Beauty
Last fall my hubby and I ran a half-marathon in the heart of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. This sacred red earth is considered one of the wonders of the world with its bounty of beautiful views that are almost as enchanting as its starry night skies. Being surrounded by this rugged beauty certainly helped ease the challenge of running in sand and heat and finishing on a steep hill.
The well-organized event was co-sponsored by the non-profit, NavajoYES and Navajo Parks and Recreation in honor of all veterans and military heroes. Our Navajo (Diné) hosts were humble and gracious, and we could feel the strength of their community’s connection with each other and the land. They have a traditional prayer called the “The Beauty Way” (known as Hózhó in their Diné language) and it is a living & breathing commitment to a lifelong path of balance, goodness, harmony, humility and inner peace. Here’s an excerpt:
In beauty may I walk
With beauty before me, may I walk
With beauty behind me, may I walk
With beauty below me, may I walk
With beauty above me, may I walk
With beauty all around me, may I walk
In beauty it is finished.
This way of seeing beauty can transform how we relate to the ‘not so pretty’ spaces of our inner and outer worlds. It’s not about looking at everything with rosy-colored glasses or by-passing what we don’t want to see or feel. It is meeting everything with presence and being. The beauty I speak of is about oscillating in the messy middle of light and darkness, good and harm, worthiness and shame, joy and grief and realizing the truth and perfection of it all. When we can be in this state of beauty, we understand that all is sacred and nothing can resolve within or throughout unless it is allowed to be there.
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Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
~ Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet
Beauty is neutrality without conditions or judgements. Beauty is a rose including its thorns. Beauty is compassion for the thorn and forgiveness when we get pricked. Beauty is the grace and space to hold it all. Beauty is the strength to move through it all. Beauty is the tight bud and the full blossom and all the incremental openings in between. Beauty is the stillness and patience for the unfolding. Beauty is the painting, the poetry, and the piano that expresses the rose. Beauty is the invisible fragrance that floods our senses and stirs our hearts.
The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
My dear father recently passed. It was after living almost two decades with Parkinson’s, several years with bladder cancer and without his mobility, and almost three weeks in a hospice bed. He was a living expression of “the beauty way” and even more so in his dying. My father absolutely loved life and didn’t want to die. To witness him in the messy middle of stubbornness and surrender, of clinging and letting go, of pain and peace was excruciating, yet so beautiful at the same time. His presence was powerful and palpable. We lovingly cared for him as we watched his body diminish, his form dissolve. And in our tender loving care I could feel invisible rippling tendrils of love and light reaching across the world to starving children and those who were dying alone. I can’t explain this beautiful mystery, but I know it’s as true as my dear father’s twinkling blue eyes.
If wonder is the right eye of our sacred sight, then beauty is the left. And, like wonder, it also perceives what it encounters through the lens of the heart. It is a transformative thread that allows us to see beyond the suffering and to know that all is sacred. Beauty is the inspired expression of presence, harmony, balance and goodness. It is an awakening touch of the Divine in all its states and seasons. Beauty is experiencing the fullness of being human.
Can Any Beauty Match This?
When the sun within speaks, when love reaches out its hand and places it upon another,
any power the stars and planets might have upon us,
any fears you can muster can become so rightfully insignificant.
What one heart can do for another heart, is there any beauty in the world that can match this?
Brotherhood, sisterhood, humanity becomes the joy and the emancipation.
~ Hafiz, fourteenth-century poet
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