beautyway

 

The Alien Throne, Bisti Badlands (in Diné bizaad: Bistahí Dééł Náázíní)

Valley of Dreams, inside the Dinétah, New Mexico.

Photo Joe Witkowski 

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Among the Navajo, the land is thought to exhibit sacred order.

Each individual undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health.

Among the various sung ceremonies of this people - Enemyway, Coyoteway, Uglyway - there is one called Beautyway. It is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time (a Navajo definition of beauty).


―Barry López
Crossing Open Ground (excerpts)

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