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.
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.
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...
The discrepancies in media coverage in coverage of female and children athletics have large gaps, but are gaining momentum in sharing equality. Major athletic leagues such as the NBA and FIFA World Cup have wide gaps in marketing and ratings for their male and female athletes. Children are future athletes and superstars, but as funding and coverage in athletics catering to the males, women are breaking the barriers to be in the spotlight of sport. Both gender contribute equally to athletics, and challenge the each other to accept new ideas and change. The sports world that has a single gender dominating the media is unjust. Society does not want to bored, we need change in sports entertainment to cater to all. Not all parents and teachers are available to educate our children about the concepts of sharing and teamwork, our children are growing up learning key concepts through media. I will discuss these concepts and how they intertwine.
Thomas Moran’s painting captures the essence of the true spirit of the Yellowstone Canyon and overwhelms any viewers who go up to it. With a size of 7’ by 12’ and a mastery display of vivid colors with hues of orange and yellow contrasted with the dark cold colors of the shadows, anyone would be overwhelmed. Under the cool shade, the path extending in front invites the viewer to join the tiny figures in the distance who seem to overlook the grand valley of the canyon below. The view from where those people are in the distance could be quite breathtaking, and this adds to the painting’s value. Moran captured the public and the government’s fascinations with the beauties of America’s Wild West. Moran’s mastery of composition within landscape
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
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.
Abstract. Recent frameworks employ the strategy to define a specific metadata schema for applications to use in their classes and programming elements, enabling framework behavior customization. Despite this technique is being widely used, there are not models, design patterns or development guidelines that aim to help in the creation of this kind of framework. This thesis proposes a conceptual model for metadata-based frameworks that has the aim to identify appropriate solutions for its internal structure and scenarios where it is suitable for. As a result, software architects and framework developers with this conceptual model should be able to identify situations where the metadata usage is appropriate and to design suitable solutions that provides flexibility in metadata reading and processing.
Many girls of different ages fantasize about the perfect wedding, perfect husband, a gorgeous dress, and the happiness to come after the wedding. At one point I was just like these girls. I saw marriage as a paradise that everybody should experience. Around tenth- grade, my rose tinted glasses were removed and I witnessed just how bad a marriage could get to the point of divorce. The divorce my parents went through, changed my entire view on monogamy. I now see marriage in a more realistic point of view and that it is not an easy journey as I once had thought it was.
Bulimia nervosa is a slightly less serious version of anorexia, but can lead to some of the same horrible results. Bulimia involves an intense concern about weight (which is generally inaccurate) combined with frequent cycles of binge eating followed by purging, through self-induced vomiting, unwarranted use of laxatives, or excessive exercising. Most bulimics are of normal body weight, but they are preoccupied with their weight, feel extreme shame about their abnormal behavior, and often experience significant depression. The occurrence of bulimia has increased in many Western countries over the past few decades. Numbers are difficult to establish due to the shame of reporting incidences to health care providers (Bee and Boyd, 2001).
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...
...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
Personal Narrative: The World The world is a messed up place and we are all stuck here until our lives are through, or until we choose to leave. It's strange that I go along with everything everyone tells me, such as that I should wear certain clothes or listen to certain songs. I often wonder why I do the things I do, but then I just realize that's who I am. People are confused about why they are here, and they don't understand what life is supposed to be about.
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.
Although there are many debatable topics psychologists tend to discuss, the Nature versus Nurture deliberation is, among society, one of the most widely known of them all. Many people have their own view on the subject however, I personally believe nature versus nurture is the question of whether human thought and behavior is influenced by environmental factors or genetic factors.
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.