More Gifts from the Seashore

Thanks to Vicky, Nikki, and Katie
for these thoughtful beach souvenirs!

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gifts from the Sea is full of so much wisdom, I can't put it down without compiling yet another blog post of favorite insights. It is only a short, small book and can be read so quickly, but the content is dense with empowering mantras.
All Anne Morrow Lindbergh passages below
are taken from Gift from the Sea (1955)
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906 – 2001)
The Dilemma of Free Time
Lindbergh's vocabulary on the stressful fragmentation and multiplicity of modern (i.e., 1955) life seems to be taken straight from a 21st century podcast:

“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. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul. And this is not only true of my life, I am forced to conclude; it is the life of millions of women in America. I stress America, because today, the American woman more than any other has the privilege of choosing such a life. Woman in large parts of the civilized world has been forced back by war, by poverty, by collapse, by the sheer struggle to survive, into a smaller circle of immediate time and space, immediate family life, immediate problems of existence. The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life. How long she will hold this enviable and precarious position no one knows. But her particular situation has a significance far above its apparent economic, national or even sex limitations. . . . not only . . . the American woman, but also the American man. . . . not merely . . . the American . . . but of our whole modern civilization, since life in American today is held up as the ideal of a large part of the world. (26 - 28)

"I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in America than anywhere else in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. (33)

"The room of one's own, the hour alone are now more possible in a wider economic class than ever before." (52)

The Value of Childcare, Housework, and Homemaking
Lindbergh's views of parenting in the 1950s are consistent with the current family policies of recent presidential hopeful Andrew Yang. Contemporary feminist writer Meg Conley, describes her first encounter with Yang's progressive economic vision:

"Yang wasn’t pandering to stay-at-home parents. He was preaching their good word, acknowledging their real, economic value with his platform of human-centered capitalism and policies like Universal Basic Income.

I cried in my kitchen. Someone saw my work."
*************

Compare to Anne Morrow Lindberg in 1955:
"I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly. What we fear is not so much that our energy may be leaking away through small outlets as that it may be going 'down the drain.' We do not see the results of our giving as concretely as man does in his work. In the job of home-keeping there is no raise from the boss, and seldom praise from others to show us we have hit the mark. . . . many women hardly feel indispensable any more, either in the primitive struggle to survive or as the cultural font of the home." (46 - 47)

Duration of Joy
Lindbergh writes of life's small pleasures that bring refreshment but not permanence, shells that are beautiful but too fragile to last:

“Beautiful, fragile, fleeting, the sunrise shell; but not, for all that, illusory. Because it is not lasting, let us not fall into the cynic's trap and call it an illusion. Duration is not a test of true or false. The day of the dragon-fly or the night of the Saturnid moth is not invalid simply because that phase in its life cycle is brief. Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. . . . The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.” (76)

Fleeting but not illusory. Edna St. Vincent Millay says the same thing in one of her sonnets. Love is always valid, even holy, no matter how brief:

When did I ever deny, though this was fleeting,
That this was love? When did I ever, I say,
With iron thumb put out the eyes of day
In this cold world where charity lies bleating
Under a thorn, and none to give him greeting,
And all that lights endeavor on its way
Is the teased lamp of loving, the torn ray
Of the least kind, the most clandestine meeting?

As God's my judge, I do cry holy, holy,
Upon the name of love however brief,
For want of whose ill-trimmed, aspiring wick
More days than one I have gone forward slowly
In utter dark, scuffling the drifted leaf,
Tapping the road before me with a stick.

~ from Huntsman, What Quarry?

Literary Allusions
Gift of the Sea is filled references to numerous other writers, including William Blake, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Rilke, Plotinus, Saint-Exupery, and Viriginia Woolf. Lindbergh writes, perhaps in defiance of her own reality, that "We all wish to be loved alone," quoting the Andrews Sisters ("Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree") and W. H. Auden:

It is true of the normal heart
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
I would add to this discussion the movie Choose Me and the wish expressed on the tombstone of American poet Raymond Carver:

Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

*************

If you're craving some peace
of mind as the holidays approach
give yourself an early gift ~ a copy of Gifts from the Sea.
Give yourself an hour to read & find your own connections.
There are so many!

Egon Schiele: Houses by the Sea, 1914