Or as the Navajo put it: “walk in beauty.”

With beauty before me I walk, With beauty behind me I walk, Beauty below and above. I finish in beauty.

In 1855 one Jonathan Letherman reported to the Smithsonian, “Navajo singing is but a succession of grunts and is anything but agreeable”.

Navajo spirituality views the universe as a dangerous place with good and evil elements which must be kept in balance, in harmony. This state of equilibrium is conveyed in the Navajo language as ‘Hozho’, a concept often translated as “Beauty.” To be “in Hozho” is to be at one with and a part of the world around you. I feel the concept is not far from my favorite biblical passage: Micah 6:8.