Smart Reads: Braiding Sweetgrass
@ Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
Online
Opening Wednesday, November 29th, from 6PM - 7PM
Virtual gathering
Join in the Smart Museum of Art’s virtual book club!
The Smart Reads series continues in September with Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. We invite you to read along with us and engage in a thought-provoking conversation with host Dorian H. Nash.
FREE. To help build a community of participants, capacity is limited and advanced registration is required.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
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Tags: Chicago, Dorian H. Nash, Hyde Park, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Smart Museum, Smart Reads: Braiding Sweetgrass, The University of Chicago
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