​The Grammar of Animacy

Braiding Sweetgrass and Process Philosophy
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​Sweetgrass, in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, is both a living plant and a powerful teacher of relationship. It symbolizes a way of knowing the world rooted in reciprocity, gratitude, and kinship with all beings. When harvested and braided with care, sweetgrass becomes an embodied metaphor for weaving together Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and personal experience into a single practice of respect and shared flourishing. Its presence reminds us that the Earth offers gifts freely and that our role is not to dominate those gifts but to honor them, give back, and participate in the ongoing creation of life.

“We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Notes After Listening to
Robin Wall Kimmerer

​In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us into a new kind of language: a grammar of animacy. This new grammar does not replace scientific language or, for that matter, our own native languages, but it does build upon indigenous ways of thinking and speaking. A grammar of animacy avoids treating the natural world as an “it” and instead addresses others, including plants, as “you.” Such language makes sense because plants are alive as subjects in their own right. They are our kin and, in many ways, our elders. When we speak with this grammar, we acknowledge that they are not merely resources or scenery. They are companions and teachers. We can learn from them. We are family.
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Those who hear Kimmerer’s call through the lens of Whitehead recognize the wisdom in her words. We, too, understand that they are kin to us and we to them. We believe that experience, feeling, and value are everywhere in the universe, not just in human life. Energy and feeling are two sides of the same coin. Wherever there is energy, there is feeling. We call this pan-experientialism. We trust that we can live—and should live—in reciprocity with our fellow creatures and with one another. Many of us seek the same kind of world Kimmerer seeks: a world in which people recognize their kinship with the community of life and live with respect and care. We call it ecological civilization.

In the spirit of that shared longing, I find myself eager to listen more closely—to hear how Kimmerer gives voice to this kinship in her own conversations. What follows are reflections inspired by her interview with Margaret Roach on A Way to Garden. Click here for the interview and a transcript of it. I myself am a gardener - I speak to us.

The Problem of “It”

Most gardeners refer to our plants as “its.” We respect them, nurture them, learn from them. Most of us sense a distinct aliveness in their gardens, yet that aliveness gets muffled by the language of objects. When gardeners learn the names of the plants we tend, much as they would learn the names of neighbors, a relationship begins to form. Plants become partners in an ongoing dialogue. English, though, makes this relationship strangely difficult. We are left with a pronoun—“it”—that strips away subjectivity

Ki and Kin: A New Grammar for Relationship

Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, offers a simple but transformative suggestion. She proposes speaking of an individual living being as ki and of many living beings as kin. In an interview with Margaret Roach, she explains:
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​​“The proposal for another pronoun is to use the pronoun ‘ki,’ pronounced ‘key.’ It comes from a word that means an Earth-being in our language, bmaadiziaki. ‘Aki’ means the Earth. So might we use he, she, ki, and it? We can save ‘it’ for truly inanimate things and use ‘ki’ for both the squirrel and the sugar maple. And then for the plural, we already have a beautiful word in English. If we take ‘ki’ and just add an ‘n’ to it, we have kin. We can then speak of the geese flying overhead as, ‘Kin are flying south for the winter.’ Or, ‘The kin are in our garden.’” [1]

​Suddenly the garden is not a collection of objects but a family gathering. The sugar maple becomes, in its own way, a person.

Plants as Collective Agents

Kimmerer notes that trees and other plants often display a unique form of agency. They act not only as individuals but as collectives. She says:
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​“The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective, and we don’t know how they do this, but they do. And I hope that we can be inspired by that as human individuals facing the uncertain future of climate change, that collective action taught to us by the trees can be a guide for us. The plants know what to do about climate change. They are taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it.” [1]

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​As gardeners, lovers of plants, and students of the green world, we can follow that example. Plant more trees. Plant more native species. Restore and reclaim damaged places. Let plants do what they do best. In return for everything they have given us, tending the flourishing of the kin in our gardens and beyond becomes our collective responsibility.

The Gift Economy of the Living World

Kimmerer speaks of these ideas as part of a “grammar of animacy,” grounded in Indigenous lifeways. It is a new yet ancient way of being with, and in, the world. To the idea that plants are subjects rather than objects, and that they act collectively as well as individually, she adds a further insight: plants participate in a gift economy.
She explains:
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​“These are the creative products of other beings, just as we as individuals have our own particular gifts that we can give to the world. Plants, as immensely creative beings, certainly do make food and medicines and dyes and materials, and they hold knowledge for us in so many ways that we think of those as gifts.
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The language of gifts, rather than natural resources, is very important. When we are given a gift, we know what to do about that, right? When we take natural resources, we take them without consequences. They’re ours; they’re our property. We can do with them as we wish.

But when we think about what the world gives us as gifts—not as stuff we take, but as gifts that are given—that engenders a whole different relationship to the living world. It invites gratitude, not expectation. It generates self-restraint in return for that gift.

