Find Dakota: A Spiritual Geography Narrated By Kathleen Norris Distributed As Interactive EBook

my Dh's grandmother was from Lemmon, South Dakota, so it was fun to see that locale play into this collection of essays on faith, the Dakotas, and writing.
However, though Norris' family is also from Lemmon, she will always be an outsider and has an often uncomfortable viewpoint on those who are from the town.
There were some good gems, but I have read other books of hers that I found more spiritually edifying, I liked her Weather Reports, I liked the short poetic bursts about life on the high plains, I liked her parallels between Dakota and a monastic life.
What I'm not sure I liked yet was her tone, At times I felt it was condescending as in "Well, I moved to Dakota from NYC, now let me tell you about these simple folk.
"
I understand that some of this might be because she is writing as an outsider this is one of the places on Earth where anyone who isn't born there will always be an outsider.
I understand that it might sound weird to me because she is writing about a region and the kind of people that I am familiar with albeit one state to the South.
Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that her move and her life in Lemmon, SD were some kind of luxurious experiment something to be written about, rather than anything authentic.
Kathleen Norris and her husband David Dwyer, both poets, left a thriving New York City arts community to live in South Dakota in, Norris' family had inherited her grandmother's farm in Lemmon, a small town in northwestern South Dakota, Although they had originally planned on staying for only a few years, the couple decided to make it their permanent residence, In addition to their writing, they picked up a succession of parttime jobs to carve out a living,

sitelinkDakota: A Spiritual Geography is a collection of essays, poems, and quotes, The author writes about the stark beauty of the acres of grassland and the vast sky, It is a challenging place to live with its winds, lack of rain, dust storms, extremely hot summers, and frigid winters, Most of the towns west of the Missouri River are sparsely populated with little economic opportunity, and located many miles away from gas stations and shopping.
Native Americans are especially impoverished, Western South Dakota is a place that gets considered for missile silos and nuclear waste sites because there are few inhabitants, Life is less materialistic in the western Dakotas, Things are slow to change in the small towns, but the people are strong and willing to help each other, Norris finds that she is contemplative and finds a sense of spirituality in the quiet, stark environment of the Dakotas,

Norris is an ecumenical Protestant who has worked as a lay Presbyterian pastor, She is also an oblate, a lay member of a Benedictine community, She writes about her retreats at the Dakota monastery where there is time for introspection, The sense of community, the joy of religious chants, and the hospitality and playfulness of the monks are important to her, Norris does not discuss specific religious beliefs, but rather the emotional aspects of spirituality and community,

Norris has written a book with a strong sense of place, The Great Plains seems to be a good fit for her spiritual nature, need for inner peace, and the contemplative life of a poet.
Poetry and Essay that recognizes the link of spiritual to geography, Our place affects our interaction with God, Norris in this book explores how the extremes of living in very rural South Dakota influenced her spirituality, I appreciated her lyricism.

As a North Dakotan by birth and choice but now living elsewhere, I miss the stark reminders of the true human position in the universe that the Dakotas provide their residents.
When life and death and the cycles of seasons are harshly evident, it is somehow less easy to forget that you are a vapor planted in this time and place for a providential purpose.


Her description of an extremely rural funeral service captures the moment for me, "as people gathered for the graveside service, the men, some kneeling, began studying the open grave.
It was early November, and someone explained that they were checking the frost and moisture levels in the ground, They were farmers and ranchers worried about a drought, They were mourners giving a good friend back to the earth, They were people of earth, looking for a sign of hope, " This is the book that appeared at precisely the right moment in my life to convince me that moving to South Dakota was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I did. It was. Blue Cloud Abbey closed recently but the tranquility of the space is eternal, “Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the holy, ”

I ran across a review of Dakota on Goodreads, and couldnt believe I had not heard of this book before.
As a native North Dakotan and someone who is on a faith journey herself, Dakota seemed to be a must read for me.


The author, Kathleen Norris, has had an interesting journey in her own right, She was born in Washington DC, but spent summers in South Dakota with her grandparents, Eventually, she found her calling as a writer poetry, to be exact and furthered her career in New York City, Like many of us who left small towns and suburbia for urban centers, Ms, Norris felt that she had outgrown the religion she grew up with, And yet, she still had a spiritual longing, In Dakota, through a series of essays and poems, the reader is able to journey with Kathleen Norris as she navigates her spiritual inheritance and finally makes peace with it.


“Ironically, it is in choosing the stability of the monastery or the Plains, places where nothing ever happens, places the world calls dull, that we discover that we can change.
In choosing a barebones existence, we are enriched, and can redefine success as an internal process rather than an outward display of wealth and power.
”

This is such a beautiful book, Norris writing is breathtaking and in Dakota, she bares her soul in an effort of devotion and instruction, I will have to read this again and again, Only a poet could write about nature like this, This is part memoir, part regional history, part religion, part "spiritual geography, " Spiritual geography is how where you are from becomes a part of your spiritual expression, We all naturally have a spiritual geography but Norris shows how the wonder and beauty of the Great Plains with those Great Spacesand Big Sky withThousandsofStars is intertwined in the lives of those who live in the West specifically South Dakota.
It must be like looking at God all the time, Norris goes from discussing the regional history to intertwining her experiences in religious life within the Protestant churches as well as a nearby monastery.


