hozh’q

Hello and welcome to Word of the Week! I’m your host, Liz. This podcast is dedicated to words and phrases that are untranslatable into English. Let’s discover the nuance of the world’s languages, shall we?

This week’s word is hozh’q. A Navajo word meaning ‘the beauty of life, as seen and created by a person’. If you were to do a quick review of your ‘wealth’, you probably immediately thought of the balance of your bank account. Or the assets you own, a car, a house. But if a Navajo were asked to review their ‘wealth’, they’d immediately think of the number of songs they know by heart.

To the Navajo, beauty is not only a way of looking at life, but is in itself a way to live. One thing us Westerners can learn from this word, and its reference to beauty, is that beauty isn’t about ornamentation, it’s about substance and power. A redwood forest may look like sales to a lumberjack, but that kind of relationship is founded on an illusory split between humans and the world in which we exist. 

The Navajo live in an often hostile environment that requires the most practical concerns, so the creation and appreciation of beauty is strongly tied in with the economic, emotional, and intellectual well-being. To a non-Navajo, beauty is a quality abstracted from the surface of things, it’s part of the peripheral. We see beautiful orchards or hear beautiful symphonies.

To the Navajo, beauty is the entire gestalt of the apple and the symphony and society as a whole. In that way, hozh’q is like tao in Chinese. It’s simply the way the universe ought to be. But while tao is tao whether we see it or not, hozh’q grows from within a human being and spreads outward to permeate the universe. 

So, if your friends or family talk about their raise at work or their new whip, try replying about how many new poems or flower arrangements or paintings you created last year. And when they look at you funny, you can smile and explain that you’re practicing hozh’q in your daily life.

Here’s to this week… May you all endeavor to adopt this Word of the Week and see the world a little bit differently. I’ll be back next week with a new word. Thank you for listening!