Pirouette

Something rather lovely happened in "Religion and Ecology" today - our final class session around an assigned reading. The reading was the last section of Braiding Sweetgrass, where Kimmerer takes on the kinds of questions of despair and hope we wrestled with Monday, and resolves them by reminding us we're not in this alone. As one student was to quote: It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes, we have to put our hands in the Earth to make ourselves whole again - something the Earth wants too. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily. (327) 

Before we got to this, though, I had the class go up to the fourth floor to commune with the red maples we've been seeing out our classroom window - they're gloriously in leaf - and then descend to the courtyard. (I took this picture from our second-floor classroom, where I was guarding laptops.) They came back abuzz, having found some of the yellow maple samaras they'd seen clustered under pillowy green leaves above twirling down upon them. What are those helicoptery seeds called, one asked, another supplying the answer: whirligigs.

Time to turn to the text, pairs tasked with choosing an important passage and writing it on the whiteboard. They made excellent choices; going through them let us experience the poetry, the sweep and the detail of Kimmerer's text weaving. We ended the class listening to an excerpt of a new podcast where Kimmerer retells the story which frames Braiding Sweetgrass, where it is called "Skywoman Falling." (It's the April 26th podcast here, starting 3 minutes in.) 

The book starts (and ends) with the story of Skywoman in freefall, prevented from dying by the cooperation of many animals, and the question is never raised why or how she fell, or from where - though we know she has a bundle of seed plants in her hand, and later learn that she is pregnant. What came before doesn't matter: the world the animals and she create is our world. But now we learn about the world where she lived, about a great Tree of Life which seeded all plants but has been blown over by a storm, and a women who peers into the hole where the tree was and topples into it, grabbing onto a branch of the toppled tree in a vain effort to stop her fall.

Why tell this part of the story now - and why not before? We concluded it had something to do with the book's argument that our world is co-created and sustained by many peoples, including us. Maybe the more recent, fuller telling speaks more to the sense of ecological cataclysm - the tree of life uprooted by a storm?! - and the importance of holding on to what we can of our disrupted world. However she comes by it, and even if it didn't save her from falling, the branch she holds introduces plants to the emergent turtle island.

Our classmates outside the window were waiting for us to put two and two together, and finally it hit us. "Skywoman falling" - the story which begins the book and which Kimmerer starts to retell at the end, fighting off despair - starts like this: She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting on an autumn breeze (3) - a whirligig. What a gift of joy!