When I hear this I cry, every time
These are good tears, will you share them?
Sometimes you come across a message so simple, so perfect, so true that it makes you cry.
This message makes me cry good tears. The ones that blend sorrow and joy, recognition, regret and hope.
Listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer talk, reading her book, and passing on this message to others bring those tears, every time. And I want to pass it on, perhaps more than anything else.
Here is the context.
Professor Kimmerer is a citizen of the Potawatomi nation, she is a botanist who faced cultural obstacles entering science.
Science is strange, in itself it is elegant, it studies the beauty of the natural world, but currently it leaves little place for the acknowledgment of beauty.
Scientists are people, they are often drawn to dedicate their lives to study, drawn by love and appreciation for that slice of the world they work with.
Yet the culture of modern science demands an objectification of the world. For many scentists, that objectification is a wound.
Professor Kimmerer’s story speaks directly to this contradiction, to the price of objectification. It’s a wound that goes beyond science. No wonder I cry.
