Walk in Beauty

In the morning just as dawn is ready to break in the eastern plateaus there is a thin white light that slowly turns into color as the sun rises, this is when we pray to the Holy People. Following along where the earth meets the sky greeting them with offerings of corn pollen and prayer. I was taught how to pray in the morning and every step has been a lesson, to teach me to ensure and maintain the balance of life by respecting all things. It’s not often that I step back and look at things and think of the direction I’m going, sometimes I feel like I’m just wondering with blind eyes and empty thought. This is when I realize that I need to go home.

Home is northern Arizona on the Navajo Reservation, near the Four Corners where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet. Dine Bikeyah, which means Navajo Country, is within the Four Sacred Mountains each directions and each with its own history. We pray to these mountains in our ceremonies for strength to help the patient recover from their illness. It is these mountains from which we emerged from, each had a different world and different beings. Our creation story is based on our belief that we emerged from 4 worlds gradually making our way into the world we now call the Glittering World. From beings like spiders and spirit people we emerge as humans to walk this earth and live in harmony and balance and to uphold our traditional beliefs and ceremonies. If we fall out of balance we rely on the sacred songs and ceremonies to correct them.

Its hard to look around to see the changes going on all around us. As the panic to raise awareness of globe warming, everyone is scrambling around looking for the source to fix this. As we believe “do not harm living things and keep all things in abundance and harmony”. Seeing my homelands cut into shreds for its natural resources that land is becoming barren and not producing a much needed plantation we need and our animals need. Coal is mined and power plants are being built for a prosperous future. When I see these changes happening for the better on my Rez I feel the imbalance. We believe that the earth is our mother and the sky our father, so when coal is being mined it’s her kidneys we extract and her flesh we tear and make bleed. So many things we do leads to different causes like natural disasters my dad use to say that doing the wrong things tends to come back to you.

I believe in respecting the Earth because it is our mother, I believe in the balance of the universe. And to always walk in Hozho- Walk in Beauty.