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Personal Narrative- Destruction of Nature
If you ever get a chance to visit Chaco Canyon National Monument in New Mexico, you should take the time to just stand in the desert and listen. The silence in this place is physical; you can feel it surround you. This is a silence with depth and layers that are unbroken even by the wind, which moves through emptiness and speaks only in occasional sighs through the canyons. The air itself is very clear—the lack of humidity gives the cliffs and buttes sharp lines, and the colors of the earth, though muted, stand in stark relief to the blueness of the sky. Night comes gradually to this place. The height and dryness of the air allows the stars to appear before the sun has set—creating an odd contrast of light and darkness in which night is falling on one horizon while the sun reddens the other. Standing on the cliff tops you can see the sky deepen from blue to black. At night the only lights come from the stars and moon, and the faint smear of light that is the city of Albuquerque, fifty miles away. This small blemish on the horizon haunts my memory in some ways, like an eyelash in the eye, because I know that twenty years ago the night was perfectly dark.
In his book Cosmos, Carl Sagan quotes two amateur astronomers as saying, “We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” But my question is, if we do not fear the darkness, why do we constantly seek to keep it at bay with our streetlights and floodlamps? Emerson declares that if man would be alone, let him look at the stars. With the defeat of the night, we have also blocked out the stars. Do we fear isolation? Or is it the undeniable presence of uncontrollable forces or of decay that is present and necessary to na...
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... presence, and darkness is always present. We have created an isolation that leads us to fear the world that created us. Are we hopeless? I hope not, because the intellect and creativity and ingenuity of the human mind are beautiful things. I am not saying we should chuck it all and go back to nature. The natural world is a harsh, brutal and impartial place, and we as sentient beings could not fit in. Rather, I argue that “development” and “progress” should be holistic, an improvement of the mind and soul as well as the body. Thoreau once said that in wilderness can be found the salvation of the world. It forces us to turn outside of ourselves and seek a social consciousness that extends beyond “individual rights” to human rights, and a greater reconciliation with the world around us. Perhaps then we can accept the darkness, because we will no longer fear the night.
Fromm tells us that as humanity continues to move forward, hopelessness will engulf us. Which I agree seeing as when one turns on the TV the majority of the news is either destruction, poverty, homelessness, famine, death and many other problematic matter’s around the world. To think that humanity has advanced so much in technique and technology; yet, there are still numerous problems worldwide and continue to spread. While this is occurring people are losing a sense of individuality due to being consumed too much in a person, video game, TV, etc. Today many teens are being consumed on a media sense and buy in whatever is shown and rather than learning to have their own sense of individuality, they take in what society deems worthy. In conclusion I agree with Erich Fromm with the direction that humanity is heading and
The first impression of the Valley-white water, azaleas, cool fir caverns, tall pines, and solid oaks, cliffs rising to undreamed-of heights, the poignant sounds and smells of the sierra, the whirling flourish of the stage stop at Camp Curry with its bewildering activities of porters, tourists, desk clerks, and mountain jays, and the dark green-bright mood of our tent-was a culminations of experience so intense as to be almost painful. From that day in 1916, my life has been colored and modulated by the great earth-gesture of the Sierra. (Fischer 9)
If we bemoan the loss of light as the day changes to night we miss the sunset. In her memoirs Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams relates the circumstances surrounding the 1982 rise in the Great Salt Lake as well as her mother’s death from cancer. Throughout the book Williams gets so caught up in preventing her mother’s death that she risks missing the sunset of her mother’s life. However the Sevier-Fremont’s adaptability to changes in nature inspires Terry Tempest Williams to re-evaluate her response to changes in her life.
Seal, Karen H., Daniel Bertenthal, Christian R. Miner, Saunak Sen, and Charles Marmar. "Bringing the War Back Home: Mental Health Disorders Among 103 788 US Veterans Returning From Iraq and Afghanistan Seen at Department of Veterans Affairs Facilities." Archives of Internal Medicine 167.5 (2007): 476-82. Print.
...l, D. M., & Willard, S. G. (2003). When dieting becomes dangerous: A guide to understanding and treating anorexia and bulimia [Ebrary version]. Retrieved from http://libproxy.utdallas.edu/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/utdallas/Doc?id=10170079&ppg=4
Anorexia is an obsessive desire to control ones bodily appearance. It often starts with the refusal to obtain a healthy body weight. “This disorder is associated with under nutrition of varying severity with resulting secondary endocrine and metabolic changes and disruptions of bodily functions” (Kontic et al. 2013). An Anorexic person has a distorted view of themselves which can lead to devastating measures of self-starvation due to an immense fear of weight gain. In the same way, an individual suffering with Bulimia has a fear of weight gain, but goes about their technique in a different manner. Bulimia is an eating disorder characterized by binge eating or, consuming a large amount of food in a short time followed by guilt. This guilt is the leading factor to the purging stage where the individual will rid themselves of the physical and emotional discomfort. The ridding stage can invo...
