The Abiding ‘Gift’ of Anne Morrow Lindbergh
In my twenties my mother foisted on me a slim book titled Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and told me it was essential to a woman’s life. Not this woman, I’d thought—a business school graduate soon to start my own enterprise, a young woman certain she knew everything there was to know of the world. I gave the book a patronizing glance—many of the chapters were named after seashells—stuck it on a bookshelf and forgot about it.
Forty years later I’m enrolled in a program of spiritual direction, learning how to counsel people to connect to their deepest longings—and in the process, my own. I’m sitting at my desk, devouring an article by Reverend Walter Burghardt titled “Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real.” He writes of mystics, social workers, philosophers who know how to engage this “long loving look.” Touch these people, he says, “and you will touch the stars.” One name he mentions in the article astonishes me: Anne Morrow Lindbergh. He references what he calls her “counterculture conviction” as expressed in Gift From the Sea—she writes that she must have her “hour to be alone.”
! The book my mother loved and that I’d scorned. I scour my shelves to no avail. I determine to find it. Finally, I spot it on a shelf at my mother’s house. I leaf through pages hoping to find some trace of what my mother thought or felt as she
