.‖26 But where do we learn what flourishing truly looks like? What example do we have in our world of a system living well? As I concluded in the last section, we need teachers.
Kimmerer reveals to us a multitude of these teachers in the plants she has loved and studied. As far as flourishing goes, she offers us Pecan trees.
Pecans are a species that undergo mast fruiting, which means that the trees do not produce predictably or regularly, but every single tree in a grove produces at the same time. No one tree flourishes individually; they either produce together or not at all. Kimmerer explains it this way:
―Some studies of mast fruiting have suggested that the mechanism for synchrony comes not through the air, but underground. The trees in a forest are often interconnected by subterranean networks of mycorrhizae, fungal strands that inhabit tree roots. The mycorrhizal symbiosis enables the fungi to forage for mineral nutrients in the soil and deliver them to the tree in exchange for carbohydrates. The mycorrhizae may form fungal bridges between individual trees, so that all the trees in a forest are connected. These fungal networks appear to redistribute the wealth of carbohydrates from tree to tree. A kind of Robin Hood, they take from the rich and give to the poor so that all the trees arrive at the same carbon surplus at the same time. They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual.‖27
If women are to thrive, we must imitate the teachers with which Yahweh gifted us and work together. In a society where women have been taught to compete against one another (for mates, for jobs, for respect, etc.—all significant pieces of feminism that I will not explore in this
particular composite), mutual flourishing can seem counter-cultural, perhaps even a bit Marxist. I am not calling for some communist movement, but I do believe that if we women desire equality of some sort with men, we must first seek mutuality together amongst ourselves, communicating and reallocating resources for the betterment of Woman.
25 The only possible competition would be Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov. 26
Cuomo, pg. 62.
27
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Flourishing together is not simply an end-goal. It is the process—the way of life made up of recognition, reflection, and communication which allows for the continuation of flourishing. If we are to flourish, competition for domination cannot continue. We must be looking to help one another come into better living, holding each other accountable for male-influenced behavior and working for the betterment of each individual and community. Not against males, not in
opposition to the world, and not in competition with each other. We must begin to ―weave a web of reciprocity‖ for the sakes of one another, and for the world.
―My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide,‖ said Kimmerer, explaining her motivation for pursuing a degree in biology, ―But science is [men are] rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer. Why two flowers [women] are beautiful together would violate the division necessary for objectivity.‖28 The question that drove her was that of Asters and Goldenrod, the purple and yellow flowers that drew her eye and rocked her back on her heels in awe.29 Purple and yellow are opposites—a reciprocal pair on the color wheel. ―These two are complementary colors, as different in nature as could be,‖ Kimmerer explains. ―In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid; just a touch of one will bring out the other.‖30
One enhances the innate significance in the other, increasing the rate of pollination for both species—together, they flourish exponentially better than they do apart.
I feel the energetic reciprocity of Asters and Goldenrod specifically as it manifests between women that choose to create via motherhood and the women that choose to create via writing—between Jo and me. Why two women should come to speak, understand, and value one another might violate the division necessary to suppress subjective feminine experience—to oppress women by keeping them divided, objectified in their individuality. Jo and I, in leaving behind the cage of red shoes, walk towards that objectifying division, ready to bridge the gap between us, redistributing the wealth of our subjective individual experiences in communion, thriving together in a way we never could apart. For women to flourish together, as subjects, opening the door in an exodus from the room of red shoes, offers the potential for a cultural awakening to the subjectivity and value of experience, both female and male, individual and collective, human and natural.
There is in ecofeminist theory the concept of the twin oppressions of women and nature. The thought behind this is, as discussed previously, both Woman and Nature are treated as oppressed objects, dominated by Man, and that the oppression of one directly affects the oppression of the other—that their experiences are linked.31
Kimmerer demonstrates this linked experience both explicitly and implicitly. She and Earth give and ask of one another in turn, and she has chronicled this kinship with land in her writing. ―The relationship between women and the earth is a reciprocal relationship,‖ and is at the very core of ecofeminism.32 In Braiding Sweetgrass, this becomes doubly evident, as
28 Kimmerer, pg. 42. 29 Ibid., 46. 30 Ibid., 45.
31 Take, for example, that Earth “groans like a woman in labor,” awaiting the return and redemption of Yahweh—
the Creator of Earth herself—through Christ.
32
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Kimmerer discusses her experience with Nature in such a way that interchanging the words ―women‖ and ―nature‖ in her literature often results in fairly eye-opening statements.
