A BALANCED EARTH, Chapter 9

Hello beloved reader,

Please find below the first chapter in PART THREE: Rewriting the Narrative and Sharing Our Original Medicine.

To see a Contents Page of everything serialized here on Substack to date, please click this link that is the full title of the book:

A BALANCED EARTH: Reclaiming the Divine Feminine for Personal and Planetary Healing

Please also note that all chapters are free for the first month after publication at which point they move behind the paywall.

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Chapter 9: When the Old Story Dies

We are living through a liminal time; an era of collapse, uncertainty, and deep reckoning. The old stories that once guided us are unraveling—stories of endless growth, heroic conquest, dominion over nature, and hierarchical power. Rooted in patriarchy, separation, and control, they can no longer carry us into the future. As the scaffolding of our dominant narratives begin to crumble, a deeper question emerges:

What stories are longing to be remembered?

Many of us recognize this transition not first in politics or culture, but in our own lives. The stories that once organized our identities begin to feel too small. The career that once defined us no longer feels like the measure of a meaningful life. The beliefs we inherited no longer answer the questions our hearts are asking. Relationships shift. Priorities change. Or we may simply feel an unexpected yearning—for deeper belonging, greater authenticity, or a more reciprocal relationship with the living world. Before a culture changes, countless individuals experience this quiet unraveling within themselves. The old story loosens its grip long before the new one has fully taken shape.

This chapter explores the possibility that we are living through a collective mythic transition. The ecological, political, and psychological upheavals of our time are real, but they point towards something even more profound: a re-storying of how we understand ourselves, one another, the Earth, and consciousness itself.

Signs of this transition are already emerging. Around the globe, we see them in literature and film that center empathy, complexity, and belonging, rather than domination. In spiritual movements that re-wild the soul and return us to Earth-based wisdom. In activism that reclaims ancestral memory, indigenous stewardship, and collective healing.

One of the clearest examples in literature is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

Indigenous elders, storytellers, and knowledge keepers have been sharing indigenous wisdom teachings for generations. But what makes Kimmerer’s work so compelling is her ability to build a bridge between different ways of knowing and experiencing the world. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in addition to being a scientifically trained botanist, she has a deep understanding of both the Indigenous and the Western perspectives.

She understands the habits of the Western scientific mind: observation, evidence, classification, hypothesis, and peer review. She doesn’t dismiss science. She loves it. She understands its power and beauty; its elegance, its rigor, and its extraordinary capacity to reveal how the living world works. But she also recognizes its limitations.

Rather than asking readers to choose between science and Indigenous knowing, she demonstrates that they answer different kinds of questions. Science can tell us how a forest functions. Indigenous wisdom can help us understand how to be in relationship with that forest—to enter as a relative.

This distinction allows many Western readers to lower their defenses. They don’t feel they’re being asked to abandon reason or scientific ways of knowing. Reason itself becomes more spacious—large enough to include relationship, gratitude, reciprocity, and wonder, alongside scientific analysis.

Kimmerer’s gift for helping a Western mindset understand different perspectives is perhaps nowhere more beautifully expressed than in the comparison of Eve and Skywoman.

For centuries, the dominant Christian reading of Eve places women at the center of a story of disobedience, fall, temptation, and exile. Whether or not that is the only possible interpretation, it has undeniably shaped Western culture for centuries, and has perhaps unconsciously influenced humanity’s relationship with women, Mother Earth, and even with knowledge itself.

The Skywoman creation story carries an entirely different emotional and symbolic architecture. Skywoman does not bring humanity’s downfall. She brings life. She falls from the sky world carrying seeds. Animals gather to help her. The Earth is created through cooperation. Her presence is generative rather than transgressive.

Her story begins not with sin, but with gift; not with hierarchy, but with reciprocity; not with punishment, but with relationship. Life begins in reciprocity. The emotional architecture is transformed. Creation unfolds through relationship and generosity. A different story—a story that honors the Divine Feminine—gives rise to a different worldview.

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New myths are rarely invented overnight. They emerge gradually through countless acts of imagination—novels, poems, films, rituals, conversations, communities, and ways of living that embody different values. We often recognize them only in retrospect, when we discover that the story guiding our lives has quietly changed.

Stories do not simply reflect reality; they help create it. They shape what a culture notices, what it values, what it fears, and what it imagines may be possible.

Just as new myths emerge gradually within a culture, the books that carry them often do as well. Stories do not necessarily spread simply because they are true or beautiful, sometimes they spread when a culture becomes ready to receive them. Publishing, at its best, is not merely a commercial industry; it is still one of the primary ways a civilization circulates new ideas, new metaphors, and new possibilities for living. The journey of a book into the culture can therefore tell us something about the journey of a culture itself.

