Today’s thoughts are
taken from the book “Gift From the Sea” by Anne Morrow Lindberg, Pantheon Books,
1955).
This is a snail shell, round, full and glossy as a horse
chestnut. Comfortable and compact, it sits curled up like a cat in the hollow
of my hand. Milky and opaque, it has the pinkish bloom of the sky on a summer
evening, ripening to rain. On its smooth symmetrical face is penciled with
precision a perfect spiral, winding inward to the pinpoint center of the shell,
the tiny dark core of the apex, the pupil of the eye. It stares at me, this mysterious
single eye – and I stare back. Now it is the moon, solitary in the sky, full
and round, replete with power. Now it is the eye of a cat that brushes
noiselessly through long grass at night. Now it is an island, set in
ever-widening circles of waves, alone, self-contained, serene.
…How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids
it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity…. We seem so frightened today
of being alone that we never let it happen. Even if family, friends, and movies
should fail, there is still the radio or television to fill up the void….. Even
day-dreaming was more creative than this; it demanded something of oneself and
it fed the inner life. Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream
blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship
to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum When the
noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be
alone…
For a full day and two nights I have been alone. I lay on
the beach under the stars at night alone. I made my breakfast alone. Alone I
watched the gulls at the end of the pier, dip and wheel and dive for the scraps
I threw them… Beauty of earth and sea and air meant more to me. I was in
harmony with it, melted into the universe, lost in it, as one is lost in a
canticle of praise, swelling from an unknown crowd in a cathedral. “Praise ye
the Lord, all ye fishes of the sea – all ye birds of the air – all ye children
of men – Praise ye the Lord!”
Moon shell, who named you? Some intuitive woman I like to
think. I shall give you another name – Island Shell. I cannot live forever on
my island. But I can take you back to my desk in Connecticut. You will sit
there and fasten your single eye upon me. You will make me think, with your
smooth circles winding inward to the tiny core, of the island I lived on for a
few weeks. You will say to me “solitude.” You will remind me that I must try to
be alone for part of each year, even a week or a few days; and for part of each
day, even for an hour or a few minutes in order to keep my core, my center, my
island-quality. You will remind me that unless I keep the island-quality intact
somewhere within me, I will have little to give my husband, my children, my
friends or the world at large.
You will remind me that woman must be still as the axis of a
wheel in the midst of her activities; that she must be the pioneer in achieving
this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family
life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization.
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