The book is built the way a tree is built. Read it in order. It is short — about eighty minutes — and written that way on purpose.
SeedYou already have a tree. Nkwu alo. The difference between chi (destroyed at death) and Agwu (kept by your children). The two rites — Ime Agwu and Iru Agwu — and why the order matters.
GroundPersonal land, not rented. The bare patch of earth with nothing on it and everything under it. Covenants. Why a landlord's quit notice would dismantle your shrine, and what to do while you do not yet own land.
RootTwo sticks. Not seeds. Cuttings from your mother's tree and your father's tree. A stick is an inheritance, not a beginning. The rite described plainly — two delegations, two holes, two sticks, one week.
TrunkThe dibia who farms. The man does the rite and then goes back to farming. Character, not ceremony, keeps the tree alive. A man who cannot hold a job for two years is not ready to hold a tree for forty.
BranchBound to water them. Your children did not choose your tree. Your job is not to force them to serve it. It is to water it well enough that they can choose it.
FruitHow a tree becomes a god. A man plants a stick alone in his compound. His children tend it. His children's children tend it. Four generations later a whole community sacrifices at that tree. A god is started by a person nobody was watching.
ShadeThe part you will never sit in. You plant trees you will not live to see tall. "A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children" is not wisdom about money. It is a description of what a human being is for.
