Not long ago, I heard a group of three women, including author Reeve Lindbergh, review on NPR Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s most famous book, Gift from the Sea, first printed in 1955. As Anne’s youngest daughter and a writer herself, Reeve added a new perspective to this book, one of my mother’s all time favorite reads.
I first read my mother’s copy when I was still a teen in college. Because the insights so touched my mother, she insisted that I read it immediately. At the time, I wondered what in the world had attracted my mother to this book so much. It was foreign to me.
After the radio review, I reread that book. I’m sorry my mother isn’t still alive so that I could tell her that I now understand.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh penned these words while she was on a hiatus from her husband and family of five children. Such separation certainly arouses introspection within any mother.
When I first read the book, I was a child and thought like a child. I think one must be a parent as my mother was when she first read the book, to appreciate fully the inner thoughts of another mother who had lost one child and was working diligently to raise five more to be self reliant people.
The copy I reread was a 20th edition of the original. In it, the author writes an Afterward: “Gift from the Sea Re-opened.” She begins, “Looking back at a book published twenty years ago, written in the midst of a busy family life, my chief sensation is astonishment. 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. Next comes an embarrassed astonishment at re-reading my naive assumption in the book that ‘victories’ (‘liberation” is the current word, but I spoke of ‘victories’) in women’s coming of age had been largely won by the Feminists of my mother’s generation. I realize in hindsight and humility how great and how many were-and are- the victories still to be won. And finally a new development puzzles me: that after so many years and such great achievement by women, my book should continue to be read.”
Certainly, I now identify with the everyday struggles this author contemplates in each essay. “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, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now!”
But for me, the symbolism far outweighed the struggles. Anne Morrow Lindbergh had returned alone to a familiar island in the Atlantic Ocean to work out her thoughts without the inevitable interruptions that five children automatically present. She uses shells - channeled whelk, moon shell, double sunrise, oyster, argonauta - to symbolize the struggle she tries to work through in each chapter. In the preface, she states, “And since I think best with a pencil in my hand, I started naturally to write.” Oh yes, I know that kind of thinking.
However, the author connects with this reader in the first chapter when she explains the mesmerizing effects of the ocean and the beach. “One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all of yesterday’s scribblings...Patience, patience, patience is what the sea teaches. One should lie empty, open, choicelsss as a beach-waiting for a gift from the sea.”
The sea heals tired minds in a way nothing else can. For years, people who lived along waterways, both salt and fresh, have understood the serenity of flowing water. Since I’ve moved to the coast, I’ve encountered many neighbors, both old-timers and newcomers, who likewise appreciate the calming effect of the water. However, several neighbors have moved on because they complain, “there’s nothing to do here.” Many developers, in an attempt to attract these disillusioned back and to appease the bored in life, build multifaceted playgrounds. They miss the point of living on water entirely. But Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who had the money to go anywhere and do anything, craved the peace brought in with the ebb and flood of the tides. On that we wholeheartedly agree.
Perhaps, the major conclusion the author reaches on this adventure is that a person must take in, be nourished, be revived in order to continue to give. Speaking of one of the shells, she writes, “You will remind me that unless I keep the island-quality intact somewhere within me, I will have little to give my husband, my children, my friends, or the world at large. You will remind me that woman must be still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities; that she must be the pioneer in achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization.”
I’m not so sure that her words don’t speak a more important message today than when she wrote them over a half century ago. Gift from the Sea certainly is worth a reread by everyone.
Happy Mother's Day.
2008
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