Gift of the Sea: Reflection One

I have joined a small group of friends in forming an online book club, and we have been reading "Gift of the Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  It is a memoir of sorts on her life, as seen through the vantage point of how different shells she finds along the seashore reflect truths about the different stages of a woman's life.  

Before starting the book, I found it helpful to know a bit about Anne Lindberg.  She was the wife of the accomplished pilot Charles Lindbergh, but she herself was a skilled pilot, author, wife, and mother.  She and her husband explored many miles together in the sky, chartering flights between continents.  She had 6 children, included Charles Jr who was kidnapped as a young child for ransom.  (The event was declared the "crime of the century" when it occurred in 1932.)  All throughout her time of raising children and maintaining a home, she continued to pursue her interests and passions, including writing numerous books.

The first shell is a channelled whelk.  Lindbergh draws a parallel between this shell and, first, her exterior home and material things, and later, her interior life. [The shell] is simple, it is bare, it is beautiful...But my shell is not like this.  How untidy it has become! ... My frame of life does not foster simplicity."

The life of a married woman with children is much different than one in a covent or livign alone by the sea. There are pots and pans, toys, clothes (usually too many), paper, tidbits of hobbies and interests, books, and the list goes on.

If the author were alive today, I believe she would take a keen interest in the "minimalist" movement.  I, too, have an attraction to live a more minimalist lifestyle, but life requires stuff.  My apartment always feels a little cluttered and not as "put together" as I would prefer. (Having one's living room also functioning as a toy room tends to result in this!) She writes, "I mean to live a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily -- like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications."

 On my first reading of that last sentence, I felt like she resented the fact that her life held many "trappings" and "complications."  This annoyed me, since she did choose the path of marriage and motherhood.  However, as I finished the section, I drew a different conclusion.  She was saying that even within a busy, cluttered life, the essential aspect was interior freedom and grace. Yes, the external does in ways reflect the interior, but if we cannot be in complete control of the external, we can at least work to have inner peace of mind and heart.  At that matches perfectly with our daily practices of Catholicism, prayer, and growing in virtue.

Life with a toddler is messy.  After picking up the house, it will be torn asunder within minutes. I tried picking up M's puzzles the other day, and she screamed in frustration. She wasn't currently playing with them, but she wanted them right where she had left them - scattered on the floor and waiting to be played with at a moment's notice.

The goal, therefore, is to find ways each day to maintain an interior simplicity or interior freedom amidst a busy life. "How to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel."