Loved this

This is from The Poetry of Monsters facebook page. They share such lovely things! I absolutely love this and I hope that I am raising my kids to have an amazing perception of our world!

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This made my day darlin’!! :face_holding_back_tears: :innocent: :kissing_heart: Truly spoken and a very veryyyy beautiful post! Thank you for sharing dear. :people_hugging: :revolving_hearts:

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Beautiful poem, my dear! Thank you for sharing.

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I love this quote so much!

It reminds me of why I love the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I think you’d really enjoy that book. Here are a few of my favorite quotes!


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“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

“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.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“Never take the first plant you find, as it might be the last—and you want that first one to speak well of you to the others of her kind.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

“Wait a second,” he said as he wrapped his mind around this linguistic distinction, “doesn’t this mean that speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature? By denying everyone else the right to be persons? Wouldn’t things be different if nothing was an it?”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants


I can’t tell you how many times this book made me cry, both tears of joy and connection and tears of sadness. It is a book I will read over and over again, because every time I read it, I will learn something new.

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Megan…now you are making me cry. I swear my heart felt like bursting when I read these quotes from this book and actually I know this book it’s just that I never knew it was Ali Baba’s Treasure!! I am getting it for myself right after this reply here. I can’t tell how much I respect and absolutely love you more now! I don’t know how to explain my emotions…sometimes, even being an author I am so bad with words, I just wanna hug you this tiiiiiiiiight!
:people_hugging: :hugs: :sparkling_heart: I hope you honestly feel how much I admire your soul love. Blessed Be my heart! :revolving_hearts:

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Aww, don’t cry! :people_hugging: :heart: I hope that when you get the book you get as much joy and connection and hope as I did, even if it did make me cry sometimes!

One of my favorite chapters in that book is called Learning the Grammar of Animacy. It really made me think about how the language we use affects the way we view and treat the world and her inhabitants. Even now my spellchecker (Grammarly) wants me to change “her” to “its”…

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And I just won’t because that’s not how I view the world. There’s a lot of correlation in the book between the Christianization of Native Americans, the almost-destruction of their languages and cultures, and how we can learn from them to better care for the world. Here’s a paragraph that I really enjoyed, and the paragraphs after this are just as profound.

English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being? Where is our yawe? My friend Michael Nelson, an ethicist who thinks a great deal about moral inclusion, told me about a woman he knows, a field biologist whose work is among other-than-humans. Most of her companions are not two-legged, and so her language has shifted to accommodate her relationships. She kneels along the trail to inspect a set of moose tracks, saying, “Someone’s already been this way this morning.” “Someone is in my hat,” she says, shaking out a deerfly. Someone, not something.

– Braiding Sweetgrass; Learning the Grammar of Animacy

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This paragraph is just beautiful…I have got the book and I am going to start reading it now! :face_holding_back_tears: Thank you because if you hadn’t posted that reply, I wouldn’t have got this treasure, love. :two_hearts: :revolving_hearts:

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I hope you enjoy it! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: And you’re very welcome!

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@MeganB next week is my sprite f break, so I’ll read it then!! I’m happy this post brought so many smiles!

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That sounds like a wonderful way to spend Spring Break :heart: I hope you enjoy it!

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Huh! :thinking: I speak to plants and animals because they are living souls! Do you mean this isn’t normal? :scream_cat:

Please excuse my attempt at humor :upside_down_face: I absolutely love this quote @MeganB and I’m adding the book to my wish list!

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It’s funny though because it’s true! I can tell you that speaking (and listening!) to the non-human beings around me has been difficult because it’s something that I “grew out of”. And I mean that in an “I was told that’s silly/not true/etc. kind of way”. Reconnecting with that lost part of myself has been very healing for me!

I hope you enjoy the book when you get it! It’s so worth it! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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On the talking to plants, I sent a picture of my little one talking to our tomatoe plant and she laughed and told me that he was young so he could do it because nobody would think him crazy.
I talked to my African Violets the other day as I checked on the 2 that I am attempting to save as I moved one to it’s own little Critical Care area. That one, might be the first one I couldn’t save

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Thank you for posting this @AileyGrey

Enjoy spring break.

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Wonderful book <3

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