Christmas Gifts From The Sea

" . . . the small circle of home . . . the particular uniqueness
of each member of the family;
the spontaneity of now; the vividness of here.
This is the basic substance of life."
[And of Christmas!]

Shells for the Tree

For what is Christmas,
if not heaven on earth?
57 - 58: " . . . the neglect of our own inner springs. Why have we been seduced into abandoning this timeless inner strength of woman for the temporal outer strength of man? This outer strength of man is essential to the pattern, but even here the reign of purely outward solutions seems to be waning today. Men, too are being forced to look inward -- to find inner solutions as well as outer ones. Perhaps this change marks a new stage of maturity for modern extrovert, activist, materialistic man. Can it be that he is beginning to realize that that the kingdom of heaven is within?"

126: "If we stop to think about it, are not the real casualties of modern life just these centers I have been discussing: the here, the now, the individual and his relationships. The present is passed over in the race for the future, the here is neglected in favor of the there, and the individual is dwarfed by the enormity of the mass. America, which as the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future."

127 - 128: "The here, the now, and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, and -- from time immemorial -- the woman. . . . the small circle of home . . . the particular uniqueness of each member of the family; the spontaneity of now; the vividness of here. This is the basic substance of life. These are the individual elements that form the bigger entities like mass, future, world. We may neglect these elements, but we cannot dispense with them. They are the drops that make up the stream. They are the essence of life itself. It may be our special function to emphasize again these neglected realities, not as a retreat from greater responsibilities, but as a first real step toward a deeper understanding and solution of them. When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.”

― Anne Morrow Lindbergh ―
Gift from the Sea

Previous Related Posts:
Only Collect a Few (Imprints #3)
More Gifts from the Sea (& Sky)
More Gifts from the Seashore
Trees and Shells

Thanks to Antoinette for this one:

"I must write it all out, at any cost.
Writing is thinking. It is more than living,
for it is being conscious of living."

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh ~

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

More Gifts from the Sea (& Sky)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

“This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the
day, of work, of details, of intimacy -- even of communication,
one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of
stars [or jack - o - lanterns], pouring into one like a fresh tide.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906 – 2001)
Gift from the Sea (1955)

As I mentioned earlier this month on my Fortnightly blog post, I have long been a fan of Anne Morrow Lindbergh but had neglected to appreciate the continued timeliness of Gift from the Sea, first published in 1955. In 1975, a 20th Anniversary Edition includes her expression of surprise and gratitude at the book's ongoing popularity:

"The original astonishment remains, never quite dimmed over the years, that a book of essays, written to work out my own problems, should have spoken to so many other women."

If she was astonished then, perhaps she'd be astounded now; for the relevance of her work has continued well into the 21st Century. In 2005, along came the 50th Anniversary Edition [with a new introduction by her daughter Reeve], which even now, another sixteen years down the road, offers wisdom entirely applicable to life on our planet, post - 9 / 11 and midst - COVID. Her concerns from five decades ago are so contemporary, they could have been expressed this very year.

In 1955 -- before the internet, before cell phones -- she wrote:

“Today a kind of planetal point of view has burst upon mankind. The world is rumbling and erupting in ever-widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts and sufferings even in the outermost circle touch us all, reverberate in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations.

But just how far can we implement this planetal awareness? We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather — for I believe the heart is infinite — modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry. It is good, I think, for our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to be stretched, but body, nerve, endurance and life-span are not as elastic. My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them all as I would my parents in illness or old age. Our grandmothers, and even—with some scrambling—our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.

Faced with this dilemma what can we do? How can we adjust our planetal awareness to our Puritan conscience? We are forced to make some compromise. Because we cannot deal with the many as individuals, we sometimes try to simplify the many into an abstraction called the mass. Because we cannot deal with the complexity of the present, we often over-ride it and live in a simplified dream of the future. Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. An escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves. But can one really feel deeply for an abstraction called the mass? Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present? Can one solve world problems when one is unable to solve one’s own? Where have we arrived in this process? Have we been successful, working at the periphery of the circle and not at the center?” (124 - 26)

In 2021 -- feminist minister Nadia Bolz - Weber expresses a similar dilemma in her essay, "If you can't take in anymore, there's a reason: it's all too much"!

"I used to live in a very old apartment building with super sketchy electrical wiring. Were I to audaciously assume my hair drier could run while my stereo was on, I would once again find myself opening the grey metal fuse box next to the refrigerator and flipping the breaker. My apartment had been built at a time when there were no electric hair driers, and the system shut down when modernity asked too much of it.

"I think of that fuse box often these days, because friends, I just do not think our psyches were developed to hold, feel and respond to everything coming at them right now; every tragedy, injustice, sorrow and natural disaster happening to every human across the entire planet, in real time every minute of every day. The human heart and spirit were developed to be able to hold, feel and respond to any tragedy, injustice, sorrow or natural disaster that was happening IN OUR VILLAGE.

