Gift from the Sea
Gift from the Sea is a book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, widow of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. Written in 1955 in Florida’s Gulf coast and revised by the author in 1983, this book contains wisdom still relevant today. Anne reflects upon seasons of life evoked by shells she collected on the beach. Her thoughts echo
“freedom that comes from choosing to remain open...to life itself, whatever it may bring: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering, comfort, and certainly, always, change” (2003 Introduction by daughter of author, Reeve Lindbergh).
Anne equates two newlyweds as the beautiful halves of a double-sunrise shell linked by a delicate hinge.
“Two people stand as individuals…facing each other…wearing the freshness of a spring morning, forgetting about the summer to come.”
Then quoting Saint-Exupery, that “love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction,” Anne moves the mid-season of a marriage to an oyster shell, struggling to fit itself on the rock, ruggedly expanding irregularly as if to house additional rooms for children and other accumulations.
Anne emphasizes the idea of marriage as a dance where two are united but separated,
“Lightly touching but confidently moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it, with the joy of living in the moment.”
Then, pictured as a tree fully matured, with
“Differentiation and separation…the unity of the tree-trunk differentiates as it grows and spreads into limbs, branches and leaves. But the tree is still one, and its different and separate parts contribute to one another. The two separate worlds or the two solitudes will have more to give each other than when each was a meager half.”
My earlier blog of converging railway tracks illustrates the illusion of marriage as two growing into “one." We retain separate self-identities in our togetherness. Furthermore, in Anne's imagination, the eye of a moon shell reminds us that we are all islands in a common sea.
“No man is an island,” says John Donne. But we are all, in truth, solitary islands, washed by the tides and crashing waves. So we must learn to savour solitude. Don’t let digital distractions dull our pains of loneliness. Carve out sacred periodic time and space to re-center our identity, to replenish our strength, and to renew meaning in our activities. Then we can reach out to communicate and contribute to the well-being of fellow islands, sharing storms and sunshine together from our individual perspectives.
The final image from the book I want to share is the rhythm of the sea.
“We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity, when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity—in freedom.”
Indeed, during the tide’s ebb is when the sea reveals most its gift of shells on beaches for us to see. We do not dig as greedy seekers for treasure, but receive them as we walk. We then wait and watch for the return of a cycle as sure as sunrise and sunset. For we live in the to and fro, mindful of the present moment to moment, whether seeing or blinded, satisfied or burdened. This too shall pass.
In this time of COVID-19, we are reminded constantly of our island status. But forget not, we are also sunrise shells of love and tree-branches growing into maturity. We belong to an oyster bed and are part of an island chain connected to each other by Spiritual water, even in a chaotic storm that seem never-ending.
0 comments