The remarkable publishing story of Braiding Sweetgrass illustrates how cultural transformation often unfolds—not all at once, but gradually, through relationships, trust, and word-of-mouth.

Braiding Sweetgrass was first published in 2013, yet did not hit the New York Times bestselling list until 2020—seven years after it was first published. During my twenty years working in the publishing industry in New York City, I saw that books rarely become bestsellers seven years after publication. Marketing campaigns are designed around the launch of a book. A book’s first weeks are generally considered its greatest opportunity. Braiding Sweetgrass followed an entirely different path.

When it finally did hit the list in 2020, there had been no massive marketing campaign or celebrity endorsement at the time. Instead, it had slowly found its readers. One person recommended it to another. Book clubs embraced it. Teachers assigned it. Indigenous voices gained greater visibility. During the pandemic, many people found themselves searching for books that offered a different relationship with the Earth. Over time, the conditions gradually became right for its message to be widely received.

One of the central ideas in Braiding Sweetgrass is that the natural world unfolds according to its own timing. Seeds germinate when conditions are right, forests mature over decades, relationships deepen over time. Wisdom is cultivated through attention and reciprocity rather than speed or force.

The book’s own success followed a similar pattern. It wasn’t made into a bestseller. It grew into one. Like the forest itself, the book found its season.

Perhaps even more remarkable than its delayed ascent, is its longevity. In June 2024, Publisher’s Weekly reported it had spent more than 219 consecutive weeks on the list, with more than two million copies sold, and by May 2025 its publisher, Milkweed Editions celebrated five continuous years of bestseller status. Most nonfiction books remain on the NYT bestseller list for only a few weeks or months. Yet as of this writing in July 2026, Braiding Sweetgrass is still on the paperback bestselling list, making it one of the most enduring nonfiction bestsellers of the decade.

The books’ staying power shows us how many readers are hungry for its wisdom. Its publishing story also reminds us that a book’s first few months are not always its destiny. Some books are written for a moment; others slowly become part of the cultural conversation. Braiding Sweetgrass belongs firmly in the second category.

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If stories help shape the world we inhabit, then the recovery of Indigenous stories—and the emergence of new stories—is not merely a literary movement. It is an act of cultural healing. These stories are medicine for a culture seeking to remember its place within the living world.

We need stories that speak the language of interconnection, reciprocity, and reverence; stories that challenge the myth of separation and remind us that healing is relational, cyclical, often nonlinear, and sometimes may even follow the way of the labyrinth.

In a labyrinth you walk along a path and you may feel as though you’re heading away from the center, only to discover you’re actually drawing closer. You repeatedly encounter the same landscape from a different perspective; arrival is not about reaching a higher place, but about reaching a deeper place; and the walk out is as important as the walk in.

Having reached the center, you walk back out into the world, carrying what you’ve found. This is an image that beautifully holds both the inward movement of the Heroine’s Descent and the outward movement of offering one’s original medicine in the world.

A labyrinth is an ancient form found in many cultures and has long been associated with pilgrimage, contemplation, and return to the center. It does not imply that the center contains something entirely new. Rather, it suggests that the journey allows us to encounter what has always been there.

Perhaps this elucidates the themes we need for a more Balanced Earth: remembering rather than inventing; reclaiming rather than acquiring; belonging rather than arriving; participation rather than mastery. Instead of the lone hero, we are being invited into shared journeys, regenerative leadership, and radical remembering.

A more Balanced Earth calls for forms of leadership that honor the Divine Feminine—rooted in intuition, inclusivity, emotional intelligence, and care. It invites the honoring of ancestral remembrance, which helps us to reconnect with lost lineages, repressed rituals, and the forgotten wisdom of the land. It also asks us to reclaim cyclical understandings of time—ways of living that honor rest, renewal, and return.

This chapter invites readers to investigate inherited stories—including those within patriarchal religious traditions—and to discern which stories must be lovingly laid to rest.

It also opens the space to imagine stories of death and rebirth; myths that make room for paradox, complexity, softness, and soul; stories that can hold grief and joy together; narratives that honor both the Earth’s intelligence and the deep, untamable, wild wisdom of the Divine Feminine.

Perhaps the stories our time most needs are not coming from outside of us. Perhaps they are being remembered and are rising from within—calling us home.

Within this larger story, the Divine Feminine is one of the great healing forces as she remembers:

The stories we inherit shape our consciousness.

The stories we choose shape our future.

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…to be continued with Chapter 10: Original Medicine.

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