Kimmerer frames annual spring breeding as one shared sacred longing across species

Evidence

Every spring, my daughters and I say that the peepers are “calling up the daffodils” with their song. The green shoots push up after the first peepers are heard and come to full flowering before they are finished. My Potawatomi ancestors had a word for this mystery: puhpowee, the power that causes a mushroom to rise up from the earth overnight. I think it is this that draws me to the pond on a night in April, bearing witness to puhpowee. Tadpoles and spores, egg and sperm, mine and yours, mosses and peepers—we are all connected by our common understanding of the calls filling the night at the start of spring. It is the wordless voice of longing that resonates within us, the longing to continue, to participate in the sacred life of the world. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Direct bridge to the Kimmerer reading thread in this polyad — puhpowee and common-language-of-spring (ch2) recurs as a connective image. — connects to: Zuni creation accounts and evolutionary science both trace life to a watery green-algal origin — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 112; Observing other species’ lives can recover a forgotten common language — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 36; Kimmerer builds a playfully gendered social frame to make species distinctions memorable — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 140
• SEED: For the Reading the Landscape / Eco-Justice thread, a piece could draw on ‘calling up the daffodils’ as a model for teaching seasonal phenology through Indigenous framing rather than mechanistic data.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Kimmerer builds a playfully gendered social frame to make species distinctions memorable #expands (0.78) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 140