About Kimerer

From a young age, I have known a triangular truth. When I find myself in nature—on a beach, in the woods, at the top of a mountain—I feel moved to dance. When I follow the impulse to dance, I feel as connected with the divine as I ever do. When I feel so connected, the joy spills over into a fierce appreciation of the natural world as Source.

My first foray in expressing this truth took shape as a desire to put an end to human pollution and so protect the earth and her inhabitants. Entering Williams College, I planned to become an environmental lawyer, or an investment banker diverting resources to environmental causes.

By the time I graduated, I had realized that addressing the human relation to the natural world would entail something more, namely, a critical reconsideration of modern western values. In particular, it would require revaluing the values, often carried under the banner of Christianity, that privilege mind over body, male over female, individual over relationship, human over nature, and writing over dancing as a medium of religious expression and experience.

I set off for graduate school to study religion and philosophy, the founding forces of our cultural moment, wanting to know: why don’t Christians dance?

Pursuing a doctorate at Harvard, I learned, with the help of philosophers Hegel and Nietzsche, dancers Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan, and many others, that the problem is not simply one of values either. Deeply implicated as well are the practices that educate our senses to see and notice and value what we do.

As a professor at Brown for a year and then Harvard for five, as a Radcliffe Fellow and then a fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, I designed courses, wrote books, and made dances, posing the same questions multiple times in different ways: what kind of practices must we engage in order to think the thoughts and craft the values that will guide us in earth-friendly ways of living? Are reading and writing the only knowledge-acquiring skills we need to engage in order to reform western values?

It was increasingly clear to me that the answer was no. If we want to hold earth-friendly values, then we need to live lives that can give rise to those values as an expression of what we are creating. It was what I most wanted to do.

My ongoing life as a dancer primed me to pay attention to the movements of my sensory, sensing self as a potent source of knowledge. My writing as a scholar and philosopher of religion exercised my ability to articulate what dancing helps me know. My experiences as a professor, life-partner, and mother were strengthening my conviction that the movements we make in our lives, day to day and moment to moment, are the places where our philosophies and ideals take root and flourish.

And all three strands of my life came together in a sudden move to the farm, July 2005. Living with my family, in closer proximity to the natural world, I would write a series of three books to flesh out how and why movement matters in the work of creating mutually-enabling relationships with the body of Earth and our bodies of earth. Movement matters.

What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire (2009) is the first book in the series. It explores how movement matters in relation to our desires for food, sex, and spirit. Family Planting (2011) is the second, exploring how movement matters in our relationships to primary human others in our lives–our parents, partners, and progeny. I am hard at work on the third, Earth Within, which will explore how movement matters in our relationship with nature.

Life on the farm is enabling my work in ways I most hoped and never imagined. Every day bursts alive with the physical, emotional, spiritual tasks of nourishing five young humans and the animals they love. These activities hold me close to the earth, where I am vulnerable to the cast of the sky, the bite of the air, the length of the light, and inspired to make the case in writing and dancing for why movement matters.

As I scrub milk buckets and recently laid eggs; make cheese and bread; hang laundry or feed calves; hug and help, hike, dance, or write, I know: my partner and our children are enabling me, even requiring me, to live out my dreams for their sake.

It is the story of Family Planting.