| Title | : | Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Vol. 1Planet |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1736862502 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781736862506 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 180 |
| Publication | : | Published September 15, 2021 |
We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our fellow humans--and we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe, this community of life is our kin--and, for many cultures around the world, being human is based upon this extended sense of kinship.
Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. The five Kinship volumes--Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice--offer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity, highlighting the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70 contributors--including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackie--invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility.
With every breath, every sip of water, every meal, we are reminded that our lives are inseparable from the life of the world--and the cosmos--in ways both material and spiritual. "Planet," Volume 1 of the Kinship series, focuses on our Earthen home and the cosmos within which our "pale blue dot" of a planet nestles. National poet laureate Joy Harjo opens up the volume asking us to "Remember the sky you were born under." The essayists and poets that follow--such as geologist Marcia Bjornerud who takes readers on a Deep Time journey, geophilosopher David Abram who imagines the Earth's breathing through animal migrations, and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser who contemplates the relations between mystery and science--offer perspectives from around the world and from various cultures about what it means to be an Earthling, and all that we share in common with our planetary kin. "Remember," Harjo implores, "all is in motion, is growing, is you."
Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Vol. 1Planet Reviews
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The Kinship series is an anthology of work by authors from exceedingly diverse backgrounds - poet, geologist, botanist, taro farmer to name a few - who share a commonality in the uncommon way they see the world - as a gift.
Before this book was released the wonderful
Point Reyes Books hosted a discussion about the series with editors/authors Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gain Van Horn, and John Hausdoerffer. It was a fantastic sort of extended preface to the series, with each guest expounding on what kinship means to them. The recording of that conversation can be viewed
here.
Toward the end of the discussion Robin Wall Kimmerer makes a statement that I scribbled down the moment she said it, and I've revisited the video many times just to hear her say it in her beautiful way: Knowing the World is a gift is our birthright... "Then there is a conspiracy to make us forget."
And that right there is what Vol. 1 - Planet is all about - re-opening our eyes to the fact that this planet is indeed a gift.
For those of us that grew up living a consumerist lifestyle with a commodifying would view, it's no easy task. Robin again has some words of wisdom: When we pay attention and realize we're surrounded by all of these amazing beings all bearing gifts... Attention leads to gift-thinking, to thinking about the World as not something we own or posses or deserve or work for, but as a gift... That gift-understanding is what leads to gratitude, and then leads us to reciprocity, which leads us to deeply felt and deeply lived kinning.
She makes it sound so simple, and perhaps, it is. Indeed, it starts with only paying attention, something I think all of us can afford to do.
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-So, how do we live in Kinship with our planet? Again, the first step (though, we come to understand that Kinship is more of a circle than a straight line) is simply to pay attention.
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Joy Harjo's poem "Remember" is a fantastic piece to open the book. "Remember the sky you were born under"... "Remember the Earth whose skin you are".
-We talk about space as if it's some distant place that most of us will never visit. Seems logical right? But what if we zoom out from our comfy chairs, from our houses and neighborhoods. Zoom out from our states, from our continents. Zoom out until Earth is a luminous blue-green ball hanging in the dark expanse of space (As LeVar Burton said, "From up here, we all have the same address."). It becomes obvious that space is not an unattainable destination, it is our home.
-In their writing, each "-ist' (biologist, geologist, etc) is so adept at flowing from science-based ways of knowing to heart-based ways of knowing and back, that I hardly noticed the shift while reading. These world-views are generally seen as opposites warring for superiority, unable to coexist based on mutual exclusivity, but the authors show us, whether intending to or not, that this is not always the case. They communicate effortlessly their ability to see the world through a holistic lens, with both science and spirit playing an equally important role.
( A brief personal detour: My partner and I had a pretty amazing conversation while hiking through the snow on our way to a Western Red-cedar grove, thanks, in part, to this book. The two of us sometimes have difficulty communicating ideas to one another: I am more of an analytical thinker, where he is more of an emotional one. (Certainly each of us is capable of both, but I tend to default to the logical, where he defaults to the emotional). I was relating something I had read from this book (I can't remember specifically what it was, maybe something about how it takes Monarch butterflies 4 generations to get from their winter grounds to their summer grounds, and how we humans liken this ability to man-made objects because we can't comprehend it any other way) and he was actually quite engaged and was able to follow up with observations of his own. He even went on to point out some underlying connections between the seemingly disparate activities of spending time in the woods and attempting a trick on your skateboard. If I had just rattled off some factoids and said, "Neat, huh?" I don't think he would have been as receptive, but by intentionally dismissing the need to "logic" and instead just reveling in the wonder of the World, we were able to connect and converse in a meaningful way.)
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J. Drew Lanham's "A Prayer For Wildness" is the second to last entry in this volume. Equal parts disappointment and hope, his essay is a deeply moving call to action. His book "The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature" has been on my radar for a while. This sample of his writing has bumped it up to the top of my "to read" list.
-In Robin Wall Kimmerer's "A Family Reunion Near the End of the World" all the inhabitants of the Earth have come together for a potluck, even the humans who by choice have long been absent. Much scolding of the humans takes pace, and rightfully so, but Nanabozho ends with a sincere plea, "We're asking you to come home. We need you to be good relatives again. Come down off your pyramid and into the circle."
Can we humans remove ourselves from the place of superiority we've been conditioned to believe is our birthright? Can we move toward reconciliation with the land and our more-than-human kin? I think we can, and the path has already been laid out for us: Awareness, understanding, gratitude, reciprocity, kinship.
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For those interested, Point Reyes is hosting a book club type discussion via Zoom for this book December 8th, 2021, with additional discussions for each volume once a month for the next 4 months. Click
here for more details. -
This is an absolutely wonderful book. I enjoyed all of the contributions about kinship and how we relate to those around us. The poem by Craig Santos Perez about the telescope they're trying to build in Hawaii was beautiful. The contributions by both Ginny Battson and Robin Wall Kimmerer were beautiful "In striving for the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Earth was forgotten. In that upward gaze, people lost sight of our earthly relatives and called them natural resources, instead" -Robin Wall Kimmerer. This book takes kinship beyond those who share your DNA and extend it to all life on the planet and even beyond that. 10/10 would recommend reading.
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What would you say is the mark of a good anthology: loving every essay in it, or loving only some? Now that I’m old I find myself grateful for editors who take risks, who include voices I might not otherwise hear.
This is an exceptional collection. All the entries made me think, or change the way I think. Some made me work. It’s been two weeks since I finished reading, and I’m still mulling over parts of it. I love the recurring themes of language: “kinning” as an active verb, use of proper pronouns for nonhuman life forms, how our words shape (and limit) the ways we see the world around us. -
This stories ranged from emotionally evocative, undeniably five star (Ku’u ‘Aina Aloha, My Beloved Land: Interspecies Kinship in Hawai’i and A Family Reunion near the End of the World) to indecipherable and pompous two stars (Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking Between the Body and the Breathing Earth). Overall I’m excited to read more in the next four books!
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I truly appreciate this book for the perspective that it is teaching me. I enjoy the challenge of shifting my colonized mind to a new way of thinking.
