Bell Hooks - (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021)

I first encountered Bell Hooks and her writing in 2017. She came, she haunted, she educated and then she left her legacy a footprint on my mind. A way into discussing with my sons the impact of my mothering.  A legacy that did not find itself on the BBC or ITV's 10 o'clock newsreel, only embedded in a website bell hooks: Author and feminist dies aged 69 - BBC News. Yet she had a profound impact on society, delving into intersectionality to get beaten but also to rise up way above the forest floor and help to shift a tide. 

As people, we often want to be noticed, acknowledged and validated, just like those Redwood seeds that germinate and make it to a fully grown tree, we all have an ambition to be NOTICED - don't we? Not necessarily all of the time, but at least some of the time, particularly when we are vulnerable or are proud of what we have achieved.  Like each woman and man, each seed has an ambition. Yet some seeds have a better chance of surviving, of seeing things that only those at the top of the forest floor can see. Some seeds germinate in nourishing soil, among an abundance of light and virgin space in which to thrive and dominate. People are seeminlgy no different. When the environment is nourishing, forgiving and ripe woman and man flourish. Yet as a woman  the environment can be hostile and as a black woman the environment can be, or is more likely to be stale and hostile, not fertile enough to allow her to thrive, preventing her beauty to extol itself onto the world with ease and acceptance. 

There are some people, who even though are not born onto fertile soil, generate green fingers and make their soil fertile. With love This doesn't come without those green fingers bleeding sometimes from the thorns that are around them but like all thorns there is often a 

Wikipedia - Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks,^[1] was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.

The focus of hooks's writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.^[3]

Also an academic, she taught at institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, and The City College of New York, before joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, in 2004,^[4] where a decade later she founded the bell hooks Institute.^[5]