I love how she shares the perspectives of those around her and I love the vignettes that feel like poems, I'll say it: this is better than poetry and this is what poetry aspires to be, This remains one of the most beautiful books I've read on spirituality, I hope it becomes a classic, It is always interesting to see how a book stands up to a rereading, This book fared fairly well in that I think it is one of Norris's best written books, There is little narrative sequence in Norris's reflections, save the general story of moving from New York to South Dakota and through a process, South Dakota becomes home.
Instead, what we have here is a series of poetic reflections on Dakota, on place, on the Benedictine monastery Norris is an Oblate,

I found it interesting that many of Norris's main themes are expanded in her later writings, "The Cloistered Walk" focus on her experience with the Benedictines, "Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and 'Women's Work'" develops the theme of daily routine, Acedia amp Me of course focuses on Acedia, but it draws together every theme that is in this book and represents a more mature reflection that is found here.
It is also more honest and complete, in that Norris there shares more vulnerably about her marriage and the difficulties she had in Dakota.
But there her prose plods and wanders, Dakota was first and artfully written, Norris gets deeper but this is perhaps one of her best artistically speaking,

What Norris attempts and succeeds at here is to enter into a place, see it appreciate it and tell the truth about it.
She speaks lovingly about the state and the people she came to love, but she doesn't romanticize it either, I read with interest her reflections and never once felt like moving to Dakota, I read this several years ago and am rereading it, I was born and raised a Catholic and have since fallen away from the Church, Norris, as a Protestant, made me look again at the faith of Catholicism versus the Church of Catholicism two very different things, While she does not say this explicitly in this book, for nonCatholic readers, the Church is a centuries old corporation of power and politics.
The faith is just that: faith, It is what doesn't get practiced by the Vatican which tries to enforce rules which cost it many former believers, This book is a beautiful examination of human existence with spirituality grounded in mancreated religion and then the religion of land, I love the way she entwined her examination of being a oblate with the land of western South Dakota, A very spiritual land of immense power, For those who simply drive through the Dakotas on the interstate, it is something they will never see, One has to take two weeks and travel on the lesser known highways or find public marked land, Then camp out and walkjust walk for hours, It is anything but empty space, I think Norris is one of the very few contemporary writers who can write about religion and faith fluidly without dragging the reader down with thick and muddy sentences or dogma.
This is especially true of her book, The Cloistered Walk, .as wise and beautiful as the Plains themselves, An evocation of the Great Plains and its influence on the human spirit, Dakota describes the harsh, desolate, yet sublime landscape that embodies the contradictions of American life as lived in the small towns where history and myth have become

indistinguishable.
Unlike the NY Times Book , I did not find this book "deeply moving", There were moments of clarity in her descriptions of extremes in weather and Hope church, But reading it was not enjoyable which is surprising since the author is as she regularly points out a poet, For instance, she uses monastic "It's hard to say what monastic people mean to us", monasticism "My monasticism is an odd one", and liturgy so often it was making me crazy.
These clunky words conjure up little meaning for me and reading them over and over was annoying, As anyone who has visited that part of the country knows, the geography she inhabits and describes is powerful and interesting, I just don't think her writing did it justice, This is a wonderful book, Norris is a poet as well as a writer, and this shows in the prose, and the precision of the language she uses, As an adult, she returned to her family home in a small town in South Dakota and, through a series of essays and snapshots, she reveals the dynamics of life in an environment that is extreme in many ways: climate, isolation, history.
She interweaves this with the related but dissimilar insights gained from the time she has spent at Benedictine monasteries in the Great Plains, and contrasts how the two societies, secular and sacred, cope with and respond to the world in which they are placed.
In "Dakota," author Kathleen Norris captures accurately, affectionately and yet also brutally honestly, what it is like to live in the American plains/Canadian prairie region of North America.
On the positive side, she addresses the stark beauty, vast unpopulated territory, recent frontier history, and interesting ethnic mix, On the negative side, she confronts the isolation both geographic and psychological and potential loneliness which follows from it, often prevalent provincial attitude, unfriendliness and even hostility shown to strangers, and severe climate.


Interwoven with all of this is Norris's spiritual journey, A sophisticated New Yorker with a rising writing career, she is surprised to find herself at home in a small Protestant church on the plains that is more conservative by far than she is.
Her spirituality is not limited to things religious, however, and she grows into a winsome understanding of God that embraces her newfound place on the plains as much as it does her church.
Plains and prairie people will appreciate and perhaps find a new perspective in the way in which her profound love of both place and God meet.


I found this book to be extremely helpful, especially since Norris's experience of moving from bigcity New York to smalltown South Dakota is mirrored by my own move two years ago, from Canada's largest city, Toronto, to smalltown Saskatchewan.
In addition, this book is a wonderful way to explore what it is like to live on or move to the plains and prairie regions, if you are a reader from another part of the world.
At heart, though, this book helps anyone, anywhere, from any religious bent, to examine their own place and spiritual journey, And it's a treat to read, .