Gift From the Sea

Hello everyone! We had a fabulous Mommy Salon kick-off meeting in September. Thanks to Camille for hosting and providing refreshments and to Kristy for leading our discussion of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea.

I found Gift From the Sea to be a profoundly insightful book that is still surprisingly relevant to women's lives, 50 years after it first appeared in print. My #1 take-away thought from our discussion of the book is the principle of intermittency and its manifestations in our lives. We should not (if we want to be happy throughout our lives) expect things to always stay the same. Relationships evolve, talents grow, adversity comes and it goes, children grow up, dreams change and some come to pass, and our very feelings ebb and flow during every day. Staking contentment on an presumed constant is foolhardy, as not much in our lives in changeless apart from God and His unfathomable love for us (which, by the way, Lindbergh did not comment on in her book. I wish she had shared her thoughts on that subject!). I need not despair over departure from one phase of life, for it also signals the entrance into a new phase with its own joys and growth and troubles and triumphs. I don't need to feel guilty that my marriage isn't perpetually honeymoony. In fact, Lindbergh suggests that it shouldn't be! I ought to stop fretting that I'm not going to Europe and doing family history for several hours a week and volunteering at a soup kitchen and writing a novel and keeping up my scrapbooks and running for town council and, and, and, and...because there will be a time and a season for those things, if indeed they still matter to me when their season comes. The tide of our lives is intermittent. The trick (and it is a trick!) is to enjoy the crash of each wave and each peace between them.

In the future, we will have someone jot down the gist of our discussion so we can remember things more clearly--I know there were some gems from last month that have already slipped my memory. For now, please please please share something that touched you during our discussion or in your reading by makng a comment on this post!