What Not Reading a Great Book Taught Me About Giving and Receiving
I don’t have enough fingers to mark the number of times folks have told me to read Braiding Sweetgrass. The recommendations always sounded similar. It’s about indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge and plants, they’d tell me. That sounded like a compelling premise to me, but also risked being a dry one. I was in graduate school when the book came out in 2013, and I wasn’t looking for any more textbooks. Still, I’d notice it in bookstores. From time to time, I’d even feel the gentle flex of its many pages in my hands, allow my thumb to cleave the book in two, and start reading. It didn’t take a full page before my eyes would glaze. It seemed to be overrated. After all, I shrugged, not every book is for every person.
Still, the recommendations kept coming, and, after a time, my toes weren’t even enough to count them. I decided to try the audiobook. Listening is my favorite way to ingesting nonfiction, so it seemed like a reasonable thing to try. So I googled to it and pressed play on the audio sample and busied myself with resetting the house for the day, prepared to be carried away by something that warranted the years of enthusiasm I had heard.
If my ears could have glazed over, they would have. While Robin Wall Kimmerer waxed poetic about wild strawberries, I wandered into the kitchen to scrounge for…
