Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes

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 means teaching your children to care for the world.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The world has a way of guiding your steps.