Silence of the Plains

(Piotr Jarosz by William Kurelek)

“As living on the Plains has nudged me into a quieter life, I’ve discovered that this is what I wanted. I’ve had to read more, and more widely, so as not to become provincial, but interlibrary loans take care of me here. Reading is a solitary act, one in keeping with the silence of the Plains, but it’s also paradoxically public, as it deepens my connections with the larger world. All of this reflects a truth Thomas Merton once related about his life as a Trappist monk: ‘It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and my sister.’

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. I was a New Yorker for nearly six years and still love to visit my friends in the city. But now I am conscious of carrying a Plains silence within me into cities, and of carrying my city experiences back to the Plains so that they may be absorbed again back into silence…”

~Kathleen Norris