💧 A Bird That Carried Water

It was last Friday, and I was a few tabs deep into a spreadsheet, but my finances had to wait as I began daydreaming about whether my micro newsletter could do any good at all against an economy built on extraction, denial, and greed. I expect that we've all been to that place of hopeless defeat, we have, haven't we?

Well, I closed the laptop and made some tea and stood at the window feeling particularly small, i'm just one person with one pair of hands, in one kitchen.

But let's not fall into a despairing 'i'm only little ol' me' just yet, because I'd like to tell you about a story that has helped, originally shared by a phenomenal woman, Wangari Maathai:

It starts with a forest and it is on fire.

All the animals are running, away from the chaos, and out to safety. They stand at the forest's edge in the heat and the smoke. They watch as flames ravage their home, burning trees to the ground, and they stand disheartened and overwhelmed. You can almost imagine standing with them there, shocked, mostly still, some of them enormous with big tusks and antlers, some smaller but with paws and claws, all able, but doing nothing at all, because what is there to do against a fire that size?

Except there's one little blue hummingbird.

She flies to the nearest stream, takes one drop of water in her beak, flies back, and lets it fall on the flames. Then she turns round and goes again.

Stream, drop, fire. Stream, drop, fire. Stream, drop, fire.

The bigger animals watch this for a while, and eventually they ask her what on earth she thinks one drop of water is going to do.

And she replies: "I am doing the best I can".

Wangari Maathai told that story again and again, to schoolchildren, to conferences and to cameras, and she said, more than once, that what ever comes, she would always be the hummingbird. Despite the unknown, she was content in doing the best she could.