What Goodness Comes of This?

Meditations from the American Academy in Rome: Returning to Fridays on Oct 10

Friday Morning Meditations
Our meditations are for everyone: please feel free to join us in fall 2025
Fridays at 9am EST.

We sit for a half hour with some guided support, and I give a little talk around the poem intermittently. Please keep your microphones off to respect the space for others.

Dear friends,

Thank you to everyone who joined our sangha last Wednesday. ***Please note that our live meditations on Zoom now return to Fridays (!) until later notice.*** It will feel like coming home to start the weekend this way with you all. Our next gathering is ***Friday, October 10, at 9 am Eastern Time.*** I will remind everyone at the start of next week, with a follow-up post.

Last week’s poem was from “Walking in Beauty,” the closing prayer of the Navajo Blessing Way Ceremony. If you didn’t attend the sit, you can find a recording of it here:

From: “Walking in Beauty”: Closing Prayer from the Navajo Blessing Way Ceremony

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

I walk with beauty before me.
I walk with beauty behind me.
I walk with beauty below me.
I walk with beauty above me.
I walk with beauty around me.
My words will be beautiful.

In beauty all day may I walk.
Through the returning seasons, may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With dew about my feet, 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.

“Traveling Cheerfully”

It happened that—only a day after offering this meditation and talk—I was walking, or rather trotting, on steep steps leading from the Janiculan Hill into Trastevere, well known for their uneven and smooth surfaces. As a pair of walkers turned the corner coming upwards, I moved to dodge them coming downwards, and I found myself in sudden flight. When the fall was over, I had dislocated my right toe and fractured a bone. Over the next twenty four hours, I experienced the pain of my injury mixed with the kindness of the Italian medical community. I was treated beautifully by everyone, and it has been a deep experience of learning how to let go.

There is no lack of irony that only one day previous, I was speaking on the art of “walking lively” in the sacred “Pollen Path” poem, known widely as “Walking in Beauty,” a portion of which is included above. I even wondered, as I can be prone to a little magical thinking, if I hadn’t broken a spiritual pact by speaking of it uninitiated and not born of the Navajo culture with which it is connected. But then, a gentler, more awake and less judging voice took to my inner podium. If there has been a lesson—with some hard tuition required—communicated strongly within the past four days, it has been the realization that walking lively isn’t a thing we do, or a thing that we can fall from while doing, but a quality, a way of being hope within an injured world.

In my hospital bed (for I required a small surgery the next day), as I waited for the nurses to come to take me into the OR, I found myself smiling—surprising myself—as I had the completely unprepared-for thought, “I wonder what goodness will come of this?”

The boot I’m now wearing will have me walking more mindfully, that’s sure. Injury and illness are instant mindfulness-machines. Yet, I’d add, walking slowly and carefully, though a sound practice for survival, are not necessarily mindful, depending on how you come to them. In my hospital bed, I seemed to be receiving a deep message about the difference. It wasn’t what good will come that I heard, but what goodness. I was preparing for a crash course in what “lively, may I walk” really means. There was an undeserved gift, a cheerfulness ascending, counteracting the fall’s descent. “Lively may I walk” seemed closely knit to what my late friend, the writer Kermit Moyer, used to say. “Travel cheerfully,” Kermit would offer, with a touch of officiousness, at the end of each of my visits to his home in Cape Cod over the years.

The path is not a road. Walking is not the movement of the legs or, in my case, the toes. Traveling isn’t about going from one place to another. As my awareness passes through time, I can take nothing with me for sure but my cheer, my liveliness. Even in my boot, I’m on the pollen path.

“Bring Something Beautiful When You Come”

I had remembered “Walking in Beauty” after attending a sublimely moving ceremony led by my academy friend and colleague, Chuna McIntyre. Chuna is a Yup’ik traditional dancer who grew up in a village on the coast of the Bering Sea in Alaska. Chuna’s ancestors migrated to that region from Siberia at least three thousand years ago, or as many as ten thousand years ago when the land bridge was first formed by receding glaciers. The word “Yup’ik” means “the real person,” or “genuine person.” The dance was ecstatic, intuitive, communicating a living picture of reality—the true reality of interconnectedness of things, inanimate and living—complete with headdress, fan, fur parka, drums and ceremonial ribbon. It spoke, as Joseph Campbell has written, to the dynamism of the body. “Mythology is a production of wisdom body, not of the intellect…Rites come from the wisdom world. Rituals are enactments of myths.”

But the dance was also educational. Chuna told us, with typical cheerfulness, that when he was a child, he would ask his grandmother why the dancers had to be so heavily clothed and why they had to carry so many bells and whistles to perform the rite. Her answer was, in Chuna’s words, “you should never come to the spirits empty handed. Always bring something beautiful with you when you come.”

