The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [141]
A healing straight out of the gospels, in which repentance and healing happen simultaneously, as in a lightning strike, in which the desire to worship is a step from death into life. And a cause for celebration in the body of Christ, who welcomes all who seek him. Blessed be those who throw the church doors open wide.
THE LANDS OF
SUNRISE AND
SUNSET
I must live here because of the quiet. On my dawn walk last Saturday the world was so still that I began to wonder if the nearly full moon, still high in the western sky, was about to speak. Eventually I heard several vehicles in the distance—no more than three in the forty-five minutes I was out—and I caught a little movement to the south of the highway that turned out to be five mule deer. Stopped, watching me, wary. One stood behind a round hay bale so that just its ears showed—the Charlie Chaplin of deerdom. Back in town, the only moving thing was a girl delivering newspapers.
This morning we had our first snowfall, and the world was even more still, more drawn into itself as the sky fell. Tomorrow, sun is forecast, and temperatures that will bare the ground, bringing us back to fall. But the first snow of the season always feels momentous here. A seasoned television cameraman once told me that the light in our snowy plains and sky is uncommonly blue, and I sometimes think I endure Dakota winters because of this blue light. Ever since I was six months old and seriously ill, and had what people now describe as a “near-death experience” of wandering down a tunnel of light, I’ve been drawn toward blue.
I live here because no one in Lemmon, South Dakota, thinks that being a writer is a big deal. They regard me with a healthy mix of pride and wariness. If my neighbor the cop is up early, ready to start the day shift, and he happens to notice that the light’s on in my studio, I’m just another person doing my chores. If a rancher delivering calves to the local livestock auction sees me walking by at 6 A.M., he knows that in some obscure way, I’m working too, up at that hour because that’s when the job gets done.
I live here because, after being out in what is purported to be “the real world,” after too much time in the literary hothouse, this is a good place to cool off. At its very best it becomes my monastery, which progresses like a river, by running in place, its currents strong and life-sustaining. This is my real world, where life proceeds at its own healthy pace, where I can revel in the luxury of paying more attention to sunrise and sunset than to clock time.
Yet I’m still a city person, at least by South Dakota standards, because I live in a town of 1600 that is by far the largest “city” in the enormous northwestern quarter of South Dakota. Country people are those who live on ranches forty miles from town, along gravel section line roads. In winter they stock up, because it may be a week or more before they can get to a grocery or hardware store. But in over twenty years of living here I’ve become enough of a prairie person to feel hemmed in by the houses and tree-lined streets surrounding me. Most of the trees in town were planted when my mother was a child, but I’ve become a throwback to an earlier generation. At least once a day I need to walk the three blocks to the edge of town and see the land, see how the sky is playing with the horizon.
I often think I live here because I’m a frustrated painter, drawn to painting this landscape with words. And even when I’m not writing about