This first came to my attention when I read the statement that ―Plants were reduced to objects; they were not subjects‖ in Braiding Sweetgrass after researching the objectification of women.33 I immediately began applying the ―plant‖-to-―woman‖ theory in other quotes I had pulled from Kimmerer‘s work. Here is an example of the result of this exercise when applied to her chapter ―A Council of Pecans:‖
―In the old times, our elders say, the trees talked to each other. They‘d stand in their own council and craft a plan. But scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locking in isolation without communications. The possibility of conversation was summarily dismissed. Science pretends to be purely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer. And yet the conclusion was drawn that plants cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that animals use to speak. The potentials for plants were seen purely through the lens of animal capacity. Until quite recently no one seriously explored the possibility that plants might ‗speak‘ to one another.‖34
Watch what happens when we replace ―plants‖ and ‖trees‖ with ―women,‖ and put in ―men‖ or ‖male‖ in place of ―scientists,‖ ―science,‖ and ―animals‖:
―In the old times, our elders say, the [women] talked to each other. They‘d stand in their own council and craft a plan. But [men] decided long ago that [women] were deaf and mute, locking in isolation without communications. The possibility of conversation was summarily dismissed. [Men pretend] to be purely rational, completely neutral, a system of knowledge-making in which the observation is independent of the observer. And yet the conclusion was drawn that [women] cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that [men] use to speak. The potentials for [women were] seen purely through the lens of [male] capacity. Until quite recently no one seriously explored the possibility that [women] might ‗speak‘ to one another.‖
These parallels occur throughout this book and beyond, into almost any literature on plants, women, and gender and environmental ethics.35 While I do not intend to delve into the
complexities of the twin oppressions theory in this particular composite (although I would like to), it is important to keep this concept in mind as we move into the lessons we can learn from plants and the resultant potential for mutual flourishing.
In order to approach flourishing, we must first attempt to crack open the issue of objectification—and thus, isolation—of both Woman and Nature. On this front, Kimmerer discusses the native Potawatomi language, specifically what she calls ―the grammar of animacy.‖ Effectively, this means that many English nouns used to identify objects are actually verbs in
33 Kimmerer, pg. 42. 34
Ibid., 19.
35
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Potawatomi, describing a thing as living in the very structure of the way in which it is
referenced. For example, when we would say ―tree,‖ they would say, ―to be a tree.‖ The tree is in the midst of the act of being. It is a living subject, alive in the very act of existing, not an object waiting to be acted upon. Kimmerer explains it this way:
―Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say ―What is it?‖ And we answer Dopwen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must say, ―Who is that being?‖ And reply Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is…Yawe— the animate to be. I am, you are, s/he is. To speak of those possessed with life and spirit we must say yawe. By what linguistic confluence do Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the New World both fall from the mouths of the reverent? Isn‘t this just what it means, to be, to have the breath of life within, to be the offspring of creation? The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.‖36
The Potawatomi language itself is set up to subjectify Creation. To refer to any living thing in Kimmerer‘s native tongue is to refer to the gift-giver Themselves. In this way, there is an automatic building block for a reciprocal relationship in every mention of a living thing. What would our culture—our world, even—look like if we were to refer to every living thing, every gift, as an animate subject, capable of experiencing and teaching, inherently valuable in its act of being?
This is the strength inherent in a reciprocal relationship between Woman and Nature; it is life-giving, subjectifying, sanctifying. ―I do think there is a feminine way of being in
relationship to nature,‖ Lorraine Anderson states in her collection Sisters of the Earth, ―This way is caring rather than controlling; it seeks harmony rather than mastery; it is characterized by humility rather than arrogance, by appreciation rather than acquisitiveness. It‘s available to both men and women, but it hasn‘t been exercised much in the history of Western civilization.‖37
If we are to come into this ―feminine‖ way of being with the world, a few fundamental mindsets must shift. Acquisitiveness must become inquisitiveness. Raping must be replaced with reaping. Domination must give way to devotion; population to propagation, harnessing to harvesting, atrocity to reciprocity, ownership to relationship. We must replace the grammar of currency with that of animacy.
We must walk barefoot through the world of Plants, listening and learning from them how to be in the world but not of it, how to flourish together, pushing up through the cracks in the sidewalk called Man, how to live well—with our hands open, our eyes up, and our feet washed and rooted in Nature, entering into reciprocity with Her once again.
S.D.G. 36 Kimmerer, pg. 56. 37 Anderson, pg. xvii.
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