Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

Lemmon, South Dakota, population 1,616, the kind of rural town that Americans leave in droves. Then there is Kathleen Norris and her husband, David Dwyer, poets both, and, at least in the case of Ms. Norris, spiritual seeker. Lemmon is their place.

How they chose it is simple enough. Ms. Norris's grandmother died, and she and her husband left New York for a few years to manage the family farm and cattle ranch. That was twenty years ago, however, and running a herd of cattle is not the simple answer to why they stayed. Although Ms. Norris had spent summers with her grandparents, living on the Plains year round was a different experience. What she discovered, along with a joy in solitude, was the meaning of what the Benedictines call "stability of place," and with it the Benedictine rudiments of her spiritual geography.

To backtrack:Norris had turned her back on her Protestant upbringing and in New York, was, as she put it, hanging around on the fringes of the Andy Warhol crowd. The vastness and emptiness of the western Dakota prairie drew her toward asceticism: to her surprise she did not miss the "cornucopia of New York City." Urban life no longer attracted her; silence became important to her. She discovered the desert fathers through her reading, and she found the monastery as well. Now, "as a married woman, thoroughly Protestant, who often has more doubt than anything resembling faith, "she is nevertheless an oblate of Saint Benedict, the monastery a particular oasis in the desert that the Great Plains resemble.

As in the desert, the Plains demand strict attention to weather. Storms come up suddenly: hail and drenching cloudbursts in the summer; blizzards in the winter. Norris describes them with a poet-farmer's eye, her description of a "white-out" (blizzard) resembles a white-on-white painting. It is quite evident why "a person could stand and watch this changing land and sky forever." Weather reports are scattered throughout the book--a few lines to indicate the time of year and what's happening just then. She describes the Plains as a huge dried-up sea, still attracting gulls who feed on rodents rather than fish. A sea, as a small boy of her acquaintance put it, "where angels drown."

Despite the attractions of solitude, Ms. Norris is not idle. She spends time in rural schools, teaching poetry to children for the North Dakota Arts Council. She acts as local librarian. She preaches in the Hope Presbyterian Church. She writes. And what a writer she is. Even though she speaks of the Great Plains as the void in the heart of North America, the pictures she draws of the rising plain, of the buttes. of the landscape that stretches almost beyond time, are immeasurably seductive. To be able to see the curve of the planet during a solitary walk is a great gift; the emptiness of the prairie a concomitant pleasure.

Although the heart of her book is the monastic ideal she has embraced, she has a great concern for community within the small town where she lives. The farmers of the area--and the Dwyers themselves have suffered great deprivations during the period when the rest of the world seemed to be getting rich. Norris and those others who live in the small towns of the West are in the slow lane, so she tells us, where, as in the monastery, nothing much happens. In order to avoid the monotony of such a life, a conversion, a change of heart is necessary. Norris feels that it's almost an imperative that life on the Plains be chosen, j u st as a commitment to monasticism is chosen. She points out that some families are educating their children to try careers other than farming; then, if they choose life on the Plains, it will be with the knowledge of what they are giving up.

Although Norris encourages women in her workshops to write about their experiences in this wide and empty land, this presents particular problems in a small town. Too many people are related and there is lear of oflending relatives. Again, individuals tend to whitewash the things that have happened to them, so that every story has a happy ending. Finally, the social lite in a small town is overwhelming-- church socials, teas, card parties, Norris tells the story of one woman who attended a writing workshop. She told her friends she was going to a meeting, as writing sounded too frivolous. Despite these drawbacks, Norris is convinced that a great novel could come out of the Plains, and that it could be written by a woman.

Meanwhile, there is the very special Norris spiritual geography. It embraces the Hope Presbyterian Church and the Benedictine monastery to which she is attached. These are her most particular sources of strength, even though she says that perhaps "we're all anachronisms in Dakota, a bunch of hicks...twenty-five Presbyterian farmers, or a handful of monks for that matter. don't have much to say to the world."But she speaks again of the matter of stability of place, and its especial suitability to a rural environment. Which brings us back to the monastery.

Hospitality and playfulness--these are what Norris has learned to love in the monks. These particular gifts, she believes, are what draw travelers and seekers to the monastery, where the liturgy is so deeply intertwined in the dailiness of the ora et labor "that everything in creation invites us to share in God's love." Where "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."

A poet's book; a work of beauty; a testimony to the work of the Spirit. Dakota is all of these.