All Is Beautiful All Around Me: Navajo Ways and Ceremonial Stories

I've done a post on this book earlier, but today it comes out as a digital book on Amazon.com and Nook, so I feel I should say something about this new edition.

What can you get out of a book like this?

The stories, all of them oral renditions of Navajo healing Ways, are evocations of a culture that as Tony Hillerman says in the Foreword deserves to be called "The Enduring Navajo" . . . he also adds that this same culture is "engulfed by a dominant materialistic society."  Guess which one.

Frederick Turner (Beyond Geography) said this book was "a useful map of the cosmogony of North America's most populous tribe."

Frank Waters commented: "This oral equivalent to our Christian Bible loses none of its power and significance in its easy readability."

So, I believe you could read this book to heal yourself, to remember yourself, to bring yourself back into harmony with all things, which is the Navajo Way.

You have only to look at the last line of some of the stories to understand what All Is Beautiful is about:

"And all was well."

"And his wish was done."

"But his spirit is always there on the Wind's breath."

"And life was restored to the village."

These endings are merely beginnings -- to your own well being. Don't take my word for it, read this book of beginnings wherein all things merge and are one.