In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
Meditation on the Fifth Line of the Prayer of Diné Blessing Way... With Beauty Around Me I Walk...
We had gone up...
we had gone up...
for my 87 year old widowed father
had said he wanted
at least once more in his lifetime
to stand inside a cloud.
Long before, 35 years before,
when he had first come west,
still in his middle age,
I had tourist-taken him to the tallest
mountain... and yes, we stood
atop a clouded mountain then
and my impatient father, at that time,
had grumped: Sen vun mowtane,
yuv sein dem ol:
Seen one mountain,
you've seen em all.
So now in his so frail years,
we went up,
we went up
past 12,000 feet above sea level ,
my old father and me,
my bent over father,
me still straight backed daughter.
The daughter and the father--
We went up,
we went up, until
the sky began to weep mist,
the higher we drove,
the more we drove together
straight up into the cloud we rose.
And when we alighted
on the pow of the huge mountain
and I gently pried my father
out of the black cherry red
two-decades old Cadillac,
til we were both standing
near the 14,000 foot mark,
standing in a mist
that was not rain, but rather,
standing, truly standing
inside a huge cloud
of swirling silver specks
that caught splinter-light from...
No Source...
I could see my father then,
in the cloud,
there on this tallest mountain,
I could see my father
I could see my father
as he truly was...
and he had always been
as he would yet become
ever more so...
in more elder years
In all my years and all his years
on earth which were then
a total altogether, of 140 years
of our trying to learn the alien Planet Earth...
that he remembered he had once
stood inside a cloud in one harried mind,
now came back to stand inside the cloud
in another mind altogether.
Standing now inside the cloud
with my father,
his unusual silence,
his briefly closed eyes,
his old face quietly tilted upward,
as though he were listening,
as though he were receiving
... something....
So I did likewise
I took his papery hand;
his fingers cold,
his palm warm....
and I too closed my eyes,
I too tilted my face upward...
and thus we stood
for only moments,
inside the cloud--
the place where ego once
said, nothing new,
now soul seemed to say, true self
can only be remembered here,
true troths given,
true washing away the detritus
not in flood, but in gentle
gentle mist, each drop of which
has its own tiny drum
and knows how to play it,
skin on skin
...
inside the mountain cloud.
With beauty around me I walk...
With beauty around me I walk...
With beauty around me I walk...
This comes with love,
clarissa pinkola estes
