The Beauty Way: To Walk in Beauty

The word is hózhó.

There is no perfect English translation. The nearest approach is: beauty, balance, harmony, order — but all four of these together, not any one of them separately, and the together-ness is what matters. Hózhó is the state of the world when it is correctly aligned: when the relationships between living things are right, when the individual is in right relationship with the land and the sky and the Holy People and the other persons who share the world. When hózhó is present, things thrive. Plants grow, people are healthy, the rains come, the ceremonies work.

When hózhó is absent, things go wrong.

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The singer — the hataalii — knows hundreds of songs.

Years of apprenticeship, the memorization of entire ceremonial cycles that can run for nine nights without repetition, the ability to paint the sand paintings correctly (there are more than five hundred distinct sand painting designs in Navajo ceremonial tradition), the knowledge of which ceremony addresses which kind of disorder. The singer’s knowledge is the accumulated wisdom of the tradition about how to restore what has been broken.

When a person is ill, the first question is not: what pathogen has attacked this body? The question is: where is the hózhó broken? What happened? Who was violated, which relationship went wrong, what contact was made with something dangerous? The answer to that question determines which ceremony is needed.

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The Blessingway — hózhóójí — is the ceremony of beauty itself.

It is not a healing ceremony in the sense of treating a specific illness. It is the ceremony of affirmation: the patient is surrounded by the beauty of the world, wrapped in the songs that were sung at the creation of the world, placed at the center of sand paintings that map the cosmos, made to lie down with the earth as their body and the sky as their cover. The ceremony says: you are part of this. You are in this. The world is beautiful and you are in it.

The final prayer of the Blessingway is the one that the whole tradition is named for:

Beauty before me, with it I wander. Beauty behind me, with it I wander. Beauty below me, with it I wander. Beauty above me, with it I wander. Beauty all around me, with it I wander. In old age traveling, with it I wander. On the beautiful trail I am, with it I wander.

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These are not wishes. They are statements.

The prayer does not ask for beauty — it declares beauty. It asserts the condition of the world as seen by one who is in hózhó: the world is beautiful in every direction, always, including the direction of old age and death, including the direction of the past where you came from and the direction of the future where you are going.

The ceremony teaches the patient to see this. Not to pretend. Not to ignore what is difficult. But to locate themselves in the fullness of a world that is ordered and beautiful even when it is also painful, because the pain is part of the order, not its violation.

This is Navajo philosophy in its most compact form:

The world is hózhó.

Walk accordingly.