TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2009If you haven't read it, I highly recommend getting your own copy of 'Gift from the Sea' by the late Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Reread it throughout your life, as you navigate through those times that Gail Sheedy called 'Passages'. I think you will be at once surprised and made aware of the common path women follow in their development as lover, wife, mother, and matron. It is calming and somehow reassuring to know that other women are as we were, as we are, and as we will be.
Lindbergh uses time spent at a beach cabin to write the book. Seashells found on the beach become symbols for the stages of a woman's life. She writes at a time when she is looking back on falling in love, giving birth to a child, losing the child to a heinous crime, surviving, raising other children, seeing her grandchildren, and becoming a widow.
I first read the book when I was twenty-four. I found it in a junk store in San Jose del Cabo, Baja Sur, Mexico, one of a few English language books. At the time, I loved it for it's simplicity and honesty. As I reread it every half-decade or so, I loved it for it's relevance to my life. It became a friend.
I have given my daughter and two sons their own copies, but I wonder if the boys will learn to love and appreciate Morrow's gift to us as much as I have and my daughter probably will. Maybe not, due only to limited frame of reference, not to lack of introspection or insensitivity. I hope they pass it on to their life partner, then, so that Morrow might speak to her heart and connect her with the vast common experience of a woman's life.
But is it the permanent symbol of marriage? Should it--any more that the double-sunrise shell--last forever? The tide of life recedes. The house, with its bulging sleeping porches and sheds, begins little by little, to empty. The children go away to school and then to marriage and lives of their own... What is one to do--die of atrophy in an outstripped form? Or move on to another form, other experiences?" --Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Lindbergh uses time spent at a beach cabin to write the book. Seashells found on the beach become symbols for the stages of a woman's life. She writes at a time when she is looking back on falling in love, giving birth to a child, losing the child to a heinous crime, surviving, raising other children, seeing her grandchildren, and becoming a widow.
I first read the book when I was twenty-four. I found it in a junk store in San Jose del Cabo, Baja Sur, Mexico, one of a few English language books. At the time, I loved it for it's simplicity and honesty. As I reread it every half-decade or so, I loved it for it's relevance to my life. It became a friend.
I have given my daughter and two sons their own copies, but I wonder if the boys will learn to love and appreciate Morrow's gift to us as much as I have and my daughter probably will. Maybe not, due only to limited frame of reference, not to lack of introspection or insensitivity. I hope they pass it on to their life partner, then, so that Morrow might speak to her heart and connect her with the vast common experience of a woman's life.
Oyster Bed
'Yes, I believe the oyster shell is a good one to express the middle years of marriage. It suggests the struggle of life itself. The oyster has fought to have that place on the rock to which it has fitted itself perfectly and to which it clings tenaciously. So most couples in the growing years of marriage struggle to achieve a place in the world. It is a physical and material battle first of all, for a home, for children, for a place in their particular society...But is it the permanent symbol of marriage? Should it--any more that the double-sunrise shell--last forever? The tide of life recedes. The house, with its bulging sleeping porches and sheds, begins little by little, to empty. The children go away to school and then to marriage and lives of their own... What is one to do--die of atrophy in an outstripped form? Or move on to another form, other experiences?" --Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Read other excerpts here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=5232208
Posted by lyn at 4:19 PM 0 comments
Posted by lyn at 4:19 PM 0 comments
1 comment:
Thanks for the introduction.
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