{"id":3502,"date":"2020-05-25T00:00:04","date_gmt":"2020-05-25T04:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/?p=3502"},"modified":"2020-05-26T08:54:04","modified_gmt":"2020-05-26T12:54:04","slug":"may-25-a-memorial-day-contemplation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/2020\/05\/25\/may-25-a-memorial-day-contemplation\/","title":{"rendered":"May 25 – a Memorial Day Contemplation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fear and anxious anger may be the primary distraction of this current cluster of years, pretty much all over the world.\u00a0\u00a0 St. Ignatius, my mentor of 500 years ago, teaches that the main temptation of \u201cthe enemy of our human nature\u201d (his term for the devil) is distraction\u00a0 \u2014 to absorb my inner attention about something that isn\u2019t so very important, to draw my inner eye away from my deepest graces, replacing joy with anxiety and to fuss about the wrong things.<\/p>\n

Maybe that\u2019s why Kathleen Norris came to mind today.\u00a0\u00a0 She writes words that open deep into ordinary living.\u00a0\u00a0 In 1974, after learning her way into New York City\u2019s 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<\/a>), Kathleen and her husband shocked their East Coast peers by moving to Lemmon in northwestern South Dakota where Kathleen had inherited the family home of her grandmother.\u00a0 They stayed a long time.<\/p>\n

In 1993, her Dakota: A Spiritual Geography<\/u> took the literary world by storm.\u00a0 Took me by storm too.\u00a0 If a book of micro essays, some only half a page, ever approaches the taut, lean focus of strong poetry, for me this is the book.\u00a0 In those South Dakota years she became friends with vast horizons, and with Benedictine monks at St. John\u2019s Monastery in Minnesota.\u00a0 She\u2019s written more than one memoir about the intersection of her secularity with the roots of Benedictine prayer and wisdom.<\/p>\n

Think of the following four quotes from Dakota<\/u> as poems.\u00a0\u00a0 Best to read them out loud, with pauses in between.<\/p>\n

Have a blest day,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

john sj<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s Post:\u00a0 Four texts from Dakota<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOnce, 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, \u201cBut what is there to see?\u201d The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe 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\u2019s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nmeadowlark on a fence,\u00a0\u00a0 Fog Basin, SD\u00a0 2008<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nKathleen Norris
\n(born in Washington, D.C. on July 27, 1947)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTo attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.\u201d Fear and anxious anger may be the primary distraction of this current cluster of years, pretty much all over the world.\u00a0\u00a0 St. Ignatius, my mentor of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11641],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3502"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3502"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3504,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3502\/revisions\/3504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}