Status Updates From The Blessing Way (Leaphorn ...

“He counted on that and upon his own ability to sort out the chaos of observed facts and find in them this natural order. Leaphorn knew from experience that he was unusually adept at this…It was a talent which, when it worked unusually well, caused him a faint subconscious uneasiness, grating on his ingrained Navajo conviction that any emergence from the human norm was unnatural and—therefore—unhealthy.”

“…he would see his daughter, his daughter whom he hadn’t seen since last summer... She would be with them all summer. Begay had deliberately postponed thinking about this, because the Navajo Way was the Middle Way, which avoided all excesses—even of happiness.”

He leaned back in the chair, rereading the letter and recalling their arguments— Leaphorn insisting that there was a basis of truth in the Navajo Origin Myth, that some people did deliberately turn antisocial, away from the golden mean of nature, deliberately choose the unnatural, and therefore, in Navajo belief, the evil way.”