Gift From The Sea

“I always began to relax into that movement and to feel like something that belongs to the tide—just another piece of flotsam, floating in the great oceanic rhythms of the universe.”

Reese Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s daughter, in her introduction to “Gift from the Sea” comments on her experience of reading and re-reading the text. The book is not merely inspirational for her in terms of the ideas in it and its exhortation to a new life-rhythm based on stillness and solitude. Rather, the poetic imagery and cadences of the book actually allow her to experience this different, more natural rhythm through the very act of reading it. Indeed, for Reese, this becomes a deep spiritual experience that puts her in touch with the rhythms of the universe itself.

“I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh outlines her reasons for writing the book. Since, for her, writing is an aid to thinking, she wrote to reflect on the character and balance of her own life. However, in writing and in speaking to other women, she discovered that these questions and her thoughts on them were relevant to many other women who were seeking a similar spiritual reorientation.

“Even those whose lives had appeared to be ticking imperturbably under their smiling clock-faces were often trying, like me, to evolve another rhythm […]”

On the surface, Gift from the Sea and the questions asked in it do not seem relevant to a certain group of women. These are women who appear to be leading perfectly ordered and contented lives in conventional society.