Dropping in on Kathleen Norris

A few years ago I was traveling home from Montana to Illinois when I decided to detour three hundred miles to Kathleen Norris’s town of Lemmon, North Dakota.  I didn’t tell her I was coming.  I just stopped in.  Not that I saw her, and I doubt that she even knew I was there.

Norris is the author of such books as Dakota, Cloister Walk, and Amazing Grace, and moved to North Dakota after living in the bright, shining din of New York City. I wanted to see where she writes of isolation and spirituality in a place she describes as “the high plains desert, full of sage and tumbleweed and hardy shortgrass.” 

Half an hour from her town, I drove into a thunderstorm and the world went dramatic -- dark and moody with hard driving rain.  As I came around a bend in the road, a slant of sunlight burst through the clouds and lit up a patch of the prairie.  I pulled over to the side of the road to watch.  The hillside sloped down to a low ridge of brown rock that cradled a small marsh with cattails and sedge.  The rays of the sun shimmered on the wet, green prairie grass as blue sky returned in the west.  A strong wind pushed the black storm clouds east and made it hard for birds to fly anywhere.  The rough, unforgiving land was stunning.

By the time I arrived at her town, the sky had cleared and warm sunlight was drying the earth.  The town is what I imagined it would be from her writing, a place trying to survive with the boom years behind it – abandoned stores, buildings in need of paint, and a petrified wood park.  I felt nostalgic surveying an aging town that had been physically pared back, but there were enduring signs of life.  A town is its people and if those who remain still gather to sing and dance, then their community is strong.

At the small café downtown, I ordered coffee, a slice of cherry pie, and watched the customers around me, thinking, these are Kathleen’s people.  They know her, and they knew generations of her kin.  Undoubtedly she has settled into a place among them as the Norris who writes books, is famous in the big cites, and flies off to give speeches.  They probably talk farm details with her, as well as matters of small town life that are coming up for debate at the next town meeting.  They see her in the grocery store and in church on Sunday.  Perhaps some of them talk to her about spirituality and mysticism, although most probably don’t.  Spirituality here is understood in one’s bones more than it is spoken, if it’s anything like the small town in Wisconsin where I grew up.

I was tempted to tack a note on the restaurant’s community bulletin board that would catch her eye one day, to let her know that her writings challenge me to be Protestant and spiritual, to value silence for the wisdom it brings, and to pay attention to my spiritual geography, the interplay between the landscape where I live and my spirit. 

But this is where she lives.  It’s her space to wander around in meditations that are as open as the land, following the rhythm of her thoughts and inklings to wherever they lead, and writing about the connections that will inspire people who live far away.  This is where she writes, where she can be just another person in town.  If she thought that strangers were here to see her, she might not be able to focus on her work.  I wouldn’t.  I live in a large city and I like to go to coffeehouses and walk on the street knowing that people don’t know who I am. I can work out the structure of a piece without worrying about being interrupted.

For Norris, the western Plains were her deserts of Egypt and Cappadocia where fourth-century monks set up shop and connected to the spirituality of the landscape:  “bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow.”  It was here, in this land of rough beauty and constant wind, that she found her voice as a writer.  From her I learned to pay attention when nothing seems to be going on, for then I begin to travel the wilderness within me.

(originally published by antler journal)