Robin Wall Kimmerer

"In the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity."

"The exchange relationships we choose determine whether we share them as a common gift or sell them as a private commodity. A great deal rests on that choice. For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were the rule. But some invented a different story, a social construct in which everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one. One of these stories sustains the living systems on which we depend. One of these stories opens the way to living in gratitude and amazement at the richness and generosity of the world. One of these stories asks us to bestow our own gifts in kind, to celebrate our kinship with the world. We can choose. If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become."

"Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft."

"A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze."

"Our people were canoe people. Until they made us walk. Until our lakeshore lodges were signed away for shanties and dust. Our people were a circle, until we were dispersed. Our people shared a language with which to thank the day, until they made us forget. But we didn’t forget. Not quite."

"Tahawus is the Algonquin name for Mount Marcy, the highest peak in the Adirondacks. It’s called Mount Marcy to commemorate a governor who never set foot on those wild slopes. Tahawus, "the Cloud Splitter," is its true name, invoking its essential nature."

"When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland."

"History moves in a circle."

"The land knows you, even when you are lost."

"A people's story moves along like a canoe caught in the current, being carried closer and closer to where we had begun."

"Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land."

"That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred."

"What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home."

"The world has a way of guiding your steps."

"To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language."

"Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own."

"To name and describe you must first see, and science polishes the gift of seeing."

"You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed."

"Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us."

"The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world."

"A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other."

"We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be."

"The maples carried the people through, provided food just when they needed it most."

"There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage; for those, we need each other."

"I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around."

"I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss."

"All moms have treasured ways to spend the few precious hours they have to themselves, curling up with a book or sewing, but I mostly went to the water, the birds and the wind and the quiet were what I needed."

"Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge."

"We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want."

"' is a safe place, a nursery for fish and insects, a shelter from predators, a safety net for the small beings of the pond. Hydrodictyon— Latin for "the water net." What a curious thing. A fishnet catches fish, a bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it."

"Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in."

"Being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world."

"The sphere of a wise woman is beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the earth."

"Being a good mother doesn't end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all of life's beings can flourish."

"It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder. We get good training along the way. We learn to say "Have a great time, sweetie" while we are longing to pull them back to safety. And against all the evolutionary imperatives of protecting our gene pool, we give them car keys. And freedom. It's our job. And I wanted to be a good mother."

"The presence of our reciprocal love is hard to say good-bye to."

"We spill over into the world and the world spills over into us. The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves."

"We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back."

"The sunrise ceremony is our way of sending gratitude into the world, to recognize all that we are given and to offer our choicest thanks in return. Many Native peoples across the world, despite myriad cultural differences, have this in common—we are rooted in cultures of gratitude."

"While expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."

"Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That's good medicine for land and people alike."

"Leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom."

"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."

"Duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin. Eagles were given the gift of far sight, so it is their duty to watch over us. Rain fulfills its duty as it falls, because it was given the gift of sustaining life. What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking "What is our responsibility?" is the same as asking "What is our gift?" It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts."

"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."

"Appreciation begets abundance."

"How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons."

"I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That's what good mothers do."

"This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone."

"The ultimate reciprocity, loving and being loved in return."