Exploring the Mycoverse: Braiding Sweetgrass Becoming Naturalized to Place

Organized and hosted by Aaron Tupac
Sponsored by Arlington Garden

Braiding Sweetgrass has been on the NYT nonfiction bestseller's list for several years straight, and for good reason.Braiding Sweetgrass offers how we can understand the world through a plurality of knowledges: indigenous wisdom, western science, and the wisdom plants and fungi behold. This book taught the Mycoverse so much how to be in betterrelationship with the land, with our community, and ultimately, how to be in better relationship with fungi – a question that has driven the Exploring the Mycoverse since it's inception three years ago.

The impact of Braiding Sweetgrass on the Mycoverse community cannot be overstated. Since our collective reading in March 2022, it has remained a constant presence in our hearts and minds. It has significantly shaped our understanding of the natural world and ourselves, becoming a cornerstone in navigating the Mycoverse.

Fun fungi fact. There is not one, but TWO chapters dedicated to the teachings of fungi in Braiding Sweetgrass! One on Umbilicaria (a lichen who lives here in SoCal) and another on Shkitagen (aka the tinder fungus aka chaga).

Further discussions will take place through October to discuss the other sections of this book. We recommend reading this book linearly as it builds on itself, ending with a finale of essays that offer powerful guidance and inspiration.

Also! We're reading this in anticipation of Robin Wall Kimmerer's new book coming out this Fall,

Before our discussion, we invite you to:

• Read pages 205-302 of the section on Braiding Sweetgrass from the book Braiding Sweetgrass.
• A focus of discussion will be on the section Becoming Indigenous to Place, a concept she later revised in an interview with Björk to say she prefers to use the botany term naturalized instead of indigenous to more accurately describe what she means by this concept of becoming in better relationship with the land.
  

Future Braiding Sweetgrass Discussions:

– pages 303-384

Eventbrite links to discussions of Braiding Sweetgrass happening before:

More Braiding Sweetgrass from the publisher

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.

Join Exploring the Mycoverse's mycelial network:

• Sign up for the Sporinator Substack email newsletter.

• Follow Exploring the Mycoverse on Instagram.
• Sign up for Alrington Garden's Newsletter here.

Host or Publisher Arlington Garden in Pasadena