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Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

Amazon.com Price:  $10.75 (as of 02/05/2019 23:52 PST- Details)

Description

A beautiful meditation on life in the Great Plains from award-winning creator and poet Kathleen Norris.

 

Kathleen Norris invites readers to experience wealthy moments of prayer and presence in Dakota, a timeless tribute to a place in the American landscape that may be at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth. In thoughtful, discerning prose, she explores how we come to inhabit the world we see, and how that world also inhabits us. Her voice is a steady assurance that we will be able to, and do, chart our spiritual geography wherever we go.
After 20 years of living in the “Great American Outback,” as Newsweek magazine once designated the Dakotas, poet Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk) came to bear in mind the fascinating ways that people develop into metaphors for the land they inhabit. When trying to bear in mind the polarizing contradictions that exist in the Dakotas between “hospitality and insularity, change and inertia, stability and instability…. between hope and despair, between open hearts and closed minds,” Norris draws a map. “We are at the point of transition between east and west in the US,” she explains, “geographically and psychically isolated from either coast, and unlike either the Midwest or the desert west.”

Like Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge), Norris understands how the boundary between inner and outer scenery begins to blur when one is fully present in the landscape of their lives. Because of this, she offers the geography lesson we all longed for in school. This can be a poetic, noble, and regularly funny (see her discussion on the foreign concept of tofu) tribute to Dakota, including its Native Americans, Benedictine monks, ministers and churchgoers, wind-weathered farmers, and all its plain folks who live such complicated and simple lives. –Gail Hudson

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