Sources & Kin
Nothing grows alone.
More Voices at the Fire
Books and teachers have changed what I notice, what I make, and what I owe. I’d like you to meet a few of them.
01 / THE PRACTICE OF SEEING
Attention as Devotion
Where looking becomes a way of belonging.
Upstream
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver sends me back to what is already here. When I begin looking for a photograph before I have properly met a place, I want to remember the patience in her pages: stay a little longer, and let the ordinary become special again.
Monica Gagliano, PhD
Gagliano brings scientific experiments into conversation with encounters that science alone cannot neatly contain. I love the unease this book leaves behind: the possibility that the plants around us have been living far richer lives than we thought to notice. Read it near something green. See how certain you feel about who is observing whom.
Thus Spoke the Plant
02 / A WIDER FAMILY
Kinship Beyond Our Kind
The border between us and the rest of life fades.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer’s words follow me into the places where I make art. When I gather what has fallen, or bring a photo home, I hear her question beneath my own: after all the gifts we receive from the living world, what will we give in return? There are very few books I have carried so thoroughly into my hands.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Deep Ecology for the 21st Century
Edited by George Sessions
This collection has made me examine a reflex I would rather think I had outgrown: placing human needs at the centre of every question. Some pages take work. But they have sharpened something essential to Root & Antler—the conviction that a forest, a river, an animal has a life and value far beyond what it can offer us.
03 / IN ONE ANOTHER’S COMPANY
How We Become Human
What we owe the people gathered beside us.
Priya Parker
A wedding, a workshop, a circle: I used to assume the occasion could carry its own meaning. Priya Parker taught me that a gathering begins long before anyone arrives. Her book has changed how I invite, how I host, and which invitations I accept.
The Art of Gathering
The Serviceberry
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A serviceberry feeds whoever comes to it. Kimmerer follows the gift from one life to another, until wealth begins to look less like something we hold than something we keep in motion. She has deepened my understanding of giving as one of the ways we keep one another alive.
04 / THE WORK AHEAD
For the World That Might Yet Be
Hope with its sleeves rolled up.
Earth For All
A Report to the Club of Rome
If you take only one practical book from this page, let it be this one. I return to it when the scale of what must change makes hope feel flimsy. It is clear-eyed about the trouble we are in and equally serious about what we can still do together. Its proposals bring that distant future close enough to begin working on.
World as Lover, World as Self
Joanna Macy
When grief for the living world leaves me unsure what to do with myself, Macy offers a place to begin: feel how deeply we belong to what is hurting. She does not hurry sorrow into optimism. She stays with it until love has somewhere to go.
05 / THOSE WHO TAUGHT ME
Teachers I’m grateful to
Books are one way their teaching continues.
Day Schildkret
Morning Altars · Teacher training
Before Root & Antler had a name, there was this practice. Morning Altars invited me to kneel among fallen leaves, stones, and seeds and make something that could belong to its place for a little while. The book opened a door; the year-long teacher training with Day changed how I walked through it. His kindness, his generosity with what he knows, and the care with which he gathers people have stayed with me.
Much of what I now make and share began down there, close to the earth.
Martin Shaw
Courting the Wild Twin · School of Myth
Brilliant. Rich. Wildly necessary.
Martin has returned fur, mud, and consequence to my writing. On his tongue, myth breathes beyond the firelight, watching to see whether we are brave enough to follow. In Courting the Wild Twin, he goes looking for the unruly part of us we traded for approval. The School of Myth offers ways to spend longer in the company of his stories. I would follow his sentences into any forest; if I could read only one voice for the rest of my life, it would probably be his.
Stephen Jenkinson
Die Wise · Orphan Wisdom School · Scriptorium
If you are willing to meet death before it comes knocking—and ask what our fear of it has done to the way we live—Stephen Jenkinson is fierce company at the threshold. His eloquence is enormous; so is the wisdom carried inside it.
To me, he is a teacher of uncommon generosity and the only person I know whom I would call an elder. Though the Orphan Wisdom School no longer convenes, its Scriptorium still gives access to his written and spoken work.
A NOTE ON FINDING THESE BOOKS
If a book calls to you, ask for it at your local bookshop, seek out its publisher, or find the author directly.