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Within and So Without:  Dispelling Illusions, Establishing the Real in Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navajo War Ceremonial Myths and rituals convey knowledge about the internal cycle of becoming and in the Navajo War Ceremonial Where the Two Came to Their Father, first given to the artist Maud Oakes for publishing during World War II in 1943, the intense internal trials of going to this meeting with the source of their origination, the father, brings the goers into such awareness that they are internally changed.  This ceremony to prepare warriors who were going off to face battle, as here when the Navajo were leaving for WWII, takes the initiates on a psychological journey that will transform their inner states to come to this arrival with the source and knowledge of...

Originally published 18 May 2015 The very first thought that brahman had when it realized itself was, "I" (atman).¹  Along with this realization also came the first feeling:  fear.  The symbol of this first feeling is the logo of Books of the Southwest, that of the wolf:  the symbol of "the fear of the passage of time" (Goddesses 259).  It is, as Joseph Campbell told it in a lecture on "Amor," the first and deepest fear, the "fear of what one has being taken away."  A symbol of fear might be a strange symbol to have as one's sign, but that actually depends on which side of the wolf one is on—which way one is facing:  the wolf head-on, or behind the wolf, through...

  57 Years of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 Novel On the Road Comes Home Originally published 5 September 2014 September 5, 1957 In the summer of 1957, 57 years ago this summer in California, just as Lawrence Clark Powell, a renowned Southwestern author, bibliophile, and head librarian at the University of California Los Angeles was putting out the first issue of this journal Books of the Southwest, there was a tidal wave (having arrived from the East Coast) building there along the coast in California.  Lawrence’s good friend, novelist Henry Miller was now living there nearby, having come from the cultured, war-torn, mores-liberated Paris through New York City, his boundary-breaking novels including Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn still banned...