North Maple Rag

Tonight was the the law school's annual Spring Fling (a semi-formal dance featuring free beer and wine). The good news is that it was very fun. The bad news is that my ride to the airport will be here in about four hours. Stay up, or go to sleep? I'm not sure there's a right answer to that question, but I'm leaning toward sleep.

Right now, I'm exhausted and I have a long day ahead of me. I'll arrive in SoDak around 2pm and I'm spending the rest of the day with friends. One of them's even having a little party tomorrow night. Also, I generally have a hard time sleeping on airplanes, so I might as well get in a couple hours now.

No one here seems to believe that I'm truly excited to be spending my Spring Break in South Dakota. But I am. This semester has been a ton of fun, but I've been feeling a bit unsettled lately and going home's always been a good gut check. As I get ready to go, here are a few thoughts from Kathleen Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

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

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.

The best description I know of the Dakota sky came from a little girl at an elementary school on the Minot Air Force Base, a shy black girl who had recently moved from Louisiana and seemed overwhelmed by her new environment. She wrote, "The sky is full of blue/and full of the mind of God."

UPDATE: My two hours of sleep may have hurt more than they helped. Oh well, at least I don't have a hangover. The only thing that makes this bone-crushing sleepiness tolerable is the thought that a headache and queasy stomach would make it much, much worse.