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Gift from the Sea: 50th Anniversary Edition (Paperback)
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
| Category:
Teens, Inspirational, Women |
| Market price: ¥ 178.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Gift from the Sea - inner harmony and essentially spiritual, it's a eternal journey of a woman seeking living in a "state of inner spiritual grace". A great gift to any woman... and man. |
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Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Publisher: Pantheon; Reissue edition
Pub. in: October, 1991
ISBN: 0679406832
Pages: 144
Measurements: 6.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BC00347
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0679406839
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- Awards & Credential -
Over a quarter of a century after its first publication, the great and simple wisdom in this book continues to influence women's lives. |
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- MSL Picks -
Anne Morrow Lindbergh could teach today's modern woman a wealth of knowledge on fulfillment and the balancing act of motherhood, wife and self. She has come to understand, the importance of finding peace and happiness within yourself, before you can share those qualities with others. Anne was, indeed, in her simplistic approach to life, a woman light-years ahead of her time. She had discovered, long before self-help books were fashionable, the ultimate joys and pleasures of a simplistic lifestyle, the richness of spiritual well being, and the importance of inner peace.
Written in a unique, vibrant, flowing style, this book says in a lot less words what dozens of other self-help books set out to accomplish in long-winded, psycho-analytic terminology. "Gift from the Sea" is truly a gift from the soul of a woman with great wisdom and inner beauty, and one which you will long remember. Another book I would highly recommend is, "A Year by the Sea" by Joan Anderson.
(Quoting from Sandra Peters, USA)
Target readers:
Women, young adults, husbands and wives, readers who like inspirational and leisure readings.
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Reeve Lindbergh is the author of many books for both adults and children, including the memoirs Under a Wing and No More Words.
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In this inimitable, beloved classic-graceful, lucid and lyrical-Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares her meditations on youth and age; love and marriage; peace, solitude and contentment as she set them down during a brief vacation by the sea. Drawing inspiration from the shells on the shore, Lindbergh’s musings on the shape of a woman’s life bring new understanding to both men and women at any stage of life. A mother of five, an acclaimed writer and a pioneering aviator, Lindbergh casts an unsentimental eye on the trappings of modernity that threaten to overwhelm us: the time-saving gadgets that complicate rather than simplify, the multiple commitments that take us from our families. And by recording her thoughts during a brief escape from everyday demands, she helps readers find a space for contemplation and creativity within their own lives.
With great wisdom and insight Lindbergh describes the shifting shapes of relationships and marriage, presenting a vision of life as it is lived in an enduring and evolving partnership. A groundbreaking, best-selling work when it was originally published in 1955, Gift from the Sea continues to be discovered by new generations of readers. With a new introduction by Lindbergh’s daughter Reeve, this fiftieth-anniversary edition will give those who are revisiting the book and those who are coming upon it for the first time fresh insight into the life of this remarkable woman.
The sea and the beach are elements that have been woven throughout Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s life. She spent her childhood summers with her family on a Maine island. After her marriage to Charles Lindbergh in 1929, she accompanied him on his survey flights around the North Atlantic to launch the first transoceanic airlines. The Lindberghs eventually established a permanent home on the Connecticut coast, where they lived quietly, wrote books and raised their family.
After the children left home for lives of their own, the Lindberghs traveled extensively to Africa and the Pacific for environmental research. For
several years they lived on the island of Maui in Hawaii, where Charles Lindbergh died in 1974.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh spent her final years in her Connecticut home, continuing her writing projects and enjoying visits from her children and grand-children. She died on February 7, 2001, at the age
of ninety-four.
Reeve Lindbergh is the author of many books for both adults and children, including the memoirs Under a Wing and No More Words.
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| View all 9 comments |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-28 00:00>
After watching The Spirit of St. Louis one afternoon, my boyfriend (who is also a pilot) told me that Anne Morrow Lindbergh had written a book, which, as he was told, "every woman should read." The next time I went to his house, Gift from the Sea was waiting for me.
What amazed me about this book was its timeliness, or should I say, timelessness. That a middle-aged Caucasian woman, writing during the 50's, could strike such a deeply-felt chord of sisterhood with me, a 30-something African-American woman living at the brink of a new millennium, is truly the mark of a gifted writer. We "enlightened, liberated" women of the year 2000 think, with a fair amount of condescension, that we have "progressed" so much from that time period. And yet, the issues Mrs. Lindbergh addressed are still very much with us today: how does a woman fulfill the roles of citizen, artist, wife/partner, mother, career person, friend, sibling/relative, and balance all of that with the time and self-commitment for spiritual/emotional nurturing?
I have a quote from this precious gift posted on the wall at my workstation; it is a state of being I seek as a humble pilgrim on life's journey:
"... I want first of all... to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints - to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible... By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony... I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God..."
This is a must read for women everywhere!
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Gregory Callahan (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-28 00:00>
This title was a recent selection for a book discussion group that I helped organize for my library. As the only male in the group, I felt somewhat compelled to offer token protest to the selection of this classic example of a "woman's book," but actually I was intrigued by it. Everything I had read about "Gift From the Sea" praised its meditative quality and I had to admit that the promise of that rather appealed to me.
