THE INFINITE MOMENT

In 1968 at the age of 28, with honors and an MA from Stanford University, Noël Bennett went to be with the Navajo. She stayed eight years. She stayed because she was learning what Stanford couldn't teach: What it is to be woman in a gender-balanced culture; how to honor the elemental energies of Mother Earth and Father Sky; the power of Story; the sacredness of Silence. 

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Particularly Noël felt kinship with Dinetah--the land---mesas rising up against the clear distant horizon. And she felt kinship with the Navajo worldview, hozhoji. BeautyBalanceBlessing. Her immediate sense was: "Here I see so far beyond myself. I see that far within." Only much later did she come to understand that in Navajo way, hozhoji is at once the default natural order of the universe as well as an internal state of being. 

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To Noël, this nature-based way of seeing/being profoundly mirrors the human psyche. The human soul. Over the next five decades, with hozhoji as personal gyroscope, Noël painted canvases that represent the BeautyBalanceBlessing  of female&male / earth&sky energies. Simultaneously, she gave national conferences, keynotes and workshops on the art of Navajo textiles and weaving--within their cultural context;  established the Navajo Textile Restoration Center to teach apprentices how to reweave old Navajo textiles into wholeness; and published ten books on Navajo weaving and history.  Later she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study architecture at one with nature and then collaborated in the hand-building of two structures that embody the philosophy.

 

Noël’s eleventh book, The Space Between, attests to the applicability and essentiality of incorporating

BeautyBalanceBlessing into Western daily living. In this book, she reaches through culture, time and space into the fullness of being human. By calling on her paintings, her life experiences, and her 8 years living with the Navajo, she invites us to reweave the fabric of our own cosmos into wholeness.

 

Noël paints and writes from her studio-gallery and home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.