"So my emotional circuit breaker keeps overloading because the hardware was built for an older time.

And yet, when I check social media it feels like there are voices saying “if you aren’t talking about, doing something about, performatively posting about ___(fill in the blank)___then you are an irredeemably callous, priviledged, bigot who IS PART OF THE PROBLEM” and when I am someone who does actually care about human suffering and injustice (someone who feels every picture I see, and story I read) it leaves me feeling like absolute shit. I am left with wondering: am I doing enough, sacrificing enough, giving enough, saying enough about all the horrible things right now to think of myself as a good person and subsequently silence the accusing voice in my head? No. The answer is always no. No I am not. Nor could I. Because no matter what I do the goal of “enough” is just as far as when I started.

And yet doing nothing is hardly the answer.

So I wanted to share something with you. Every day of my life I ask myself three discernment questions I learned from one of my teachers, Suzanne Stabile:

What’s MINE to do, and what’s NOT mine to do?

What’s MINE to say and what’s NOT mine to say?

And the third one is harder:

What’s MINE to care about and what’s NOT mine to care about?

To be clear – that is not to say that it is not worthy to be cared about by SOMEONE, only that my effectiveness in the world cannot extend to every worthy to be cared about event and situation. It’s not an issue of values, it’s an issue of MATH."

Writing 66 years apart, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Nadia Bolz-Weber draw the same conclusion: however infinite we might like our hearts to be, our resources are limited. We must use our energy wisely, stay focused, and use our wits to solve the problems at hand. Without a sure focus . . .

"a singleness of eye . . . that will enable [us] to carry out these obligations," we will spill away "in driblets . . . seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim. . . . With our pitchers, we attempt sometimes to water a field, not a garden" (Gift from the Sea, 23 45, 52)

When it comes to staying focused on the time and task at hand -- the garden, not necessarily the entire field, Pastor Nadia says it so well:

"Because actual reality is also the only place where actual joy is to be found. If joy is delayed until a preferred future comes about, we set ourselves up for despair. But if there is hope in THIS day. Joy in THIS reality. This life. This body. This heart, then certainly we can prevail."

Somebody somewhere mentioned
this earlier, water-color edition . . .

Once Upon a Cat

~ AND BOOKS! ~

[2023: See Halloween & Christmas]

LESTER & FUQUA
Just Hanging Out in Their Citrus Boxes

One of the polydactyl cats at the
Ernest Hemingway House
JUST HANGING OUT IN KEY WEST
Digital photo taken by Marc Averette

For some readerly feline fun:

Hemingway's Cats
by Lindsey Hooper

a lighthearted novel
featuring cute cats with funny names such as
"Pawpa Hemingway, the grumpiest cat in Key West" (141)
&
Ernestine Hemingway, Lady Bratt Ashley, Kilamanjaro

Hooper loves a good pun, as she describes the cats (& humans)
hunkering down to wait out the frightful weather event:
"When Hurricane Harry met Tropical Storm Sally"
[More Wise Cats!]

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

Following last month's heroic (real life) Book Woman,
this month's reading included a notable (fictional) Book Man,
Jean Perdu, the Literary Apothecary,
who seeks to heal his friends and clients
through prescribed reading.

Monsieur Perdu would no doubt agree
with (real life) journalist Will Schwalbe:

"Books can’t do anything by themselves.
They need us.
Today we need to read more than ever.
And we need to act now more than ever."

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

Thanks to a few of my personal Literary Apothecaries:
Steven for Hemingway's Cats,
Katie for The Little Paris Bookshop
-- such fun presents for a girl who loves books & cats!

And to Igor, who says:

"This is a bookshop! We'll fight them on the Seine!

My favorite quote from
The Little Paris Bookshop:

"Do you mean: 'Sorry, I haven't finished what I wanted to say' or 'Sorry for being in love with you and only giving you headaches'?"

"Both. Any request for forgiveness. Maybe you've got used to feeling guilty for everything you are. Often it's not we who shape words, but the words that shape us." (37)

~ Nina George ~

Sorry, sorry, sorry . . .

Book Women

Thanks to Barbara McFadden for sending this vintage
photo of a reading, writing, bicycle - riding
Book Woman with Typewriter

Reading The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek [Kentucky] will open your eyes to a few things. First of all, you must brace yourelf to the nearly incomprehensible reality that this story takes place in 1936. The desperate living conditions for so many of the characters seem more like 1836. One way you know it's the 20th Century is the Pack Horse Library WPA Project.

These devoted librarians and their amazing steeds traveled to remote but inhabited areas, delivering novels, magazines, almanacs, newspapers, picture books, scrapbooks, recipes, medicinal advice, and even occasional treats of special food, such as herbs, teas, and fruit for the school children.

Thanks to my sister Diane for recommending this very inspiring historical novel which is introducing a new generation of readers to the Pack Horse Librarians -- and to the Blue People of Kentucky. We had no idea!

