💧 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.

That little hummingbird didn't wait for permission, she didn't do a proper risk assessment, and nor did she doubt herself. She simply did what she could.

From the perspective of the other animals, all standing still, it makes sense to question the effort to reward ratio. But from what I have learnt since writing these emails is that small seeds plant big trees, and folk tend to forget the power of planting seeds.

I love the additional symbolism of the stream, yes it is water, but it is also the flowing consciousness inside of ourselves where we can find what we need.

And I also love how Wangari keeps the ending open, the fire may burn the whole forest to ashes, or perhaps it is saved. The future's not ours to see. But what we do with our actions is in our control. In a world that is, by any honest measure, too big for the hummingbird, she did what she could, and she was enough.

And once you hear about Wangari's life, you'll see the deeper meaning to her hummingbird story, which is, I think, the reason why it stuck.

She founded the Green Belt Movement, whose goal was to plant trees and the mechanism to do that was unbelievably simple: pay rural women a few shillings for every seedling that survived. More than 51 million trees went into the ground that way, one small payment at a time, and the women who planted them likely never got to sit in the shade of the forest they'd grown.

Later, she stopped a planned development for a sixty-storey tower in the middle of Nairobi's Uhuru Park, and the government called her a mad woman for it. In that same park, the police beat her unconscious during a hunger strike for political prisoners. Her husband divorced her, and widely reported as finding her too much, too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn, and too hard to control.

Wangari was later elected to parliament and for her efforts, she won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first African woman and the first environmentalist to receive it. She died of ovarian cancer aged 71, in 2011.

Nobody plants 51 million trees. You plant one, and then someone else plants one, and somebody else, and you look up decades later and there's a forest where once there wasn't.

One drop at a time, carried by a lot of small birds, who were always enough.

Talk soon,

Rob

Ps. You can watch a short animated film of Wangari telling the hummingbird story, from Dirt! The Movie.