Sea change

"WE SEEM SO FRIGHTENED today of being alone that we never let it happen. 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."

A tale of TiVo and iPods? No, these words were penned by Anne Morrow Lindbergh in 1955. The wife of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh was a pilot and explorer herself, an award-winning author, and the first woman to receive the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal.

Ironically, Lindbergh's most enduring legacy may be the result of a quiet fortnight she spent in a primitive island cottage on Florida's Gulf Coast. In Gift From the Sea, a brief yet profound volume of reflections on the human condition, she confronts issues--living in grace and harmony, finding freedom and simplicity, defining love--that continue to resonate. (The book has just been reissued by Pantheon in a special 50th anniversary edition.)

Lindbergh finds that being close to nature strengthens her "understanding and faith in the intermittency of life." A morning swim becomes "a baptism, a rebirth to the beauty and wonder of the world." Seashells are reminders that "the sea recedes and returns eternally."

"We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships," she observes. "Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid."

It's a lesson far more difficult to learn back home, where life is defined by the distractions of work and family, where silence is a luxury and solitude is deemed unreasonable. But where there is time and space, balance and diversity are possible; where there is nature, stillness and significance effortlessly co-exist.

Here, by the sea, there is inner music.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Weider Publications
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group