Dakota
I recently finished Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris. I mentioned earlier that this was not the easiest read but I found it rewarding in how I experience life in South Dakota.
I almost missed the boat as I read the book, trying to read it as a book of sociology and culture. The want you will find in this approach is considerable and frustrating. As soon as you can see the book as a spiritual journey as its title betrays, it comes together in a very deep and moving work.
She begins:
The high plains, the beginning of the desert west, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it before it bestows a blessing. This can mean driving through a snowstorm on icy roads, wondering whether you’ll have to pull over and spend the night in your car, only to emerge under tag ends of clouds into a clear sky blazing with stars. Suddenly you know what you’re seeing: the earth has turned to face the center of the galaxy, and many more stars are visible than the ones we usually see on our wing of the spiral.
Had I read this book from a coffee house in Los Angeles I could never have imagined a place that one wrestles with and yet my own experience here confirms this – the journey that I made to get here was from a large metropolitan place like Norris (she came from New York) and there are many things that she touches on that I experience.
Where I am is a place where the human fabric is worn thin, farms and ranches and little towns scattered over miles of seemingly endless, empty grassland. On a clear night you can see not only thousands of stars but the lights of towns fifty miles away. Scattered between you and the horizon, the lights of farmhouses look like ships at sea… some have come to love living under its winds and storms. Some have come to prefer the treelessness and isolation, becoming monks of the land, knowing that its loneliness is an honest reflection of the essential human loneliness.
At her best she is personal – she talks about this place and her growth. Although she is vague on her spirituality, her approach has hallmarks that are fascinating. An example of this is prayer – you can glean that she finds a formal, verbal prayer as trite. And yet she perceives herself and others as living a life of prayer here based on the actions of life and closeness with the physical terrain. Another interesting feature of her discussion is that she perceives her faith as an inheritance: "Grandma Totten’s rain barrel." A friend I have reacted strongly to this – “It is a choice!” he pleaded. But I agree that a religion can be a bit like land left behind: though you may do with it as you wish it came from somewhere.
The metaphysical and intuitive speech finds its shortcomings in attempts Norris makes to link her own obsessive spiritual lens to the Dakotans that surround her. She strives to find their gossip as an odd form of prayer and the weather as a soulful experience of God. The problem with this is that it has everything to do with her own spiritual journey and mystical personality; it is such an awkward fit for the people I find around me. An example of this is the concept that Dakota inspires a personal confrontation; the emptiness of this place forces a person to look inside themselves for belief and inspiration. For those that seek it this can be true but I find that most people here apply themselves wholly to a physical, insular lifestyle that consumes the need to look for spiritual or intellectual inspiration. Instead it strips away complexity and leaves life to operation: operation on the land, the people around them and the traditions they inherited.
Large sections of the book devote themselves to monasticism and the lives of “desert monks.” This is interesting and challenging – interesting because it can inspire a question in oneself of what true devotion to faith can mean and challenging because the perspective shift comes back to you and how you act out what you believe.
9:27:54 PM 
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