I wound up reading the bulk of the book on Mothers' Day, which seemed quite appropriate, given that among the many issues Lindbergh addresses here is the need for mothers to find a balance between their own needs and those of their children and husbands. The need for time to one's self, a "room of one's own", the need for a spriritual dimension to one's existence-well, it seems so obvious that these needs have to be met if a woman--if any human being--is to be fulfilled and to be able to meet her (or his) responsibilities with joy rather than with dread. But the lessons that Anne Morrow Lindbergh taught in 1955 still need to be voiced in 2000 - perhaps more than ever. Lindbergh seems prescient when she speaks of the dangers of the "life of multiplicity" which had already taken root in the immediate post-War era. We know all too well that it has not gotten any better in the past 50 years and that women's lives in particular have become more stressful and, to use Lindbergh's word, "fragmented" in the past half-century.
What distinguishes Lindbergh's book from today's current crop of self-help or New Age sprititual books though is its lyrical quality. Her careful, belletristic prose is soothing and, yes, meditative in and of itself. Reading it seems to bring about the very centeredness and balance that she seeks to describe.
Although she includes no bibliography (and rightly so, as this is not a tract), I would hope that many of her readers would be inspired to seek out the works of some of the writers she quotes in the context of these essays. She does the world a great service in suggesting how Rilke, for example, whose poetry may seem impenetrable at first, can actually speak to the concerns of our own lives.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-28 00:00>
Not a book to race through! To be read slowly, alone, savored, re-read, meditated and mused on, with contentment. And if you can't find contentment, it will find you - in Anne's words - her gift from the sea.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh's thoughts are woven around her impressions gathered from her ocean-side stay away from society and civilization -- from people and things - from noise and confusion - from musts and don'ts.
What Anne discovers in her solitude at the beach, she offers to you the reader by way of her journal. The tiny shells she held and studied provide lessons to her and all of us.
Anne's musings about life, relationships, love, busy-ness, aging, simplicity and solitude came to me several years ago at a time I was re-assessing many things in my life. Like a grace, her words soothed me and helped me quiet my turbulent thoughts, and to gather my inmost spirit to bind the wounds, to fill myself with the good already all around me and to go forward.
I realized I could slow down my pace, choose my own path, ask for and expect some peace and quiet and harmony, because these gifts are there for all of us to enhance our lives.
Although written from a woman's perspective, Anne's gift from the sea is for all of us who hunger for the slower pace, the garden path, the sanctity in God's every creation down to the intricate sea shell in Anne's hand as she coddles it, examines its artistic swirls and ridges and colors, and listens to the lessons - the homilies - within its delicate curves.
A keeper of a book. You'll go back to this one, like to a favorite vacation hideaway or armchair by the fireside or corner in the garden under the stars. It'll be an old friend, a comfort and blessing.
Take a deep breath...Can you just smell the salty tang of those soft breezes off the ocean?
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Orrin Judd (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-28 00:00>
Based on its reputation as one of the seminal works of Feminism and a callow belief that the author was merely riding her husband's coattails to fame, this is a book that I have pretty studiously avoided. As it turns out, that was a colossal mistake on my part. This little book contains more interesting and compelling thoughts on the nature of human relationships, particularly the marriage relationship, than just about any other book I've ever read.
It's not possible to address them all here, but here are two ideas that I found particularly striking. Here is a passage describing a quality marriage:
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance, and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand, only the barest touch is assign. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back - it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it. The joy of such a pattern is not only the joy of creation or the joy of participation, it is also the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined.
When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. 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, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.
This image, of a loving couple as partners in a dance, not gripped in a hammer lock, but tracing a unified pattern via different steps, just seems profound to me. We all know people who demand of love that it be unchanging, or demand of a partner that they do things in lockstep; these people are never happy and we immediately recognize their relationships as unhealthy. At the same time, we recognize the good marriages around us as the ones where each partner is confident enough in the other to have faith that their separate paths will remain intertwined and will lead to the same place.
The other section that truly brought about a personal epiphany, was when she says:
...marriage, which is always spoken of as a bond, becomes actually, in this stage, many bonds, many strands, of different texture and strength, making up a web that is taut and firm. The web is fashioned of love. Yes, but many kinds of love: romantic love first, then a slow-growing devotion and, playing through these, a constantly rippling companionship. It is made of loyalties, and interdependencies, and shared experiences. It is woven of memories of meetings and conflicts; of triumphs and disappointments. It is a web of communication, a common language, and the acceptance of lack of language, too; a knowledge of likes and dislikes, of habits and reactions, both physical and mental. It is a web of instincts and intuitions, and known and unknown exchanges. The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward and working outward in the same direction.
As I read that, I was reminded of some of the marriages I've never been able to fathom, from my own grandparents to that most analyzed relationship of our day, the Clintons. The notion of the years together creating a web and of reaching a point where you, the couple, are within, looking out in the same direction, seems to me to go a long way to explaining such marriages. Think of how completely the Clintons are entangled within their own unique web, how insular their world must be, and, so long as they do work in the same direction, their relationship at least starts to make a little sense.
There is much more here besides. I approached with trepidation, fearing a chick book, and found instead a marvelous exploration of the human condition in general and of the extraordinarily complex nature of marriage in particular. It is a book that anyone will benefit by, especially actual or prospective husbands and wives.
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