About 20 years ago, when I was living in Las Vegas, my dear friend, Cindy Shelton, shared a book she was reading. The book was Anne Morrow Lindbergh's "Gift from the Sea." I was pregnant with my 4th child. As Cindy shared what she had learned about simplicity, solitude, love and being genuine, I remember thinking, "I'll definitely put that on my list of books to read when I have enough quiet in my world to have an uninterrupted thought for 6 or 7 minutes." Amazingly, that time has come, but I had forgotten my intentions until the title came up on a summer reading list on Facebook. I admit I read a few other books before getting around to checking this title out from the library, but what a treat it was. As Anne described her gifts from the sea, I felt the calm of the sand and the water and her thoughts washing through my muddled mind. The tangled knots of anxiety that make pretty regular appearances were smoothed and laid by. I loved her words and illusions and felt so pleased that I could spend a couple of days with her. I recommend this book to anyone who needs to take a breath of clean sea air and soak their feet in the cool rushing tide.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from this book:
"We are aware of our hunger and needs, but still so ignorant of what will satisfy them. With our garnered free time, we are more apt to drain our creative springs than to refill them. With our pitchers, we attempt sometimes to water a field, not a garden."
'"Purposeful giving [does not] deplete one's resources. It belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has to give-like milk in the breast."
"Nothing feeds the center so much as creative work."
"For is it not possible that middle age can be looked at as a stage of second flowering?...of a new stage in living when, 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."
"This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation."
"The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere."
"We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen. Now instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continued music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen...When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must relearn to be alone."
"It's not physical solitude that actually separates one from other men, not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation."
"Forgetting about the summer to come, one often feels one would like to prolong the spring of early love... One resents any change, even though one knows that transformation is natural and part of the process of life and its evolution...It moves to another phase of growth which one should not dread, but welcome as one welcomes summer after spring... But there is also a dead weight accumulation, a coating of false values, habits, and burdens which blights life. It is this smothering coat that needs constantly to be stripped off, in life as well as in relationships."
"Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction." Saint-Exupery "For in fact, man and woman are not only looking outward in the same direction; they are working outward."
"Have we been successful, working at the periphery of the circle and not at the center?"
