Walking In Beauty

Image credit: Jef Poskanzer

I once lived in an apartment in an older building where there were mice. I used to hear a scratching sound coming from inside a living room wall every night. This went on for a few months. Then suddenly there were no more sounds. One day I came home and the apartment stank like the smell of something dead. Sure enough the caretaker found a dead mouse behind the living room wall. What he also found was a beautiful, small gold broach pin between the folds of a piece of fabric, tucked under the dead mouse! I guess our little mouse had found himself a shiny, beautiful treasure and was hoarding it in his nest. I don’t know whom it belonged to, but I kept it as a reminder that all beings are attracted to beauty, even little mice.

In the Native American tradition, the Beauty Way is the path of living in harmony with one’s self and all creation. Walking the path of beauty is to embrace the sheer pleasure of being human, living in a manner, where your thoughts, speech, actions and way of being are in harmony with all of creation. It is to find the sacred in everyday living. It is to honor simplicity and to discover the magic of reality, when we see with the heart. In The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery, the lonely young prince befriended a fox. The fox told him his secret, “…It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” In seeing with the heart we connect to our inner wisdom and see the inter-connectedness of all creation, we live in contentment, we walk in beauty!

Here is a beautiful Navajo prayer:

Beauty is before me
And beauty is behind me
Above and below me hovers the beautiful
I am surrounded by it.
I am immersed in it.
In my youth I am aware of it,
And in old age I shall walk quietly
The beautiful trail.