"Gift From the Sea"

I love how Anne Morrow Lindbergh describes each shell with such delicacy. It's a very short read, but it still took me days.

• the porcelain perfection of their smoothly ticking days.... whose lives had appeared to be ticking imperturbably under their smiling clock-faces were often trying... to evolve another rhythm with more creative pauses in it.
• flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today's tides of all yesterday's scribblings.
• To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith.
• Each whorl, each faint knob, each criss-cross vein in its egg-shell texture, is as clearly defined as on the day of creation.
• (My life) entrains a whole caravan of complications. /drenched in work
• Life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communications... The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life.
• The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows.
• I must find a balance.. a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return.
• 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.
• instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we chock the space with.. chatter..
• Eternally, woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim.
• (Mothers) are the great vacationless class.
• Nothing feeds the center so much as creative work, even humble kinds like cooking and sewing.
• The smile, the act, the relationship is hung in space, in the immediacy and priority of the present; suspended on the still point of here and now; balanced there, on a shaft of air, like a seagull.
• For the first part of every relationship is pure, .. simple and unencumbered. It is like the artist's vision before he has to discipline it into form, or like the flower of love before it has ripened to the firm but heavy fruit of responsibility. {人生若如初相见～}
• One has the illusion that one will find oneself in being loved for what one really is, not for a collection of functions.
• It is when we desire continuity of being loved alone that we go wrong。
• that Virginia Woolf hero who meets middle age admitting: "Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires..."
• We lie flat on the sand under a bowl of stars. We feel stretched, expanded to take in their compass. They pour into us until we are filled with stars, up to the brim.
• Dance: they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it. .. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined.
• It is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant.
• Just how far can we implement this planetal awareness? Modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry.

Florida Scott Maxwell, Elizabeth Janeway, May Sarton