My Sacred Home

This traditional Navajo song is dripping with meaning in every word. Immediately we sing of the earth and nature as our material home, but more significantly it also invokes images of the love of ancestral lines in our family homes and our individual physical body. Our physical bodies are framed with bones like logs of a home, and our skin and flesh woven around us are similar to the bark and earth that form its walls. How does such materialism, traditionally made of log, bark, and mud radiate such beauty? How does the author see his humble body worthy of such descriptions as being 'sacred' and ‘holy?’ Isn't the nature of mortals evil? Such descriptions can only be used to describe God, right? Yet, to this poem, our earthly homes and physical body is described as holy! They're places where angelic figures visit every morning. Near the end of the poem it states that the words of our fathers speak to us ‘through the echos of the wind.’ These 'winds' are spiritual communications with angelic beings at dawn, the threshold between sleep and wakefulness or the threshold between winter and summer-–spring. The Native Americans understood the importance of keeping spiritual connections with our dead ancestors in order to find the signs of spring for the future. Hence, wherever ‘my house’ stands I also ‘walk in peace.’ Spend some time pondering the four cardinal directions described in this song and you will see in them colours and images that symbolise the whole human being.