Gift From The Sea
The sea, once it casts it’s spell, holds one in it’s net of wonder forever.
Jacques Yves Cousteau
If my first fantasy is to spend the night in a library, the close second is to recreate the experience of Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her book Gift from the Sea. My copy of this book cost $1.65 so I’ve had this dream a long time. Anne takes time from her family and responsibilities to spend two weeks on a Florida beach in a pure style of minimalism. “Here I live in a bare sea-shell of a cottage. No heat, no telephone, no plumbing to speak of, no hot water, a two-burner oil stove, no gadgets to go wrong.” And from this place, she discovers healing truths about herself, her relationships and her world.
Anne married Charles Lindbergh, one of the world’s most famous men as he made the first solo transatlantic airplane flight in 1927 from New York to Paris. She was a writer, an aviator with her husband, and the mother of six children. Her first child was tragically kidnapped and killed resulting in the Lindbergh family living in the public view. It’s easy to imagine how healing it was for her to retreat to the beach to write her reflections while finding rest and renewal.
As I reread this book this month, I was awed (again) by how her words apply to today’s world. I found new sentences to highlight adding to previous years of notes and stars in the margins. While women were just beginning to leave the home into careers in 1955, her cautionary insight into how these changes may affect their health and mental health was visionary.
Consider her description of life in 1955: “For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels with it. What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily…. This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul.” If we added today’s list of social media, she could easily be describing our lives in 2019.
In these 128 pages, Anne pens her personal answers to finding peace and joy amidst the “circus” and provides messages that will ring true to the reader of any age. This time I discovered her wonderful view of middle age (which I consider starts in one’s 60’s). “Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego…Perhaps one can at last in middle age, if not earlier, be completely oneself.” She proposes that this is a time of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence. What a wonderful view of the opportunities that accompany the gift of growing older. “…having shed many of the physical struggles, the worldly ambitions, the material encumbrances of active life, one might be free to fulfill the neglected side of one’s self. One might be free for growth of mind, heart, and talent; free at last for spiritual growth…”
Each time I read Gift from the Sea I remember why it is on my Words of Wisdom bookshelf. Its pages are falling out of their binding and are covered with my scribbled notes but there is always a new message, a new shell, that adds to my life of well-being and wholeness.