Have you ever had an experience of reading a book and feeling you're so on the same page that the author must have written your book - as though they drew the words right out of you? (though probably more eloquently that you could have ever written?)
I recently started reading Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris. She expresses why I feel so at home on the prairies and, in part, why I knew that I needed to move back to the prairies post-seminary.
"Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the Holy." p.1
"It's holiness is to be found in being open to humanity in all it's diversity. And the western Plains now seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow." p.3
"The silence of the Plains, this great unpeopled landscape of earth and sky, is much like the silence one finds in a monastery, an unfathomable silence that has the power to re-form you. And the Plains have changed me." p. 15
"It was the Plains that first drew me to the monastery, which I suppose is ironic, for who would go seeking a desert within a desert? Both Plains and monastery are places where distractions are at a minimum and you must rely on your own resources, only to find yourself utterly dependent on forces beyond your control; where time seems to stand still, as it does in the liturgy; where your life is defined by waiting. No one waits better than monks, or farmers." p.17-8
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