My Identity My Place

In the huge country India, exists a microscopic land, my village. This is not a fancy picture. You might haven’t expected this. But this is my identity, my place where my history exists. Although I haven’t lived here ever, but my parents did. As you can see from the picture it’s a small village, Karan. It’s pronounced as Ka-run. When I was young about 4 years, my parents took me and my brother who is 2.5 years elder than me , to visit this place. Yeah you might be thinking that at that age how can I remember all this, but trust me I do. I do remember because of the beauty of this place. By word beauty I don’t mean the fascinating and delightful scenery that people usually expect. But it was a beauty of nature that you can now see haven’t prevailed. It’s just the wilderness that remained unnoticed. The nature was at its most. My brother and I used to visit the farms my grandfather had. It was extraordinary. The greenery, the agricultural products produce. I still remember the excitement I used to have when my grandpa took us for land seeing. Above all, which I think was the most beautiful was the love and care that everyone had for each other. Everyone in the neighbor regardless of religion, cast, they cared for each other and lived as one, which doesn’t exists anymore.

While going through Kingslover’s reading he mentioned, “On a given day I may walk the half mile down our hollow to the mailbox, hail our neighbors… (Kingslover)”, reminded me of that day when my brother and I took money from my mother and went to buy Popsicle. We bought the Popsicle and enjoyed the taste of it in that sunny day, but we forgot our way back home. When we finally re-united with my family, we both were scolded and spanked. It always bring smile on my face whenever I think about it, even now. Like Kingslover said ” I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breath in (Kingslover)” made me ponder that generations after us whose family resided in this village would never know that love that people had, the smell of the farm land, the way people use to live, their struggle and still being happy.

“When we love the Earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully (bell hooks, 363).” This isn’t a statement that bell hook just said but it has a deeper meaning in it, or as what I believe. I’ll give my example, when my room’s messy I get all stressed out and nothing feels good. It feels like I can’t be there anymore if it’s not clean. So when I am done with the cleaning I feel proud of my self in a way that I did it. Similarly, Earth is our home. Loving it will protect us only because destruction of Earth cause consequences that harms us. Skin cancer is one of the example. If we want to love ourselves we need to love our mother Earth and then only wilderness can be prevented and nature can prevail.

It touched my heart when I read through Williams writing which I think best explained the idea of bedrock democracy showing the connection between human and Earth is, ” In an ideal world, a world we might well inhabit one day, we may not need to “designate” wilderness, so evolved will be our collective land ethic, our compassion for all manner of life, so responsive and whole…I pray there will indeed come a time, when our lives regarding the domestic and wild will be seamless (William).” I guess we all will agree that we too hope to see a future with nature in it’s purest form and may one day come when we don’t need to use the word “wilderness” anymore.

I am a city dweller but I belong to 20th century where still I got chance to see the connection between nature and human. The way they took care of it. But today’s generation won’t be able to see the actual connection of nature and human, that’s mostly because the land that were use to be symbol of nature’s beauty are no more. They are somewhat connected to the Earth but it still lacks the original feeling of that connection people used to have.  I couldn’t agree or disagree to Barbara Kingslover’s desire of wildness as I don’t understand what she’s trying to say. So I don’t think any of us would need wildness unless we want to harm ourselves.