Most self-help books aim to help readers find happiness. They may be about losing weight or making money or finding the love of your life. They might even go a bit deeper and offer to help you find purpose, meaning, and spiritual fulfillment. But ultimately, those books target readers who long to be happier than they are now—and who are willing to shell out twenty bucks for a book that promises to help them. Browse at any bookstore or online retailer, and you will have lots of books to choose from.
Journey to Eloheh is not one of those books. Our story is not about how we found happiness by following a five-step plan. It’s not about helping you manifest your own individual dreams or find your purpose. Happiness, in our contemporary society, has come to mean a state of feeling good. When people talk about happiness, they often mean feeling comfortable, at ease, fulfilled, entertained, and successful. “We just want you to be happy,” many people say to their children. “You both look so happy!” people say to a new couple.
The pursuit of happiness tracks a long history in the United States. It is embedded right there in the Declaration of Independence, listed as one of the three “unalienable rights” that the founders say Creator gives to all human beings: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While we can’t know exactly what the framers of the Declaration of Independence meant by those words, we can know who they thought possessed those rights—and who didn’t. Thomas Jefferson and his peers didn’t think of the “merciless Indian savages,” whom they mention later in the declaration, as human beings possessing those rights. Nor did they include enslaved Black people in that group of humans, given that forty-one of the fifty-six signers were slaveholders. Apparently, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness weren’t for everyone. Forgive us if we’re not excited about whatever brand of happiness they claimed some people—and not others—had the right to pursue!
This book is about creating well-being, which is very different from seeking one’s own private happiness and definitely different from the sort of happiness those enslavers had in mind. People describe a sense of well-being with various words: health, wholeness, harmony, shalom, right living, or even the common good. Well-being is a much more inclusive pursuit than happiness, one that is concerned about the wholeness and thriving of others—and not just other people but everything in our environment. Well-being, as we are describing it, is for all.
When the two of us (Edith and Randy) talk about well-being, we mean a way of living that includes the whole community of creation. It’s a way of living that emerges from Indigenous lifeways, as we will see—values passed down from those very “merciless Indian savages” who the founders did not view as possessing a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Native people know that we as humans are intimately related to all living things. We are in a reciprocal relationship with every other being—and so are you! If you are not well, how can I be? If our rivers are not experiencing well-being, how can we? If our mountains are not well, how can the land below them, and the people on that land, thrive?
Measures of well-being must also include the way our society operates in all its systems and structures from small businesses to large corporations, small social gatherings to large movements, and small governments to large nation-states—including all the customs, rules, and laws that govern them. It’s like happiness and well-being are made up of two different substances: one is composed of personal satisfaction, and one of communal, even planetary, good. In short, when we talk about well-being, we are concerned with the well-being of all.
So while we don’t want to split hairs, we must remember that happiness and well-being are two different things entirely. Happiness may be a byproduct of well-being, but it is not the prime product or even the aim. Western definitions of happiness—and Western maps of how you get there—may even lead you away from well-being. Individual success, private comfort, career advancement, wealth building: research shows that the things that we think will make us happy usually don’t. Humans are not always good forecasters of what will actually bring us a sense of happiness or well-being.
Indeed, many of the values held by the Western world run contrary to living well. For example, the Western worldview stresses individualism over the good of the whole community. The Western worldview—which descends from the settlers who landed on this continent—emphasizes competition over cooperation. If you seek to live in harmony—to find true well-being—using only the values available to you through the Western worldview, you are much like the fellow who got lost on the back roads of Maine. He stopped and asked an old man sitting on his porch how to get to a particular city. With his Maine brogue intact, the old man answered, “Ya can’t get there from here.”
Maybe you feel a bit lost, too, having tried all the roads to happiness and still not having found your way. Or maybe you’re realizing that you’ve had the wrong destination in mind all along. Perhaps you’re finding out that the road to what you used to call happiness is a road toward a precipice: of social decay, planetary catastrophe, and personal alienation, depression, and despair. Maybe you know now that the place you long to arrive looks less like happiness and more like well-being. And possibly you’re realizing that you can’t get there using the values contained in the map that your parents, friends, social media, and advertisers have handed to you.
So, if you are no longer sure that you can get there from here, what can you do?
The Harmony Way
Native Americans and most other Indigenous peoples around the world consider a Harmony Way of well-being as the foundation of their societies. In the Cherokee language, this concept of well-being is often called Eloheh (pronounced ay-luh-HAY).
The Cherokee meaning of well-being is deep and resonant, and it is hard to capture in English. Eloheh means “well-being,” yes, but it means so much more. Eloheh—what some traditions call the Harmony Way—describes a state of being when all is as it should be or as it was created to be. Eloheh means that people are at peace, not at war; that the Earth is being cared for and producing in abundance, so no one goes hungry. Eloheh means people are treating each other fairly and that no one is a stranger for very long.
Eloheh is a word that we as a couple have related to for more than three decades. It’s the word we have chosen as a reference point in raising our family. Eloheh is at the center of our service to our community, and it encompasses the values in which we have built community over the years. So when we share our journey to Eloheh, know that we are speaking in the broadest of terms and the most intimate as well. We are talking about overall well-being but with very specific applications.
We have been on this journey to Eloheh for quite some time. For many years, people have listened to us, read our books, and visited Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice, our regenerative agroecology farm in Oregon. For years, people have asked us to write our story. Finally, we have decided it is time.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of Journey to Eloheh.
