I have been tempted forward into beauty;
I have left beauty behind me.
I look to my left, and I see beauty;
I look to my right, and beauty is there.
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Beauty surrounds me. Beauty surrounds me.
Careful of my footing, I look down,
into beauty;
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Behold! Beauty is below me.
Pausing to rest, I look up
And beauty greets me.
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Beauty is above me.
Beauty surrounds me. Beauty surrounds me.
For life, may I be drawn forward into beauty,
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Walk forward in beauty.
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(Beauty surrounds me.)
And when my life is over, and it is time for me to die,
May I be tempted forward into Beauty
-
Once again.
- Yahte’ey. Medaasi pa. Medaasi pa.
May it be so for all of us.
The story of where this came from:
A couple of summers ago I was car-camping in the mountains of Idaho. I carefully wended my way up a pretty rough road, and found a spot to camp. The next morning, I decided to take a walk with my dogs, intending it to be only a short one, half an hour or so.
It was an unusually wet summer, and I headed off across a scree of fallen rocks partway up the base of the mountain. Because everything was wet, the rocks were unusually beautiful, and I kept seeing something just ahead that I wanted to get a look at. I ended up on a dirt road that went further up through some trees, and since the walking was becoming easier–I kept going.
I came to a creek, and debated going back since I was beginning to get tired–but decide to go around “just one more bend”. When I rounded the bend, the trees opened up into the most beautiful mountain meadow, and the exclamation burst out of me, laughing, “I have been tempted into beauty!” Then I turned to look back, and followed that with “And beauty is behind me!” That sounded like the beginning of a poem (and I am emphatically not a poet), so I worked on it over the next few days, with the result you see above.
Since I had spent 5 years working on the Navajo reservation, I naturally invoked something of their chants/prayers in the poem (see below).
“Yahte’ey” is the Navajo greeting, and means “walk in beauty”. “Medaasi” is Fanti (a Ghanaian language; I spent three years in the Peace Corps in Ghana) for “thank you” (literally, it means something like “I lie or rest beneath you”); “pa” is used to give emphasis to any statement.
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