I wrote this book while I was trying to write another. The other book I was trying to write was on the same topic. I was trying to write a book about our relationships with our parents, partners, and progeny. I wanted to identify the bodily challenges that each relationship represents, and thus argue how and why, in each case, the practice of bodily movement helps us figure out how to cultivate mutually-enabling bonds. I kept drafting outlines and making charts, but the book would not come.
Meanwhile, I was wrestling mightily in my own relationships, aghast that I seemed to have so much work to do. I thought I already knew how to live in love! How to partner! How to parent! I was wrong. I wrote about my experiences in my journal, furiously, passionately, trying to get at the heart of the matter and find new ways to move. I wanted freedom from the distress I felt. I wanted more love!
In one calm moment, reading over some past entries, I realized: I had already written the book I had been trying to write. I had it–it was in my journals. The framework I had been thinking about in an abstract and logical way was actually rooted in and growing out of the experiences I couldn’t not write down. I hadn’t even noticed.
I spent hours culling the best and most illuminating moments from my journals, and then over several months, pieced them together into a story.
Family Planting is a story about one matrix of mutually-enabling lives, as they learn what love can be. It is a story about philosophical ideas and how they emerge, insight by insight, out of bodily experiences. It is a story about why we humans need to cultivate a relationship with the body of Earth and our bodies of earth if we are to learn to love one another. And vice versa.
From the Back Cover:
“In this passionate philosophical memoir, Kimerer LaMothe unfolds an earth-friendly vision of what love can be. Moving to a farm after years spent teaching and writing at Harvard University, LaMothe faces new challenges in her relationships with her parents, her partner, and their children.
In her struggle to respond she comes to a radical conclusion: we humans are nothing more or less than an impulse to connect, born to love, but not born knowing how. In vivid accounts of family life, LaMothe reveals how moving our bodily selves in the natural world can foster the sensory awareness we need to cultivate life-affirming connections with those who enable us to be.”
