Sacred Texts & Sources
Sacred Earth honors two great libraries: the written wisdom of those who have listened deeply to the living world, and the unwritten library of the land itself. Neither is complete without the other.
Voices We Study
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer — a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation writing about reciprocity, the grammar of animacy, and the honorable harvest. For many in this order, this is the closest thing to a central text: scientifically rigorous and spiritually luminous at once.
- The teachings of the land’s first peoples — creation stories, trickster tales, and ecological law carried in oral tradition. We approach these as respectful listeners, never as collectors, and we prioritize learning directly from Indigenous teachers where they offer to teach.
- Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold — the founding document of the land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.”
- The ecological sciences — works on mycorrhizal networks, keystone species, watershed hydrology, and restoration ecology. We treat careful science as a spiritual discipline, a way of paying the attention that reverence requires.
- Poets of attention — Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and others who taught modern people how to look at the world again.
The Unwritten Text
Above all, we study the place where we live. Members are encouraged to learn the Indigenous history of their watershed, the names of native plants and animals, the patterns of local weather, and the stories the elders of their region — human and otherwise — have to tell. A shelf of books about somewhere else is no substitute for knowing your own ground.
The land knows you, even when you don’t know the land. The work is to close that gap.