Rooted and Rising

Women, Change, and the Courage to Grow Differently

How do we stay steady when life keeps shifting underneath us?

A career ends or begins. Children grow up and leave home. Our bodies change. A relationship changes. We move somewhere new. Or sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all—we simply realize that a version of ourselves we've lived with for years no longer quite fits.

I've been thinking about what it means to be rooted during those times.

We tend to imagine roots as something fixed. They keep us in one place. They belong to where we've been.

But roots are alive. They grow. They adjust to what surrounds them. They search for water and nutrients. And sometimes, when conditions change, they find another way.

Maybe we do too.

The women you'll meet here have faced change in very different ways. Some are protecting forests and communities. Some are preserving knowledge that could easily be lost. Some have crossed borders, begun again, changed direction, or found themselves questioning the life they thought they were supposed to live.

Their circumstances are different, but the question underneath them is one many of us eventually face:

What do I hold on to, and what am I ready to change?

What It Means to Be Rooted and Rising

Being rooted doesn't mean refusing to move.

A tree can survive years of wind, heat, cold and drought not because nothing happens to it, but because it responds to what happens.

I like that distinction.

We often talk about resilience as “bouncing back,” as though the goal after something difficult is to return to the person we were before.

But what if we don't?

Loss changes us. So does motherhood. Migration. Menopause. Aging. Love. Disappointment. Starting over. Even getting something we thought we wanted can change us.

Sometimes there is no going back.

And maybe there doesn't need to be.

There are plants whose growth depends on disturbance. Some seeds remain dormant until conditions around them change. What looks like an ending can also create the conditions for something else to begin.

Not something better, necessarily.

Something different.

I think women's lives are often like that.

There are periods when the old answers stop working. The roles we've played feel too small. Things we once tolerated become harder to tolerate. Things we once thought mattered enormously suddenly don't.

And questions begin appearing:

Who am I now?
What still matters to me?
What am I ready to put down?
What do I want to make room for?

We don't always know the answers.

That's another thing I think we've misunderstood about strength. We imagine the strong woman as someone certain—someone who knows where she's going and gets on with it.

But sometimes strength looks much less impressive.

Sometimes it's admitting, I don't know anymore.

And staying there long enough to find out.

We Don't Grow Alone

There's another reason I like the image of roots.

A forest isn't simply a collection of individual trees standing beside one another. Beneath the soil are complicated relationships among roots, fungi and other organisms through which resources and information can move.

The popular nickname for some of these fungal networks is the “Wood Wide Web.”

The science is more complicated than the beautiful metaphor sometimes suggests, but the basic idea stays with me:

what looks separate above ground can be connected underneath.

I think about women that way too.

The people who came before us. The women beside us. The friend who says something at exactly the right moment. The mother whose choices we understand differently as we get older. The woman we've never met whose story makes us recognize something in our own.

None of us becomes herself entirely alone.

That's one reason I keep telling women's stories.

Not because every woman in them has an answer for us.

But because sometimes another woman's life gives us a different question to ask about our own.

The women you'll meet in Rooted and Rising are protecting land, preserving Indigenous knowledge, challenging established ways of doing things, and using their voices in places where being heard matters.

I don't expect us to look at them and think, I should be more like her.

I'd rather we become curious.

What has kept her rooted?

What allowed her to change?

And perhaps, quietly:

What is taking root in me now?

You don't need to know yet what it will become.

Sometimes noticing that something is growing is enough.

Three Women, Three Ways of Making Change

There isn't one way to care about the world.

For Marina Silva, it began in the Amazon. For Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, with the knowledge of her Mbororo community in Chad. For Mónica Carrillo Zegarra, language, culture and storytelling became part of the work.

Their lives are very different. What interests me is the way each woman has taken something deeply connected to where she comes from and carried it forward.

🌿 Marina Silva — The Forest She Never Left Behind

Marina Silva grew up in Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, in a family of rubber tappers. Her childhood was marked by poverty, illness and the death of her mother. She didn't learn to read and write until she was a teenager.

It's difficult to look at that beginning and predict what came next.

She worked as a cleaner in a convent, studied, became politically active and worked alongside environmentalist Chico Mendes. Eventually, she entered politics and became Brazil's Minister of the Environment.

What interests me most about Marina isn't the distance between where she began and where she ended up.

It's what she carried with her.

The forest wasn't something she left behind when she entered government. The lives of the people who depended on it weren't either. Her environmental work grew out of an understanding that protecting land and protecting people couldn't easily be separated.

Decades later, that connection is still at the center of her work.

There's something about that I find moving: a life can change enormously without requiring us to abandon where we came from.

Listen to Marina

In this TEDx talk, Marina speaks about the forest, her upbringing and the role words and education came to play in her life.

👉 Watch: Everyone Can Do It – Marina Silva at TEDxRio+20

🌍 Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim — Knowing the Land Differently

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim comes from the Mbororo pastoralist community in Chad, where knowledge of weather, water, animals and land has been passed between generations.

As climate change began altering that landscape—water becoming scarcer, pastures changing, desertification increasing—Hindou noticed something important.

The people most intimately connected to the land were often missing from the conversations about how to protect it.

Her work has been about bringing those worlds together.

She has worked with Indigenous communities to map natural resources, combining traditional knowledge with modern mapping technology, and has taken that perspective into international climate discussions.

I like her story because it complicates an assumption many of us make: that moving forward means leaving old knowledge behind.

Sometimes the old knowledge is exactly what we've forgotten to ask about.

And sometimes progress isn't choosing between tradition and science.

It's allowing them to speak to each other.

Listen to Hindou

In her TED talk, Hindou describes the extraordinary knowledge held by her community—including the ways her grandmother could understand changes in weather by observing the natural world.

👉 Watch: Indigenous Knowledge Meets Science to Take On Climate Change – Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim

🎨 Mónica Carrillo Zegarra — When Storytelling Becomes Part of the Work

Mónica Carrillo Zegarra is an Afro-Peruvian poet, journalist and activist whose work brings together race, gender, culture and human rights.

What drew me to her was something different.

She uses words.

Poetry. Storytelling. Memory. Art.

These may seem like quieter tools beside legislation, scientific research or environmental policy. But culture shapes the way we see people—and whose experiences we consider important enough to notice.

Mónica's work asks us to pay attention to people and experiences that have too often been pushed to the edges.

And perhaps that's why her story belongs here.

Changing the world isn't always about having the loudest voice in the room.

Sometimes it begins by telling a story that wasn't being heard.

Listen to Mónica

In this short video, Mónica discusses Rostros de Violencia, Rostros de Poder (Faces of Violence, Faces of Power) and the relationship between memory, identity, racism and gender-based violence.

👉 Watch: Historias I: Mónica Carrillo Zegarra

A Question to Carry with You

This week, pause and ask yourself:

What am I holding on to because it still matters to me—and what am I holding on to simply because it's familiar?

It could be something small—like changing a habit that no longer serves you.
Or something bigger—like standing up for a cause you care about.

If you'd like to spend a little more time with these ideas, you can download my Eco & Empathy Journal, with prompts for reflecting on our relationship with ourselves, other people, and the world around us.

🌍 What the Earth Teaches

The natural world doesn't stay the same.

Things grow.
Things die back.
Some return.
Some don't.

A tree doesn't look the same in every season, and we don't either.

Maybe being rooted has less to do with staying where we are than I once thought.

Maybe it's knowing what matters enough to carry with us when we change.

And knowing what we can leave behind.