“My first trip to the Grand Canyon was one of my most significant. Maybe I just didn’t expect to be so impressed by anything in middle-America, or maybe I hadn’t quite given enough thought to why it was called “Grand” but that first peak over the canyon was a genuine surprise… It was a last minute trip during my last semester in Grad school, and I had just come back from Rio & São Paulo, so I wasn’t expecting the American road trip to be particularly impressive, but I was more awed in my five days in Arizona than I was in over a week in Brazil. I felt very connected to the earth, and experienced a veritable sadness because it felt like we were standing on stolen land. The native inhabitants of the continent had/have a lot of respect for nature, and there is a reservation right outside the national park, which only added to the sense of sorrow… I became very aware that we are all just visitors on this earth, regardless of …