What the Land Teaches
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
We prowled among the trees, breathing in the scent of balsam. The soft mattress of needles, wintergreen, trailing arbutus, bunchberry—all my familiars from home carpeted the forest floor. They made me realize suddenly how displaced I felt to be teaching in someone else’s home forest, when I was so far from my own.
I lay down on a carpet of moss and held class from a spider’s perspective. High on these summits live the world’s last populations of the endangered spruce-fir moss spider. I didn’t expect pre-med students to give a damn, but I had to speak up for the spiders. They have persisted here since the glaciers picked up and left, living their tiny lives spinning webs among mossy rocks.
Global warming is the major threat to this habitat and these animals. As the climate warms, this island of boreal forest will melt away and with it the last of many lives, never to return. Already insects and disease from warmer elevations are claiming them. When you live on the summit, there’s no place else to go when the hot air rises. They will balloon away on strands of spider silk, but there will be no refuge.
I ran my hand over a mossy rock, thinking of the unraveling of ecosystems and the hand that pulls the loosened thread. “We have no right to take their homes from them,” I thought. Maybe I spoke out loud or had a zealot’s look in my eye, because one student suddenly asked, “Is this like your religion or something?”
“I ran my hand over a mossy rock, thinking of the unraveling of ecosystems and the hand that pulls the loosened thread.”
Ever since a student had challenged my teaching of evolution, I’d learned to tread lightly on these matters. I felt all of their eyes upon me, good Christians, every one. So I hemmed and hawed about loving the woods, started to explain about Indigenous environmental philosophies and kinship with the other members of Creation, but they looked at me so quizzically that I stopped and then hastened off to point out a nearby clump of sporulating ferns. At that time in my life, in that setting, I felt that I couldn’t explain the ecology of spirit, a sense that went so far from Christianity and science alike that I was sure they wouldn’t understand. And besides, we were there for Science. I should have just answered yes.
After many miles and many lectures, at last it was Sunday afternoon. Job done, mountains climbed, data collected. My pre-med students were dirty and tired, their notebooks filled with more than a hundred and fifty nonhuman species and the mechanisms behind their distributions. I’d have a good report for the dean.
We hiked back to the vans in the late golden light, through a stand filled with the pendant blooms of mountain silverbell that seemed to glow from within like pearly lanterns. The students were awfully quiet, tired, I imagined. With mission accomplished, I was happy just to watch the slant of hazy light over the mountains for which the park is justly famous. A Hermit Thrush sang out from the shadows and a little breeze brought a shower of white petals around us as we walked in that amazing place. I was suddenly so sad. In that moment, I knew that I had failed. I had failed to teach the kind of science that I had longed for as a young student seeking the secret of Asters and Goldenrod, a science deeper than data.
I had given them so much information, all the patterns and processes laid on so thick as to obscure the most important truth. I missed my chance, leading them down every path save the one that matters most. How will people ever care for the fate of moss spiders if we don’t teach students to recognize and respond to the world as gift? I’d told them all about how it works and nothing of what it meant. We may as well have stayed home and read about the Smokies. In effect, against all my prejudices, I’d worn a white lab coat into the wilderness. Betrayal is a heavy load and I plodded along, suddenly weary.
“As an enthusiastic young PhD, colonized by the arrogance of science, I had been fooling myself that I was the only teacher. The land is the real teacher.”
I turned to see the students coming down the trail behind me, a petal-strewn path in gauzy light. One person, I don’t know who, began to sing, ever so quietly, those familiar first notes. The ones that open your throat, irresistibly calling you to sing. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. One by one they joined in, singing in the long shadows and a drift of white petals settling on our shoulders. That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found.
I was humbled. Their singing said everything that my well-intentioned lectures did not. On and on they went, adding harmonies as they walked. They understood harmony in a way that I did not. I heard in their raised voices the same outpouring of love and gratitude for the Creation that Skywoman first sang on the back of Turtle Island. In their caress of that old hymn I came to know that it wasn’t naming the source of wonder that mattered, it was wonder itself. Despite my manic efforts and my checklist of scientific names, I knew now that they hadn’t missed it all. Was blind, but now I see. And they did. And so did I. If I forget every genus and species I ever knew, I’ll never forget that moment. The worst teacher in the world or the best teacher in the world—neither can be heard over the voices of Silverbells and Hermit Thrushes. The rush of waterfalls and the silence of mosses have the last word.
“The worst teacher in the world or the best teacher in the world—neither can be heard over the voices of Silverbells and Hermit Thrushes.”
As an enthusiastic young PhD, colonized by the arrogance of science, I had been fooling myself that I was the only teacher. The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart. My job was just to lead them into the presence and ready them to hear. On that smoky afternoon, the mountains taught the students and the students taught the teacher.
As I drove home that night, the students slept or studied by dimming flashlight. That Sunday afternoon changed forever my way of teaching. A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear.
This is an excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013). Copyright: 2013 by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kimmerer is the author of the bestselling Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, which has earned her wide acclaim.