Week 1 Reflection Narrative
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University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign *
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242
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Arts Humanities
Date
Dec 6, 2023
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docx
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Uploaded by bpdoyle20
Week 1 Reflection Narrative Paper
Brendan Doyle
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
RST / NRES / LA 242: Nature and American Culture
Dr. Jacob Fredericks
October 20, 2023
The landscape that I have been to and decided to choose for this week’s narrative paper is the
Grand Canyon. I visited Grand Canyon National Park during Spring break last year for a few days after
spending most of it in Scottsdale, Arizona to watch Minor League Baseball games. I wanted to visit the
Grand Canyon so badly for a very long time because I have heard about its majestic beauty that pictures
really can’t even do justice. I very much enjoyed the time that I spent here, the sights that I saw were
amazing and I do plan on returning to this place someday when it is warmer outside. As you can see,
even in the Spring, the Grand Canyon still is cold and has snow because of the higher altitude which is
not typical compared to the rest of Arizona. So, I would like to return sometime to go on hikes into the
canyon and to go white water rafting inside of the rivers in the Canyon. This was impossible to do while I
was there because a lot of the paths were covered in sheets of ice. However, this didn’t take away from
the grandeur of my experience while I was there just by seeing the sights there were to offer. I’d say that
my experience was pretty similar to one of the definitions of nature that Nash (2014) described in our
textbook. “In Japan the first religion, Shinto, was a form of nature worship that deified mountains,
forests, storms, and torrents in preference to fruitful, pastoral scenes since the wild was thought to
manifest the divine being more potently than the rural” (p. 20). This deification of nature is very similar
to how many others and I see the Grand Canyon and other National Parks today. I looked at the Grand
Canyon as if it were some special place that I placed above other landscapes of nature that I have seen
before, which does make it kind of deified, similar to the Shinto.
References:
Photo by Brendan Doyle
Nash, R. (2014). Old world roots. In
Wilderness and the American mind
(5th ed.). (p. 20). Yale University
Press.
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