Welcome! I am a contemplative thinker and photographer from Colorado. In this blog, you'll discover photographs that I've taken on my hiking and backpacking trips, mostly in the American West. I've paired these with my favorite inspirational and philosophical quotes - literary passages that emphasize the innate spirituality of the natural world. I hope you enjoy them!

If you'd like to purchase photo-quote greeting cards, please go to www.NaturePhoto-QuoteCards.com .


In the Spirit of Wildness,

Stephen Hatch
Fort Collins, Colorado

P.S. There's a label index at the bottom of the blog.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

The Navajo word for beauty - "hozho" - has both moral AND aesthetic connotations.



"The term 'hozho' includes everything that a Navajo thinks of as good . . . It expresses such concepts as the words beauty, perfection, harmony, goodness, normality, success, well-being, blessedness, order ideal, do for us. This is probably the central idea in Navajo religious thinking . . . In various contexts it is best translated as 'beautiful,' 'harmonious,' 'good,' blessed,' 'pleasant,' and 'satisfying.' As a matter of fact the difficulty with translation primarily reflects the poverty of English in terms that simultaneously have moral AND aesthetic meaning."

Anthropologists Leland Wyman and Dlyde Kluckhohm

Photo: Courthouse Tower, Arches National Park, UT; April 27, 2013






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