Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

A book review of Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993)

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography is about a person and a place.  It is a spiritual autobiography, written by the poet Kathleen Norris about her spiritual journey.  It is also, as the subtitle says, "a spiritual geography" of the Great Plains of the western Dakotas.  Dakota is well-written and easy to read, marked by its clean prose, lack of pretension, and winsome honesty.  It is filled with aphorisms and quotable one liners.  It is a thoughtful read rather than a hard one.

Dakota is about Norris' life in a small town located on the prairie, Lemon, South Dakota.   Although her family was from Lemon, Norris was not born there and spent only part of her life there.  After her parents died, however, she and her husband moved from New York to Lemon and the High Plains.  Dakota is about that move and her life as both an outsider who didn't grow up in Lemon who is also an insider—everybody knew her parents and her family.

Life on the prairie is different and in our time it is in decline.  The country is vast and empty.  The towns are few, far between, and slowly dying.  The people can be closed, fearful, and defensive.  They often resist even good changes and want to dwell in an era long since past.   Norris describes the inertia that takes hold of their lives.  The world seems to be passing by the rural western Dakota plains.  Early in the book Norris writes, "The western Dakotas feel like America's shadow side, where the economy is not booming but in free fall and rural people have been rendered invisible in a media-driven celebrity culture." (p. xv)  The book, acknowledges the realities of the empty plains and the isolated lives people live there, and then finds numerous ways to celebrate that life.  Norris likens it to learning how to live a monastic life.  The emptiness, the constant winds, the vast distances take on a spiritual quality.

Kathleen Norris

Life on the prairie for Norris is a study in contrasts and contradictions.  The people of Lemon, for example, cherish the past but at the same time fear the truths it holds.  Where others see emptiness, she has found beauty.  What seems to be bleak and boring has taught her how to find more in less.  She learned that there are clear parallels between living a monastic life and living on the prairie.  They both seem to be confining and constraining, and yet they each give birth to unexpected freedom and unlooked for happiness.  When Norris returned to Lemon, she was a religious doubter and skeptic, but the years there have brought her back to the Presbyterian church, her family church.  In spite of the wordiness and sometimes shallow feel of mainline Protestant worship as they practice it in Lemon, she found herself attracted again to the deeper faith also found in worship.  She worked through negative elements of that Protestantism and learned to think of herself as a Presbyterian again.  The fact that the Presbyterian church in Lemon is small was a plus.  She had to take leadership.  She was asked to preach, and  in the course of things, she learned to translate old-fashioned off-putting religious ideas like "sin" into terms that make sense for her.

In sum, Norris discovered that her place of self-imposed exile on the plains became her home, a comfortable place.  The prairie is not what it seems to be.  It seems to be vast and empty.  But when you know where to look, it is actually teeming with life.

Dakota prairie

The chapter "Where I Am" (pp. 107ff), which lies at the center of the book, summarizes many of these themes.  Norris writes, for example,  "Where I am is a marginal place that is at the very center of North America..." (p. 107) It is a place where whites and Indians "live alone together."  While it seems a place of little hope where the human fabric is "worn thin," she embraces its emptiness and writes that, "The willing embraced desert fosters realism, not despair." (p. 110).  In response to this place she calls herself "a fledgling ascetic." The high plains seem to sand down Norris' soul with its vastness, its contrasts, its demands for courage and the almost stifling pettiness it encourages at times.  In her small church, she has had to learn how to preach, and she has heard other lay leaders who do a good job.  Norris thus lives in a place that calls for wisdom from her.  It is a place where she has discovered how to live on the edge of a dying world and find life in the dying.  It is a place that can't be controlled, can't be solved with quick fixes; and in this world she has found liberation and rediscovered her own past.  Her experience in the Presbyterian church is part of that process.  At the end of the chapter, Norris writes, "My own life has opened up more than I thought possible in the Dakota desert, the desert of the monastery and the small town, the desert of a small and fairly conservative Presbyterian church." (p. 122)

The prairie reminds Norris of the ocean.  Living there is like living at the edge of a vast empty and powerful sea.  It can't be controlled.  It can't be tamed.  You must learn to live with it on its terms.  In doing so, Norris has discovered that this oceanic-sized monastery with its rules, regulations, and restrictions—its dangers—is her spiritual home.  Living on the plains for her is a spiritual experience.  One hastens to add that there is no false, wordy piety in this book.  Norris is a doubter, a skeptic, and one who questions everything.  She is impatient with pretense in herself as well as others.

Dakota is written from the edges of modern American society, spiritually as well as geographically.  It is, if anything, the discovery of a counter-culture by someone who was not finding meaning in the fast-paced, fill-life-with-things world of places like New York City.  In Norris' counter-culture, empty is full, slow is good, and small is preferable.  Dakota reminds us that even in our age of conformity and uniformity there is still much that is different in our world.  Hidden here and there are whole communities that the world passes by, but which have something meaningful to teach the rest of us.  Faith in our world today is often hard won and all the more precious for that fact.

Dakota is an honest book that looks life's hard places squarely in the eye and discovers happiness, love, and meaning.  Norris is wise in a self-deprecating way that reflects the true style of wisdom.  She has been able to learn from things that others just endure.  She uses small words well.  There is something of the modern mystic in her.  This is a book well worth reading and reading slowly and thoughtfully.


Kathleen Norris Links

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There is surprisingly little about Norris on line. These two links will take you to some of what is available:
A Bibliography of her works.
The Wikipedia article about her.