All day may I walk.
Through the returning seasons may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.
With 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 all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
~ From "In beauty may I walk", Traditional Navaho Blessing Way Prayer
I felt myself a steady, fixed point on the earth round which a whirling gathered and spun a center. Then it was that I seemed to be no one, to belong to no one, and suddenly beholding the russet light of the turning sumach tree in the pasture, I thought,
I am leaf and I am wind and I am light. Something in the world likes faces and leaves and rivers and woods and wind together and makes of them a string of medallions with all our faces on them, worn forever round our necks, kin.