The Tree Her Mother Wouldn't Cut

There was a tree.

A wild fig, the kind the Kikuyu called mugumo. It stood near the home where Wangari Maathai grew up, in Nyeri, in the central highlands of Kenya. She was born there on April 1, 1940 (Nobel Prize facts page). And there was a tree.

Her mother had a rule about it. Maathai remembered the words exactly. "That is a tree of God. We don't cut it. We don't burn it. We don't use it" (her account in an On Being interview, drawn from her memoir Unbowed).

She was a child. She did not know why. She just knew the fig was off limits. You walked around it. You let it stand.

There was also a stream. She played in it as a girl. Clear water, moving, alive.

What she understood later

The tree got cut down.

Cash crops were coming in, land was being cleared, and the sacred fig went the way of the rest of it (the account traces to Unbowed, retold in On Being and elsewhere). And the stream she played in dried up.

For a long time those were two separate facts. A tree, gone. A stream, gone. Two losses on the same patch of ground.

Then she grew up and learned what her mother had never put into words. The fig's roots ran deep, all the way down to the water table. The streams ran where the figs stood. The tree was holding the water in place the whole time.

Her mother could not have drawn you the science of it. She just knew you did not cut that tree.

Sit with that for a second. The thing that was protecting the water looked, to a busy adult clearing land, like the thing in the way. So they took it down. And the water left with it.

The roots you cannot see

I think about that a lot.

We are very good at cutting down what is in the way. The meeting that slows us down. The boundary that costs us a deal. The quiet morning that does not produce anything you can measure. The relationship that does not move a number.

We clear it. We call it efficiency.

And then one day the stream is dry and we cannot figure out why.

Maathai understood that the things holding your life together are often the things you cannot see working. The roots. The slow stuff. The part of the system that takes nothing from you on a Tuesday and turns out to be the whole reason the water is still there.

That is Integrity. Leading the whole person across every role you carry. It means refusing to cut down the parts of your life that look like they are in the way, because some of them are roots.

What she did with all of it

Here is where the story turns, and where I want you to see yourself in it.

Maathai did not stay small. She became the first woman from East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, in biology, and the first female professor in Kenya (Nobel Prize facts page). She had every reason to live in lecture halls.

Instead she went to the women.

On June 5, 1977, World Environment Day, the National Council of Women of Kenya planted seven seedlings, the first at Kamukunji Park on the outskirts of Nairobi (Nobel Prize; the Goldman Environmental Prize). That was the public start of the Green Belt Movement. Seven trees. Seven.

Her plan was not complicated. She said it plainly years later. "The only thing I had, the option I had was to work with these ordinary people and try to teach them" (On Being).

Ordinary people. Planting trees. One at a time.

Since 1977, more than 51 million trees have been planted (the Goldman Environmental Prize, matching the movement's own count). Fifty one million. From seven.

The hard part she did not skip

I want to be honest about the cost, because the uplift in this story is real and it is also earned.

This was dangerous work. Trees meant land, and land meant power, and power did not want to be questioned. Maathai was arrested more than once, in January 1992 and again in 2001. On March 3, 1992, during a hunger strike for political prisoners at Uhuru Park in Nairobi, police knocked her and others unconscious at a spot that came to be called Freedom Corner (widely reported; Amnesty International, which had described her as a former prisoner of conscience).

She lost her university position. She kept going.

In 2004 she won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first African woman to receive it (Nobel Prize facts page). She died on September 25, 2011, in Nairobi (Nobel Prize facts page). The trees are still standing. The roots are still holding water she will never see.

Where she found it

There is one more line of hers I cannot let go of.

She said we are learning to find God "not in a place but rather in ourselves, in each other, in nature" (On Being).

Read that again if you are running on a hard season. Not in a place you have to arrive at. Not in some future version of you who finally has it together. In yourself. In the people around you. In the living thing right in front of you.

That is the whole leader. The one who stops looking for wholeness somewhere out there and finds it has been at the roots the entire time.

For you, right now

So here is the bridge, and it is for you.

You may be in a season where the ground feels cleared. The stream feels dry. You are leading a team, a company, a family, and you cannot find the water.

You do not have to fix the whole forest. Maathai did not start with 51 million trees. She started with seven, and ordinary people, and a willingness to plant the next one.

Look at your own life the way her mother looked at that fig. What are you about to cut down because it is in the way, when it might be the thing holding the water? The morning quiet. The boundary. The relationship that pays no dividend you can measure. The part of you that is not for sale.

Do not cut the tree.

Plant one. Then the next one. Let the roots do what roots do.

What is the one tree you could plant this week?