Feb's Book Pile: Plants, Wild Food, & Grief

It’s book week again! Yippee for books. Here are 4 I read this month. 

Hello, Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly (2017)
First up with a child’s book - grade 3-6. 

Oooff. This one lobs some big topics in an adventurous story of friendship in a neighborhood complete with a bully and a gerbil. The narrators flip back and forth between these young middle schoolers. All of them sort of outcasts in their own right yet all so very relatable. 

Virgil Salinas - 11 yo Filipino American— is shy, introverted kid who wanted to befriend a girl - Valencia, who is deaf -from his class but never got up the nerve to and here it is summer time. So he enlists the help of Kaori Tanaka - Japanese American girl who has a knack for spiritual guidance and advice giving. In the process of the story, Valencia ends up also enlisting Kaori’s help. The bully - Chet- enters the story and does some bully like things (I don’t want to give it away, you should go read it) that ends with Virgil being stranded at the bottom of an old well in the middle of the forest that separates his house and Kaori’s. 

Along the way, the author skillfully weaves in Filipino folklore and culture with Virgil and his grandmother’s stories. By the end of the book, new friendships are cultivated. Everyone returns home safely albeit changed.

Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food by Gina Rae La Cerva (2020)

“It is estimated that we will lose 30 to 50 percent of other life forms with whom we share the planet by mid-century. Dozens go extinct every day. So many edible species and varietals have vanished to standardization, uniformity, and predicable tastes.” (Pp. xiv-xv)

The human search for the last of the wild foods is another capitalistic attempt to hoard, exploit, and destroy what’s left. We’ve already be relegated to rice, wheat, and corn that makes up 60% of our diet versus what used to be a nutritionally and taste-bud diverse delight. 

So you can clearly see why - OMG - I loved this book. What a delightful, surprising blend of memoir, food history, travel writing, and a dash of a love story. 

She talks about urban foraging and how non-indigenous folks and chefs come into areas without knowing how to harvest to promote regrowth and taking only 10%. I’m not sure she offers that number but I seem to recall it from Braiding Sweetgrass - ohhh, another most delightful, informative moving book.

Historically, she reviewed how white men made themselves the distinguished scholars of wild and exotic plants yet this was on the backs of indigenous women and African slaves who knew what the plants were and how to use them. 

Her visit to Poland to see the oldest forest strikes me personally as my father’s people hail from there and I spent a summer in my 20s visiting the ghosts of my ancestors. Well the forest is old, but not so old or wild given how much man has deemed he knows best for how trees should grow in rows and monocultures. Only recently is forestry starting to understand the error of men’s thinking they can outsmart Nature. Makes me think about the book, The Hidden Life of Trees, which I mention below as well but that one is written by a German forester.

She travels around the world in search of the last wild foods. There’s the history of turtle soup. Current state of bushmeat trade. The over farms and taken bird’s nest for soup. She travels to Maine, Scandinavia, Poland, Borneo, and, the Democratic Republic of Congo. I would re-read this book and that says a lot because I have so many other books begging to be read. And did I mention there is a love story without the Hollywood ending. This brief review is not even doing it any justice.

Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants by Monica Gagliano (2018)

I feel her message-my mind was first blown open after reading a few years ago about the Findhorn Gardens in Scotland. Summary of Findhorn is that 40+ years ago, founders cultivated an area not considered viable given its far northeastern sand dunes, windy location. But with the help of ‘nature spirits and devas’ (think fairies specific to each type of plant) who communicated with the founders/gardeners in how to grow and thrive there. That book was gifted to me by a previous long hair hippie, veteran turned acupuncturist where I lived previously. We would have the most fascinating convos. 

Then Findhorn opened me to the books, The Secret Life of Plants and The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. So as you can see, this path of plant communication has been intriguing for a few years. I even had on a previous dating profile that if I had a superpower it would be talking to plants. It’s how I weeded out the weirdos, haha. 

Okay, back to Thus Spoke the Plant, as a social scientist, I found the science parts dense and hard to get through. But I completely understand why they were there because the author has a hard message to convince mainstream readers/scientists on. She details her experiments which are cool. I lean more towards the first person narrative stories though, but that’s me. 

What did resonate with me personally is how she struggled in academia being ridiculed to ignored by colleagues because her ideas were outside of mainstream human limited understandings of the natural world. It really highlighted for me the danger of thinking our brains can comprehend the world.

Another take away though was a mind opening around our human disconnection to plants. She says, “one of the many faces of colonialism: the capitalist agro-scientific psychosis whereby plants are seen as commodities to be taken without sanction and the wealth of traditional knowledge regarding them is used without permission.” (p. 25). 

Her experiments and personal interactions/knowing point to: plants communicate with their environment, plants communicate with each other, and plants communicate with humans (but most humans are too limited to listen). Cool. As a gardener and wanna be plant communicator, I can dig all those. I know our human brains have been so narrowly limited with modernization and disconnecting curriculum that there’s so much we don’t understand. 

Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and The Sacred Work of Grief by Frances Weller (2015)

A book on grief might seem to veer off course of the previous books this month but there’s some beautiful threads of shared messages. 

“Sorrow helps us remember something long intuited by indigenous people across the planet: our lives are intricately comingled with one another, with animals, plants, watersheds, and soil.” (p. xvi)

As a grief therapist, the author situates it within our split as humans from the natural world and how our suffering mirrors the suffering of Earth herself. 

He addresses how we’ve pathologized grief in our society making it hidden and primitive rather than accepted and expressed openly. Not attending to grief is just more spiritual bypassing and toxic positivity shit. Part of why it’s so damn hard for us (white) Westerners to grieve is that grief is held in community and we suck at connection and real meaningful relationships beyond family. Because of this, we can’t heal nor do we have resilience in face of crisis and stress. 

Oh, my heart, he is speaking right to it with this lovely, insightful, and written for our times book. And I’ll admit, I put in on the list to review this month but I haven’t finished it only because I’m stopping so often to underline, write margin comments, and reflect with OHHHH. Ultimately I know he recommends and shares ideas for grieving rituals which we all have lost in this modern age the role of ritual in sharing together as a community. Being held in community heals our hearts. I can’t wait to continue reading and incorporating this into my work and own heart.

What are you reading this month?