And when we’re given a gift, it also opens the door to reciprocity. ‘In return for this gift, I want to give something back.’ That’s the gift-giving economy, based not on an exchange of property, but an exchange of relationship.” [1]

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​This shift in language nurtures a shift in perception. The world becomes a community of givers and receivers, kin to kin, sharing life.

Verbs, Not Nouns: The Grammar of Animacy

There is still one more dimension to what Kimmerer calls the grammar of animacy. Plants, like everything else in the living world, are best understood in terms of happenings rather than static objects: events, not things; verbs, not nouns. In Braiding Sweetgrass she writes:
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“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too.

To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us. […]
This is the grammar of animacy.”
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​Through this lens, gardens cease to be collections of objects and become gatherings of active participants—each moment a new verb unfolding. The world is forever doing, becoming, choosing how to be.
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Language that honors those choices helps us remember that we live among neighbors, not things.

A Process-Relational Perspective

Process philosophers and theologians influenced by the work of Alfred North Whitehead will agree with almost all that has been said above. They, too, believe that every actuality has something like life and experience, interiority and agency, subjective aims and emotional feeling—plants very much included. We are kin among kin. They also recognize, given evolutionary history, that plants are far older than human beings, which means they are our elders. They understand that actualities are better described as verbs rather than nouns, happenings rather than static things, and that living beings act not only as individuals but as communities.

Process thinkers likewise emphasize the importance of language. The ways we speak shape the ways we see and live in the world. A grammar of animacy is not simply helpful; it is essential for a flourishing future. Whitehead himself experimented boldly with language, coining new terms and reshaping old ones. He spoke of all actualities—not humans alone—as “prehending” their worlds, and he described each as a gift to others through what he called its “superjective” contribution.

Yet Braiding Sweetgrass expresses these insights with a beauty, concreteness, and scientific grounding that most philosophical and theological writing can only admire. If process philosophy and theology have anything to offer here, it is as a complement—not a replacement—to Kimmerer’s wisdom. They give conceptual tools to underscore what Indigenous teachings and ecological science already reveal: that the world is alive with neighbors, and we belong in a community of reciprocity.

The Spirit of Creative Transformation

What of Spirit? Many process philosophers and theologians draw inspiration from Whitehead’s understanding of God as a divine Spirit at work in every creature. This Spirit stirs within all beings as an animating breath of life, offering each moment its initial aim: to survive with satisfaction according to the situation at hand. Spirit is a source of novelty in creation. Spirit is also a compassionate companion, a living receptacle who feels and holds the world’s joys and its sufferings. This sacred presence is called by many names: God, the Eros of the Universe, the Peace of the Universe, the Spirit of Creative Transformation.

Our language about Spirit deserves the same care that Kimmerer asks us to bring to our language about plants. When we speak of Spirit carelessly, we risk turning the divine into an object, an “it” that serves our intellectual projects. A grammar of animacy invites a different relationship. It reminds us that in listening to plants and other living beings we may also be listening to Spirit. The palpable presence that moves through the web of kinship can be a way we encounter the sacred.

This does not rule out more personal forms of address. Many spiritual traditions speak to Spirit as Grandmother or Grandfather, as Friend or Guide, as Lover and Beloved. These names, too, can be relational, honoring mutuality instead of possession. The essential point is that our language helps us remain in living connection rather than reducing Spirit to a static idea, be it the "God" of classical theism or, for that matter, the "God" of process theology.

Whitehead’s vision offers support here. Spirit is not an aloof overseer outside the world. Spirit is deeply entangled in the becoming of all things, feeling with every creature, luring every moment toward richer life. A grammar of animacy helps us remember that this sacred presence is alive with us, alongside us, within us, a well as beyond us, as a fellow participant in the ongoing creation of a world where kin can flourish.

Some speak of this way of thinking about God as panentheism (everything in God). The image is of God or Spirit as a womb-like mind or heart inside of whom the universe unfolds, like an embryo nurtured by amniotic love. Kimmerer's wisdom invites to offer a still newer phrase: pan-animism. With animus including plant and animals and people, together in a familial network. filled with life, and enfolded within a deep Kin who is also a deep listening.

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer’s comments are from the podcast conversation “Lessons in the Plants: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass,’ with Robin Wall Kimmerer” on the program A Way to Garden. Available at https://awaytogarden.com/braiding-sweetgrass-robin-wall-kimmerer/

The Teaching of Plants:
​Robin Wall Kimmerer

What Plants Can Teach Us -
​Robin Wall Kimmerer

In traditional ecological knowledge, plants are regarded not only as persons, but as among our oldest teachers. If plants are our teachers, what are they teaching us, and how can we be better students? In a rich braid of ecological science, indigenous philosophy, and literary reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, Dr. Kimmerer explores the material and cultural gifts of plants and our responsibilities for reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.