Finding Rhythms of Slowness
A Review of
This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse
Lydia Wylie Kellermann
Paperback: Broadleaf Books, 2024
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Reviewed by Katie Booms Assarian
The essays in This Sweet Earth are a thoughtful and loving call for Americans to build from communal traditions that are embodied, spiritual, just, and sustainable; we should let the children in our lives guide us in embracing our place as creatures beholden to a beloved Earth.
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann was raised in southwest Detroit by activist parents and an entire block of families who were all strongly connected to the Detroit Catholic Worker movement. As an adult, she moved into a house up the street and carried on this tradition. She and her partner Erinn continue co-creating an intentionally slow, non extravagant, lifestyle with deep connections to their local people and place. Yet it is to her children, Isaac and Cedar, that Wylie-Kellermann attributes her “sacred yearning to reweave my being back into this wild ecosystem to which I belong” (xiii). In other words, she aspires to reimagine a healthier balance between humans and the rest of nature– counter to the dominant capitalist and supremacist American practices which have contributed to the climate change crisis. Her sons’ questions about their environment, she writes, have reshaped her own beliefs and even vocation (which, to my surprise, are never explicitly Christian in this book). Go slow, she urges throughout, and be led by love.
There is one major point on which the author takes a hard stance, twice. That is regarding the highly-divisive question I keep over-hearing in public conversation: Is it ethical to bring children into such a potentially violent and inhospitable world? Yes, she writes. People have been doing just that, worldwide, for generations. In fact, “We need all the children born into this moment in time to be part of the voice and imagination that leads us forward. Without pressure or expectation, we welcome them just as they are. And we offer them just who we are” (131).
Beyond that, Wylie-Kellermann does not claim to possess certainty, nor solutions, regarding climate collapse. She states upfront that “there is nothing new in this book…”; rather, “Let this book be a place of company, rest, and love” (xvi). Her overarching argument is that all her strategies of resilience and resistance have brought her closer to the life she wants for her family, regardless of how climate change plays out.
Each chapter is themed around a value the author encourages us to nurture for ourselves. In them, she threads together stories of her family and community struggles. Then she ends each chapter with a non-religious, poem-like prayer addressed directly to us: “So dear friends,/ welcome. / Move slow through these pages. / Take up these stories / and put them down. / Tend to your own stories. / Notice the seasons changing. / Let your eyes linger on the children in your life” (8). In this way, the author encourages us to draw on these lessons of shared wisdom, strength, and heart.
The actions Wylie-Kellermann promotes are simple but not easy. She suggests confronting the climate change crisis directly, in order to choose life in the face of death. About equally as uncomfortable, she asks us to recall ancestral traditions and intertwine our lives and wellbeing intimately with others in our local communities. She also argues we should reconsider how we educate children, with a higher emphasis on creating by hand than reliance on technology. Perhaps most challenging – Wylie-Kellermann calls for us to include our children as we actively resist injustices and speak difficult truths. Most of us will find it easier to adopt the other practices of joy, gratitude, and even acknowledging our griefs.
She is inspired in this work, as am I, by her children’s zeal to get to know and love the natural world around them. She shows how intimately tied her sons are to their environment: how they love to collect eggs from the family chickens, bond with individual trees during a community bonfire, and say how when they are dead they want their bones to be scattered in the forest – like the animal bones they pick up and carry around in their pockets. These are the kinds of experiences of the sacred that Wylie-Kellermann seeks.
Reading this book, I felt buoyed by the beauty of her stories and her equally sweet, well-crafted sentences. I had some truly lovely moments of reading it in the hammock under our Eastern Redbud tree, as my young children built fairy gardens among the native plants we’ve started incorporating into our lawn. (In case it’s not clear, I’m firmly in the politically-progressive, unconventionally-Christianish choir she’s urging toward a sturdier song.)
I think I will adopt some small habit changes: engaging my kids more in planting despite how satisfying alone time in the dirt is for me, calling the two neighbors with young kids who I keep thinking about, finding time this week to write that email to my city in support of an affordable housing village, joining the nascent food co-op, and continuing to make art by hand instead of digitally. Even as a farmer’s daughter, though, I can’t say I look forward to growing any annual food crops. Go slow, she said. Right? I think the wild strawberries, mulberries, red currants, and elderberry sapling I’ve planted are enough of that for now. Maybe in a few years one of my kids will take on seasonal seedlings as a project.
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Katie Booms Assarian
Katie Booms Assarian is a writer, artist, Episcopal Church administrator, and engaged citizen of Grand Rapids, MI. More often than not, she is inciting creative shenanigans with her loud librarian husband and twin kindergarteners. Fellow spiritual seekers and picture book enthusiasts, please connect via www.commonpoem.com or
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