Anne Morrow Lindbergh - Gift From the Sea

By the Same Author
NORTH TO THE ORIENT
LISTEN! THE WIND
THE STEEP ASCENT
THE UNICORN AND OTHER POEMS
DEARLY BELOVED:
A THEME AND VARIATIONS
EARTH SHINE
BRING ME A UNICORN
HOUR OF GOLD, HOUR OF LEAD
LOCKED ROOMS AND OPEN DOORS
THE FLOWER AND THE NETTLE
WAR WITHIN AND WAR WITHOUT

Copyright 1955, 1975 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and renewed 1983 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Copyright renewed 2003 by Jon Lindbergh, Land M. Lindbergh, Scott Morrow Lindbergh, and Reeve Lindbergh.
Introduction 2005 by Reeve Lindbergh. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. This edition originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005. Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. The quotation from Auden on is reprinted courtesy of Random House, Inc. The afterword, Gift from the Sea Re-opened, was written to accompany an article on Gift from the Sea published by McCalls magazine in their August 1975 issue. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, 19062001
Gift from the Sea
1. Life. I. Title.
BD435.L52 1977 170.202233 76-56244
eISBN: 978-0-307-80517-1 www.pantheonbooks.com v3.1

Contents

Introduction to the
Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

M y mother published this book over fifty years ago, and I feel as if I have read it fifty times since then. I may not be exaggerating . Gift from the Sea first came out when I was ten years old, and this edition is appearing in my sixtieth year. I blush to confess that Id never read the book at all until I was in my twenties, though this is not uncommon for the children of writers, whoever they may be. Now I read it at least once a year, sometimes twice or more .

I read Gift from the Sea at all seasons of the year and of my life. I have never once had the sense that my mothers 1955 book has lost its freshness, or that the wisdom contained within its pages has ceased to apply, whether to my own life or to what I have learned, over time, of hers .

When my mother was writing the book, she stayed in a little cottage near the beach on Captiva Island, on Floridas Gulf Coast. Many people have claimed to know which cottage it was and where it stands today, but the Florida friends who originally found the place for her told me years ago that the cottage had been gone, even then, for a long time .

Knowing this to be true, I went to spend a week on Captiva recently, bringing with me the copy of Gift from the Sea that my mother had inscribed in 1955, quite simply, for Reeve. It was not the writers cottage that I was looking for on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, but the writer .

Following her death and the subsequent estate processes, following several celebrations and events related to our public family history, and following a number of revelations and discussions about our personal family history, I was looking to her, again, for help. I felt that I needed her wisdom and her encouragement, one more time, to carry me forward. Just as I had hoped and expected, she did not fail me .

At whatever point one opens Gift from the Sea, to any chapter or page, the authors words offer a chance to breathe and to live more slowly. The book makes it possible to quiet down and rest in the present, no matter what the circumstances may be. Just to read ita little of it or in its entiretyis to exist for a while in a different and more peaceful tempo .

Even the sway and flow of language and cadence seem to me to make reference to the easy, inevitable movements of the sea. I dont know whether my mother wrote this way consciously, or whether it came as a natural result of living on the beach, day after day, while writing the book. Whatever the reason, after just a few pages I always begin to relax into that movement and to feel like something that belongs to the tidejust another piece of flotsam floating in the great oceanic rhythms of the universe. This, in itself, is deeply reassuring .

But there is more than peace offered in this book, and more than the comforting tidal rhythms of quiet living and quiet words. Underlying all of it is an enormous, sustaining strength. It surprises me every time I meet this strength again in full force in Gift from the Sea. I tend to forget this quality in my mother, or maybe Ive just taken it for granted .

I remember how small and delicate she always seemed. I remember her intelligence and her sensitivity. But when I reread Gift from the Sea, the illusion of fragility falls away, leaving the truth. How could I forget? She was, after all, a woman who raised five children after tragically losing her first son in 1932. She was the first woman in America to earn a first-class glider pilots license, in 1930, and the first woman ever to win the National Geographic Societys Hubbard Medal, in 1934, for her aviation and exploration adventures. She also received the National Book Award, in 1938, for Listen! The Wind, her novel based on those adventures, and she remained a best-selling author all her life .

She skied with me in Vermont when she was sixty-five and took long walks in the Swiss Alps at seventy. Five years later, at seventy-five, she hiked down into Haleakala Crater in Maui, Hawaii, to spend a night in the volcano with several of her children and her friends .

I remember looking up in darkness at the great curved bowl of the night sky, bright with stars, while my mother, standing firm in her size-five hiking boots, pointed out and identified for us the Navigators CircleCappella, Castor, Pollux, Procyon, and Sirius. They were the stars by which she had first learned to set a course in the darkness as a pioneer aviator fifty years earlier .

Above all, I think , Gift from the Sea offers its readers an unusual kind of freedom. It is hard to recognize, or even to describe, but I think this freedom is the real reason the book continues to be so well loved and so well read after all these years. I am talking about the freedom that comes from choosing to remain open, as my mother did, to life itself, whatever it may bring: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering, comfort, and certainly, always, change .

In honest reflection upon her own experience, in trying to live from a core of inner stillness while actively responding, as we all must do, to the here and the now, my mother quietly set herself free, into her own life and into all life. By writing Gift from the Sea, she found a new way to live in the world, for herself and for others. It is a joy to know that with this fiftieth anniversary edition a whole new generation of readers will be able to follow her .

Reeve Lindbergh
St. Johnsbury, Vermont
March 2005

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. And since I think best with a pencil in my hand, I started naturally to write. I had the feeling, when the thoughts first clarified on paper, that my experience was very different from other peoples. (Are we all under this illusion?) My situation had, in certain ways, more freedom than that of most people, and in certain other ways, much less .

Besides, I thought, not all women are searching for a new pattern of living, or want a contemplative corner of their own. Many women are content with their lives as they are. They manage amazingly well, far better than I, it seemed to me, looking at their lives from the outside. With envy and admiration, I observed the porcelain perfection of their smoothly ticking days. Perhaps they had no problems, or had found the answers long ago. No, I decided, these discussions would have value and interest only for myself .

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