Meditations with the Navajo

Book excerpt: A collection of stories, poems, and meditations that illuminate the spiritual world of the Navajo. • Explores the Navajo's fundamental belief in the importance of harmony and balance in the world. • Shares Navajo healing ways that have been handed down for generations. • Includes meditations following each story or poem. Navajo myths are among the most poetic in the world, full of dazzling word imagery. For the Navajo, who call themselves the Dine (literally, "the People"), the story of emergence--their creation myth--lies at the heart of their beliefs. In it, all the world is created together, both gods and human beings, embodying the idea that change comes from within rather than without. Poet and author Gerald Hausman collects this and other stories with meditations that together capture the essence of the Navajo people's way of life and their understanding of the world. Here are myths of the Holy People, of Changing Woman who teaches the People how to live, and of the trickster Coyote; stories of healings performed by stargazers and hand tremblers; and songs of love, marriage, homecoming, and growing old. These and the meditations that follow each story reveal a world--our world--that thrives only on harmony and balance and shares the Dine belief that the most important point on the circle that has no beginning or end is where we stand at the moment.