Dakota Quotes

“True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“When you come to a place where you have to left or right,' says Sister Ruth, 'go straight ahead.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“In choosing a bare bones existence, we are enriched, and can redefine success as an internal process rather than an outward display of wealth and power.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“The land lives,” is how one young rancher put it to me. But now that the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area contains more people than Montana and the Dakotas combined, I fear that his attitude will prove incomprehensible to modern, urban Americans who live as if they have outgrown the land that feeds them, as incomprehensible as a similar reverence for the land among Native Americans was to the railroad barons, merchants, and immigrant farmers of a century ago.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“It may be fashionable to assert that all is holy, but not many are willing to haul ass to church four or five times a day to sing about it. It's not for the faint of heart.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Blaming others wouldn't do. Only when I began to see the world's ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word, sin, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behavior.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Being closed in makes us edgy because it reminds us of our vulnerability before the elements; we can't escape the fact that life is precarious.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and won't allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“The city no longer appeals to me for the cultural experiences and possessions I might acquire there, but because its population is less homogeneous than Plains society. Its holiness is to be found in being open to humanity in all its diversity. And the western Plains now seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“An old woman I know who has lived all her life on ranches here and rarely complains about deprivations (she raised a family with no electricity or running water, and can remember winnowing wheat by hand with blankets in the 1920s because her family could not afford to hire a threshing machine and crew) once said to me, “The one thing I could never stand was the wind.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“In the Ghost Dance religion of just a hundred years ago, a desperate people tried to assimilate Christianity into their native religion. They believed that their ancestors would come back to help them in their fight against white soldiers and settlers; their warriors wore shirts they believed the soldiers’ bullets could not penetrate. Though this seems tragic to Western eyes, some Lakota credit the Ghost Dance with helping them preserve their ancient religious traditions over the last century. Others have found in it a viable blend of Christianity and the old religion. “I’m a good Catholic,” one elderly woman told me, “and I also carry the pipe.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Change is still resented on the Plains, so much so much so that many small-town people cling to the dangerous notion that while the world outside may change drastically, their town does not...
... when myth dictates that the town has not really changed, ways of adapting to new social and economic conditions are rejected: not vigorously, but with a strangely resolute inertia...
Combatting inertia in a town such as Lemmon can seem like raising the dead. It is painful to watch intelligent business people who are dedicated to the welfare of the town spend most of their energy combatting those more set in their ways. Community spirit can still work wonders here - people raised over $500,000 in the hard times of the late 1980s to keep the Lemmon nursing home open...
By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...
More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“If monks are crazy to live the way they do, maybe the world needs more such craziness, what Matthew Kelty has termed 'the madness of great love.' My narrow world had just opened wide, and I had glimpsed such a love.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Many people are just waking to the reality that unlimited expansion, what we call progress, is not possible in this world, and maybe looking to monks (who seek to live within limitations) as well as rural Dakotans (whose limitations are forced upon them by isolation and a harsh climate) can teach us how to live more realistically. These unlikely people might also help us overcome the pathological fear of death and the inability to deal with sickness and old age that plague American society.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Maybe it’s our sky that makes us crazy. We can see the weather coming, and we like it that way. Being truly of the Plains, however, means something more. It’s the old North Dakota farmer asked by a sociologist why he hasn’t planted trees around his farmhouse. No shelterbelt, not even a shade tree with a swing for his children. “Don’t like trees,” he said, “they hem you in.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“words of a sixth-century monk, Dorotheus of Gaza: “The root of all disturbance, if one will go to its source, is that no one will blame himself.” When I read those words in a sermon at Hope Church, one old farmer forgot himself; he nodded and said aloud, “That’s right.” He was assenting to a hard truth, one confirmed by a lifetime of experience.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky. The beauty of the Plains is like that of an icon; it does not give an inch to sentiment or romance. The flow of the land, with its odd twists and buttes, is like the flow of Gregorian chant that rises and falls beyond melody, beyond reason or human expectation, but perfectly. Maybe seeing the Plains is like seeing an icon: what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Living close to such an expanse of land I find I have little incentive to move fast, little need of instant information. I have learned to trust the processes that take time, to value change that is not sudden or ill-considered but grows out of the ground of experience. Such change is properly defined as conversion, a word that at its root connotes not a change of essence but of perspective, as turning round; turning back to or returning; turning one’s attention to.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“I know as well as anyone that a lot of book learning doesn’t make a person wise (sometimes it simply legitimizes stupidity),”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“In 1925, when 53.2 percent of American homes had electricity, the figure for eastern North Dakota was 38.8 percent and for western North Dakota, 2.9 percent.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“Fortunately a Benedictine friend provided one answer: “Sin, in the New Testament,” he told me, “is the failure to do concrete acts of love.” That is something I can live with, a guide in my conversion.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“It’s also a much better definition of sin than I learned as a child: sin as breaking rules.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

“to quote a Quaker friend, “trust comes before belief and faith is a response to love more than an acceptance of dogma.”
― Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography