Norris writes words that open deep into ordinary reality. \u00a0 In 1974, after learning\u00a0her 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 peers by moving to Lemmon in northwestern South Dakota where Kathleen had inherited the family home of her grandmother. \u00a0They stayed a long time.<\/p>\n In 1993, her\u00a0Dakota: A Spiritual Geography<\/u>\u00a0took the literary world by storm. \u00a0Took me by storm too. \u00a0If 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. \u00a0In those South Dakota years, she became friends with vast horizons, and with the Benedictine monks at St. John\u2019s\u00a0Monastery in Minnesota. \u00a0She\u2019s written several memoirs about the intersection of her secularity with the roots of Benedictine prayer and wisdom.<\/p>\n Think of the following short quotes from\u00a0Dakota<\/u>\u00a0as poems. \u00a0 Best to read them out loud, with pauses.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Have a blest day,<\/p>\n john sj<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Post: \u00a0Four texts from\u00a0Dakota<\/u><\/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 meadowlark on a fence, \u00a0Fog Basin, SD \u00a02008<\/p>\n A recording of the song of the Western Meadowlark<\/p>\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/poetry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/170\/2016\/09\/meadowlark-300x225.jpg\")
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