Earthbound on Solid Ground

                Earthbound on Solid Ground by Bell Hooks is an excerpt about home and change. It could be related to Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s book of The Place You Love is Gone. Both authors talk about their home towns and the changes they went through. Bell Hooks writes about how Kentucky Hills is where she grew up and spent her childhood. There, she was surrounded with wilderness and honeysuckle and wild plants. “I was taught early on in my life the power of nature” (Hooks 67). She states that meaning she grew up learning about nature and how it hold all the power. She brings up a point about white power, and her being a black woman, she wanted to believe that whites were not the highest power. Seeing as nature cannot be changed by anyone, she believes that nature hold the ultimate power.

                “Humility in relationship to nature’s power made survival possible” (Hooks 67). Many people learned that nature had made people the way they are. Connecting to nature allows people to learn to survive. Those who lived in nature, like Hooks, learned that the environment gives life and takes life. Those who are from the “backwoods” were taught to ignore the rules of the society and law. “The wild spirit of unspoiled nature worked its way into the folk of the backwoods, and ancestral legacy, handed down from generation to generation” (Hooks 68). She is talking about the people who grew up in the backwoods, and were not able to experience the effects of nature and how it can shape you.

When Bell Hooks said “To tend to the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom, and our hope” (Hooks 68), it kind of caught my eye. Saying that tending to the earth is kind of determining your destiny, she is saying that the nature and the earth can potentially affect your future. How does the earth control your future? According to Hooks your destiny and freedom can be controlled by the earth. Since the earth is not something that can be changed by people, Hooks sees the earth as the essential power, rather than white power.

Bell Hooks is also stating that she would like to be back in her natural suburban childhood home town rather than the urbanization she is now subjected to. There are not as many greens and that is when many started seeing whites as the powerful ones. Much like in Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s story both her and Hooks want to go back to the suburban areas they came from.