Dear ,

I've promised you a few times I was going to share a writer named Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book Braiding Sweetgrass:
​​​​​​​Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants with you, and today's the day! Because we are now fully in September, the month of asters and goldenrod, which Kimmerer writes of beautifully.

courtesy of Nicholas A. Tonelli 

Okay, you well might wonder. But why—and what is—metaphoray?

Well, Kimmerer coined this word in Braiding Sweetgrass:

When botanists go walking the forests and fields looking

for plants, we say we are going on a foray. When writers

do the same, we should call it metaphoray, and the land

is rich in both. We need them both; scientist and poet

Jeffrey Burton Russell writes that "as the sign of a deeper

truth, metaphor was close to sacrament. Because the

vastness and the richness of reality cannot be expressed

by the overt sense of a statement alone."

Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous

ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we

understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind,

body, emotion, and spirit. I came to understand quite

sharply when I began my training as a scientist that

science privileges only one, possibly two, of those ways

of knowing: mind and body. As a young person wanting to

know everything about plants, I did not question this. But

it is a whole human being who finds the beautiful path.

Given my love of metaphor, my love of WordPlay, and fact that I pass yellow cards out to all my students that describe and enjoin them to include all "four elements of human being" in their writing, how could I not love this passage of Robin Wall Kimmerer's, and the word metaphoray itself?

Discovering that all four elements of human being belong in our writing sprang from my constant quest to make my own writing stronger, and to help my students do the same. It was a real aha moment for me. I often have students go through writing they love and distinguish what element(s) are conveyed in each word/phrase/sentence. There's often an overlap, and I had another aha moment when I realized that metaphor ALWAYS included more than one element of human being: by its nature, a metaphor shows a likeness between two disparate yet similar things, most often an abstraction, like, say, hope, and something of the physical world, as in, to quote Emily Dickinson,

For more on metaphoray, see this week's prompt. And for more of Kimmerer's Goldenrod and Asters from Braiding Sweetgrass, see this week's featured writing, which I found posted by Blue Mountain Center. I think you'll love it! (I also wanted you to have the benefit of the two paragraphs quoted above that are in included in the "Asters and Goldenrod" chapter of the book but not a part of Blue Mountain Center's lovely excerpt.

Love and light,

Maureen

Upcoming WordPlay

 Featured Writer

​​​

 Robin Wall Kimmerer

​​​​​​​Featured Writing

Goldenrod and Asters: My Life with Plants

An excerpt from

Braiding Sweetgrass:
Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

​​​​​​​

​​​​​​​by

Robin Wall Kimmerer

​​​​​​​

I like to imagine that they were the first flowers I saw, over my mother’s shoulder, as the pink blanket slipped away from my face and their colors flooded my consciousness. I’ve heard that early experience can attune the brain to certain stimuli, so that they are processed with greater speed and certainty, so that they can be used again and again, so that we remember. Love at first sight. Through cloudy newborn eyes their radiance formed the first botanical synapses in my wide- awake brain, which until then had encountered only the blurry gentleness of pink faces. I’m guessing all eyes were on me, a little round baby all swaddled in bunting, but mine were on goldenrod and asters. I was born to these flowers and they came back for my birthday every year, weaving me into our mutual celebration.

People flock to our hills for the fiery suite of October but they often miss the sublime prelude of September fields. As if harvest time were not enough—peaches, grapes, sweet corn, squash— the fields are also embroidered with drifts of golden yellow and pools of deepest purple, a masterpiece.

I wanted to make a good first impression. There were hardly any women at the forestry school in those days and certainly none who looked like me. For the freshman intake interview, I wore my new red plaid shirt, a hallmark of foresters, so I’d fit right in. My new faculty adviser peered at me over his glasses and said, “So, Miss Wall, why do you want to major in botany?” His pencil was poised over the registrar’s form, twitching, while portraits of Linneaus and Asa Gray looked on from his walls.

How could I answer, how could I tell him that I was born a botanist, that I had shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves under my bed, that plants colored my dreams, that the plants had chosen me?

So I told him the truth. I was proud of my well- planned answer, its freshman sophistication apparent to anyone, revealing what I hoped was a deep knowledge of plants. I told him that I chose botany because I wanted to learn about why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. I’m sure I was smiling then, in my new red plaid shirt.

But he was not. He laid down his pencil as if there was no need to record what I had said. “Miss Wall,” he said, fixing me with a disappointed smile, “I must tell you that that is not science. Beauty is not the sort of thing with which botanists concern themselves.” I tried again: I’d like to learn why plants make medicines, why willow bends for baskets and why strawberries are sweeter in the shade. “Also not science,” he said and he ought to know, sitting in his laboratory, a learned professor of botany. “And if you want to study beauty, you should go to art school.”

I had no rejoinder; I had made a mistake. I did not have the words for resistance, only embarrassment at my error. But he promised to put me right. “I’ll enroll you in General Botany so you can learn what it is.” And so it began.

I didn’t think about it at the time, the echo of my grandfather’s first day at the Carlisle Indian school, when he was ordered to leave everything—language, culture, family— behind. But they did not cut my hair.

If a fountain could jet bouquets of chrome yellow in dazzling arches of chrysanthemum fireworks, that would be Canada goldenrod. Each three-foot stem is a geyser of tiny gold daisies, ladylike in miniature, exuberant en masse. Where the soil is damp enough, they stand side by side with their perfect counterpart, New England asters. Not the pale domesticates of the perennial border, the weak sauce of lavender or sky blue, but full-on royal purple that would make a violet shrink. The daisy-like fringe of purple petals surrounds a disc as bright as the sun at high noon, a golden- orange pool, just a tantalizing shade darker than the surrounding goldenrod. Alone, each is a botanical superlative. Together, the visual effect is stunning. Purple and gold, the heraldic colors of the king and queen of the meadow, a regal procession in complementary colors. I just wanted to know why.

Why do they stand beside each other when they could grow alone? There are plenty of pinks and whites and blues dotting the fields, so is it only happenstance that the magnificence of purple and gold end up side by side? Einstein himself said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” Why is the world so beautiful? It seemed like a good question to me. . . .

Read the rest of this essay here: http://bmccommons.org/goldenrod-and-asters-my-life-with-plants/