Before his dance, Chuna had hung pictures of masks that represented the spirit within not just beings but also things—the kayak has a face, for example—and he spoke of the seal which is killed to clothe and feed the village. Meeting the face of the seal spirit in the mask, the Yup’ik teach that you will train your gratitude and reverence for this animal who is integral to your survival. Each facet of daily life holds a spectacular presence behind its expectable facade.

Chuna McIntyre at the American Academy in Rome, September 29 2025

And I wondered: how have I lived this practice? What do I bring to air, to the road underneath me that someone has well-hewn, even hundreds or thousands of years ago? What do I bring that is beautiful to the insects, the grass I walk on, and to the trees that make oxygen from which I breathe? Have I come to this party empty handed?

Whether in hand or in our heightened perspective, we each can bring a liveliness to living, which is described so well in the above poem, “Walking in Beauty.” In beauty all day may we walk. In hospital beds and in cottages on the lakeside. In traffic. In waking up in bed. In closing out the day with our loved ones. There is room for beautiful walking in every action, at every moment.

The Navajo and Apache first migrated from Alaska; thus there is a soft connection between the roots of the Yup’ik ceremonial dance and this prayer. You might say that “I must bring something beautiful” comes in response to the awareness that “there is beauty around me.” We see the beautiful being offered us, before us, behind us, above us, below us, and we want to offer beauty, liveliness, cheer, in return. Though this mindset is hard to sustain at all moments, it soon becomes a way of life, like meditation is. It becomes a gem-tactic, to use Emily Dickinson’s turn of speech. We are constantly polishing the facets of a gem that is already carried in brilliance within us.

This wisdom is to be found in other sacred literature all over the world. I see it in mystical Christianity of the 13th century when Meister Eckhart writes, “I say we should know and recognize the nobility of being. No creature is so small that it does not desire being. When caterpillars fall from trees, they climb back up the wall so that they can preserve their being. That is how noble being is.” I see it in the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna tells Arjuna, “all worlds, all beings, are strung upon me like pearls on a single thread.” I see it in Rome when I view Bernini’s magnificent Daphne metamorphizing into a laurel tree. His sculpture offers the laurel tree a spirit face—Daphne’s in flight from Apollo at the moment of her transmutation—and when I stand before the laurel tree, I am convening with a god.

A Pollen Path Meditation

Let us not come into this world empty-handed today.

I bow to the beauty behind me: What is the beauty behind us but the beauty of the body, which has borne all of our injuries and scars, and which has carried our awareness into the present moment? Borges wrote, the body forgets nothing. It is the caterpillar that climbs the tree of each moment. The body is an ultra-personal archive. We know how Beethoven died, for example, because it was recorded in the chemical content of his hair. The body is the soft animal who runs from the past and stands at the front line of the world, and meets the world courageously there. That is how noble the body is.

I bow to the beauty before me: The beauty before us is the mind’s beauty, which has the power to imagine and recognize patterns of behavior and trances, and can admit errors, and can practice, and can heal from trauma. John O’Donohue writes in Aram Cara, “When the unconscious becomes illuminated, its darker forces no longer hold us prisoner. The work of freedom is slow and unpredictable yet it is precisely at this threshold that each individual is the custodian...of their own transfiguration.” That is how noble the mind is.

I bow to the beauty above me: In honoring the beauty above us, we revere the single thread along which these pearls of separation are strung. I write this on Yom Kippur, a day of Atonement and repentance, the day to come home again to the higher power whose ultimate, unknowable direction and creative immensity I serve. The power of bowing to the beauty above me comes in the spirit of humility. We make ourselves so small, we willingly accept our interconnected role in everything. Becoming small on Yom Kippur is related to fasting and prayer. It is to recede from the world so one can more fully embrace it and enter it. It is happening for me right now—foisted upon me by a boot—but I have not, in a long time, felt so “humbly exalted”—as in a temple or a cathedral. That is how noble that unnameable presence is.

I bow to the beauty below me: I stand honoring the dead underneath my feet, whose world was once this world. They have returned to the earth—every being, from every fly to every house of royalty—and now we walk atop them. We walk on the sky of the ancestors. Along the Potomac and in the Chesapeake Bag regions, we walk on the remains of the Anacostan, Piscataway, and Pamunkey peoples. We walk on the remains of our deceased beloveds, and we remember that we will become a part of the beauty below us. We invite that beauty into our lives as a way of humbly including ourselves—as they lovingly greet us—into their midst. That is how noble the ancestors are.

Knowing the beauty around us, let us bring the gift of beauty with us today—in all of its fallings and arisings.

With love,
David