You would be a well on your way to completing a Great Books Course if you devoted a summer or a semester to reading all of the classic titles that nineteen - year - old Cussy Mary Carter delivers to her patrons -- Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, Robinson Crusoe, Brave New World. Despite her own tough road in life, Cussy (named after her great - grandfather's birthplace in France) is determined to raise the consciousness and the literacy of the citizens of Troublesome Creek. She distributes not only the standards but also creates scrapbooks of unique selections from her own eclectic reading:

"The poetry section I'd made filled several pages, and I paused to reread one of my favorites, 'In a Restaurant' by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. I loved how I could hear the music of the violin he'd written into it. Beside it, I'd pasted 'Trees in a Garden' by D. H. Lawrence. The poem was a pretty one about trees, and I could almost smell the naked scents of woody barks, budding leaves, and fruits." (52)

Out of curiosity, I just had to look these poems up and share them here:

Trees In The Garden

Ah in the thunder air
how still the trees are!

nd the lime-tree, lovely and tall, every leaf silent
hardly looses even a last breath of perfume.

And the ghostly, creamy coloured little tree of leaves
white, ivory white among the rambling greens
how evanescent, variegated elder, she hesitates on the green grass
as if, in another moment, she would disappear
with all her grace of foam!

And the larch that is only a column, it goes up too tall to see:
and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of things from the sea,
and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends
how still they are together, they stand so still
in the thunder air, all strangers to one another
as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in the silent garden.

Lichtental

D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)


***************
In a Restaurant

He wears a red rose in his buttonhole,
A city-clerk on Sunday dining out:
And as the music surges over the din
The heady quavering of the violin
Sings through his blood, and puts old cares to rout,
And tingles, quickening, through his shrunken soul,

Till he forgets he ledgers, and the prim
Black, crabbèd figures, and the qualmy smell
Of ink and musty leather and leadglaze,
As, in eternities of Summer days,
He dives through shivering waves, or rides the swell
On rose-red seas of melody aswim.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878 – 1962)

***************
I learened that Gibson was best known for his poem "Flannen Isle," based on a true story of the mysterious disappearance of three lighthouse workers. My first thought was, Hey, that sounds like it would make a good movie! Sure enough that show exists: The Vanishing, a 2018 psychological thriller that I only came across because of reading The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

After viewing the movie, we followed up with a documentary that gave additional background, perhaps more factual, though much remains unknown. For example, the three lighthouse keepers probably did not kill each other; more likely, they were swept away in the storm. Still, you never know what facts or fictions may be revealed, or how one title will lead on to another, when you are being guided by the reading list of a learned Book Woman!

All - loving, tender - hearted Book Woman
Photo by Jay Beets

Me as Book Woman:
Likes to read aloud!

P.S. Try to find later:
Book Woman link
Read aloud link

Sacred Ground

~ Book Benches ~
Burgas, Bulgaria

Q: What do books stores & grief have in common?
A: "Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground."
~ Oscar Wilde ~

The Magic of the Book:
~ Hermann Hesse on Why We Read and Always Will ~

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

Summer Reading So Far

Two old favs by E. L. Konigsburg:
Silent to the Bone & Outcasts of Schuyler Place

Two old favs by Muriel Spark:
A Far Cry From Kensington & Memento Mori

Two new mysteries:
Kiss of the Moonflower by Joe Benevento
Careless Love by Steve Zettler

Three sci - fis:
Recursion by Blake Crouch
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (2022 ~ Great Books)

One biography:
Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess:
The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland

Ariadne

A sad tale, no matter how it is portrayed . . .

Ariadne in Naxos ~ 1877
by Evelyn De Morgan ~ 1855 - 1919

from the novel Ariadne
by Jennifer Saint
~ My birthday present from Ben & Cathleen! ~
~ Highly recommended summer reading! ~

Dionysus: "I did not speak of my burning questions . . . the need to ask why. Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing. Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled. And how everything they once were, that spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief" (176 - 77).

"But I have told you, Ariadne, that the other gods are not like me. I have walked among mortals for many years and I know the dizzying joys of humanity: the fragile, ferocious power of human love and the savage force of grief. When I share wine with mortals, we celebrate together and I feel the clustered hopes and yearinings, the pain and fears that you all share. In those sacred rites, as simple and ancient as the world itself, we raise a cup and we drink together, and our souls are freed from the constraints of the everyday. We find what unites us, what we have in common with one another. I have felt the gaping wound and the bruised, ragged edges of grief. I know that human life shines more brightly because it is but a shimmering candle against an eternity of darkness, and it can be extinguished with the faintest breeze" (178 - 79).

Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus ~ before 1782
by Angelica Kauffmann ~ 1741 – 1807

More about Ariadne & Dionysus

Bacchus and Ariadne ~ 1522–1523
Titan ~ 1488/90 - 1576