Wednesday September 16 – ” To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.”
Author Kathleen Norris writes prose and poems that cut deep into ordinary lived reality. In 1974, after living her way into New York City’s world of poetry with mentoring from the legendary Betty Kray at the Academy of American Poets (http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/24/obituaries/elizabeth-kray-patron-and-friend-of-poets-and-their-art-dies-at-71.html) Kathleen and her husband shocked their peers by moving to Lemmon in northwestern South Dakota where Kathleen had inherited the family home of her grandmother. They stayed a long time.
In 1993 her Dakota: A Spiritual Geography took the literary world by storm. Took me by storm too. If a short book of micro essays, some only half a page, ever approaches the taught, lean focus of strong poetry, for me this is the book. In those South Dakota years she also formed a deep friendship with the Benedictine Monastery at St. Johns in Minnesota and wrote several memoirs about the intersection of her secularity with deepening roots in Benedictine prayer and wisdom.
Why, I wonder, did she come to mind in the middle of last night? This sort of question refreshes the imagination because it has no tidy answer. Anyway, I am glad she visited me today. Think of these short quotes from Dakota as poems, try reading them out loud.
Have a blest day.
john sj
Today’s Post four texts from Dakota
“Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, “But what is there to see?” The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.”
“Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.”
“To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.”
“For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.”
Kathleen Norris (born in Washington, D.C. on July 27, 1947) is a best-selling poet and essayist. Her parents, John Norris and Lois Totten, took her as a child to Hawaii, where she graduated from Punahou Preparatory School in 1965. After graduating from Bennington College in Vermont in 1969, Norris became arts administrator of the Academy of American Poets, and published her first book of poetry two years later.[1] In 1974 she inherited her grandparents’ farm in Lemmon, South Dakota, moved there with her husband David Dwyer, joined Spencer Memorial Presbyterian church, and discovered the spirituality of the Great Plains.[2] She entered a new, non-fictional phase in her literary career after becoming a Benedictine oblate at Assumption Abbey ND in 1986, and spending extended periods at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.[3] Since the death of her husband in 2003, Norris has transferred her place of residence to Hawaii, though continuing to do lecture tours on the mainland.