What are we missing anyway?

In the book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimerer writes about our false sense of separation from all living things. She says we refer to birds and grass and sky as inanimate objects. 

That bird, it’s singing; the grass, it’s green; the sky, it’s clear today.

Imagine speaking of your grandmother this way: dear Nana, it cooked the most delicious yams. 

Or, your lover: this man, it is my beloved soulmate. 

We strip our world of its aliveness so that we can be powerful. So that we can go about our days consuming and producing without feeling the effects. We have created containers to inhabit; imaginary tupperware to hold ourselves just outside the dirt. 

We peer through plastic, our human-made constructs and operations; systems and structures, barely noticing the opaque rolling hills or the far off squirrels in the oaks. 

What are we missing, anyway, we might ask.

I think Kimerer would say, everything true. 

The bluest December sky and her scattered clouds nodding their way toward the sea. A chartreuse finch chirping her song. Blades of grass, each a verdant someone too – little fellows standing tall, praising our stunning sun.