Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea is the title of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's famous little book first published in 1955. In the 20th-Anniversary edition the author includes an Afterword. Here is a small portion of what she wrote:

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 the "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.

Why should Gift from the Sea, after all we have undergone in these tumultuous twenty years, have any validity for a new generation of women? To look back on those years is a sobering experience. We have lived through the terms of four presidents and the assassination of one. We have wrestled with the tragedy of a long, divisive, and conscience-searing war. We have witnessed shattering advances in science and technology. We have watched a man walk on the moon. We have been rocked by political and economic tremors that are still in force and world-wide. All of us have been swept forward by the ground swells of revolutionary social movements, most of them still in progress and not wholly defined by their popular labels. Among those the most important seem to me to be the Civil Rights movement, the so-called Counter-culture, Women's Liberation, and the Environmental Crisis. (It is interesting to note that woman has taken as influential a role in the three movements which do not bear her name as in the movement she calls her own.)

The world has totally changed in twenty years and so, of course, have the lives of every one of us, including my own. When I wrote Gift from the Sea, I was still in the stage of life I called "the oyster bed," symbol of a spreading family and growing children. The oyster bed, as the tide of life ebbed and the children went away to school, college, marriage, or careers, was left high and dry. A most uncomfortable stage followed, not sufficiently anticipated and barely hinted at in my book. In bleak honesty it can only be called "the abandoned shell." Plenty of solitude, and a sudden panic at how to fill it, characterize this period. With me, it was not a question of simply filling up the space or the time. I had many activities and even a well-established vocation to pursue. But when a mother is left, the lone hub of a wheel, with no other lives revolving about her, she faces a total re-orientation. It takes time to re-find the center of gravity.



Every couple of weeks or so, Mr. Fun and I go to the ocean's shore. It is there in the wet of the sand, if I am quiet for a brief moment, I can feel my heart beat. In the pounding of the waves, I am reminded of the pattern and purpose of my life. There in the water's rhythm I remember to dance.

Today I have found myself thinking about Kathryn Bigelow and her tremendous victory last night at the Academy Awards. Certainly today she is "re-finding her center of gravity." And I bet she danced!

It has been a wholesome Monday with a morning at the ocean, an afternoon workshop at the campus, an evening with Mr. Fun and an on-line office hour. Now it is the 11th hour. I need to get some sleep. Tomorrow is coming. If you have read this far, you are amazing.

Good night from Southern California.
Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol

P.S. The photo is a young couple enjoying their little one on the sand at Crystal Cove. I had several others of them, but chose not to do a collage.