To Thoreau, life’s progress has halted. It seems people have confused progression with captivity driven by materialism. To Krakaeur, people are indifferent to pursing the sublime in nature. To Christopher McCandles the world around him is forgetting the purpose of life. People are blind to nature. In the eyes of these men the world is victim to commercial imprisonment. People live to achieve statuses that only exist because man made them. Fame, money, and monotonous relationships do not exist in nature; they are the pursuits of soulless fundamentalism. The truth is that people pursue meaningless goals, and people don’t want to hear or know how they are foolish. When exposed, reality is so unsettling that it seems wrong. Yet, to be free of the falseness in life is in essence the point of singularity that people realize if there is no truth in love then it is false, if there is no truth in money then it is worthless, if there is no truth in fame then it is undeserving. Without truth everything is a worthless pursuit of a meaningless glass ceiling.
Anorexia Nervosa is characterized by a strong desire to lose, or not to gain weight through starvation. This can be caused by the victim’s distorted view of their own body image. The two generalized types are: strict diet and exercise, and binging and purging (Martini, Nath, Bartholomew, 2012). Bulimia nervosa is categorized by episodic binge eating that is followed by guilt, depression, and self-condemnation (Martini, Nath, Bartholomew, 2012). These emotions noted are usually followed by attempts to lose weight by way of self-induced vomiting, laxatives, dieting, and or fasting. Excessive eating followed by periods of fasting or self-induced vomiting are characteristics of binge-purge...
Bulimia nervosa is a serious psychiatric illness. People who suffer from bulimia binge eat regularly and try compensating for their behavior by over exercising, purging and fasting; according to the National Library of Medicine a significant number of people with bulimia also have anorexia (Nordqvist, 2009). There are many warning signs and symptoms that come along with bulimia such as: binge eating, purging, over exercising, constant change in bodyweight, disappearing after eating to the restroom, depression, and damaged teeth (Nordqvist, 2009). Not only does bulimia affect ones physical appearance but it also affects a persons state of health because there are many consequences that come along with this disorder such as: sto...
Did you know that in 2010/2011 official statistics stated that more than 6,500 children and teenagers were treated in hospitals for eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa? Anorexia is probably the most known and common eating disorders out there, along with bulimia. Anorexia is an eating disorder that makes people lose a lot more weight than is thought to be healthy for their age or height. The people who are diagnosed with it could have a fear of gaining weight and over exercise, diet, skip meals, or simply don’t eat at all in order to lose weight. Bulimia is most of the times together with anorexia because the person with it is also is trying to lose a lot of weight by not only starving but also purging. The person will most of the times over eat because their body is starving and afterwards the person will most likely feel guilty and most of the times that leads to the person throwing ...
A calm crisp breeze circled my body as I sat emerged in my thoughts, hopes, and memories. The rough bark on which I sat reminded me of the rough road many people have traveled, only to end with something no one in human form can contemplate.
As the counterpart of light, darkness is commonly viewed as an evil and dangerous entity which consumes all and leaves nothing. However, Insurgent ignores the old and cliché use of darkness and makes it the symbol of truth and all that wh...
Darkness. It pervades every nook and cranny of our human minds and souls, held back by the fragile light of our beliefs, yet encroaching entirely in the eyes of another. The darkness is ignorance and fear. It is the quintessence of imperfection, the corruption of the pure, and tragic irony that stems from incomprehension. It explains and confuses, persuades and dissuades. It is the unknown and the unknowable. Darkness.
The sunset was not spectacular that day. The vivid ruby and tangerine streaks that so often caressed the blue brow of the sky were sleeping, hidden behind the heavy mists. There are some days when the sunlight seems to dance, to weave and frolic with tongues of fire between the blades of grass. Not on that day. That evening, the yellow light was sickly. It diffused softly through the gray curtains with a shrouded light that just failed to illuminate. High up in the treetops, the leaves swayed, but on the ground, the grass was silent, limp and unmoving. The sun set and the earth waited.
During this specific night, an army of mysterious, murky clouds seized control of divine sky, devouring the sun. Favored by the troops, the moon, displaying its glorious luminescence upon a shadowy city, wins a triumphant victory over the sun. A ferocious leader of the army activates the withdrawal then leads dedicated soldiers to west as if they are tracking down a wild dog. On the other hand, the city transmits its vivid and righteous illuminations back to the sky to let people in the “second floor” know that “era of tranquility” began. Imagine the astonishing night, rigid and bright buildings lie elegantly on the moonlight sky, bring lights gaze from the thousands of bulbs. It is beautiful, yet no one knows what beauty is upon them.