Being there

I’ve been thinking a lot about noise recently. Not just the sound of gunshots in the distance as my rural neighbors gear up for deer-hunting season. Not just the voices of politicians who think they can score points by shouting each other down.

It’s the noise inside my own head that’s kept me from feeling at peace lately. It’s the thoughts and worries that keep me awake at night, that keep me from feeling truly “there,” wherever I am. I don’t know how to turn down the volume.

Yesterday, feeling less “there” than I had in awhile, I pulled out my tattered copy of Kathleen Norris’ “Dakota: A Spiritual Geography,” a book that’s about so much more than one woman’s move from the noise of city life to the “desolation” of the high plains, a place she calls “the beginning of the desert West.”

I put quote marks around “desolation” because as sparse as the Dakota landscape might be, you don’t get the feeling that Norris’ life there is “desolate.” Living in western South Dakota, she writes, has nudged her into a quieter – and richer – existence where she can think (or not) and write. She even stopped watching TV.

Scarcity, Norris writes, has helped her form a spirituality deeply rooted in the power of “less” – fewer distractions that can deprive you of the quiet in your own mind, a kind of peace you can take with you wherever you go.

Norris calls it “desert wisdom,” a wisdom that allows you “to be at home, wherever you are.” To be fully “there.”

Maybe I should move to South Dakota.