I just chanced upon this post while searching the archives for something else and it seemed so pertinent to the moment that I present it again.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote Gift from the Sea in 1955. I have read it many times across the years. It will suddenly come to mind and I will seek it out, or I will come across it in the library or at a book sale and feel the ‘nudge’ to reconnect. It is always worthwhile.
The most recent wish was as a gift for a special person. I went to my own bookshelves where my own copy and those I collect at sales as gifts would be – to find they weren’t. Not a single copy. No use fretting over the absences; especially no use trying to remember just what and where and why and when I had done with them all. I checked out my favourite book stores for copies. None. I went to the library and got a copy to read while I searched. Special person got her gift without the book. I did not want a brand new book. I wanted one that had been read and held and infused with the energy of the readers.
More searching at garage sales and book sales across a few weeks. Then came that moment – and this catches my breath with awe and delight – when something shifted and it went from ‘seek’ to ‘accept’.
I came across a copy at a church sale, a greeting card production that was “Selections from Gift from the Sea.” Then the teetering between gratitude and shucks. It wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want “selections”. I wanted the entire book.
(Tangent. This reminds me of the day when I was in my twenties and married with children and going through my childhood library to re-read old favourites and discovered that my copy of Little Women was abridged. The copy that I had read countless of times over countless years. Well, when I got over the shock I went out and got an unscarred version of Little Women and read it with unparalleled enjoyment, some resentment that I had missed so much but much delight at the unexpected gift. “Selections” shouted “abridged” at me, I guess.)
So back on track into ‘accept’. Another church book sale. Browsing with that freeform feeling of flow. My hand reached out for a book turned upside down. Gift from the Sea. Old. Loved. It was soonest given to the special person. And I now wait on my own copy. In the meantime, the library copy – well read, well handled, old – companions me in leisurely reads in relaxing moments.
And I have learned once again that there are different ways of getting things we want: making it happen : allowing it to happen. They both have their importance. They both increase with awareness.
And this leads me to ‘wanting’ endless summer, at least a year experience of it. Now that I have windows and doors wide, now that daily activities mean raising eyes from doing the breakfast dishes and seeing the swallows soar in the air outside the kitchen door with no barrier of glass between, now that I sleep with only a screen separating scents and sounds of outdoors, now that I move in and out with no need to open or close anything…….I wonder what it would be like to have this for more than six months or so. At the moment the thought is curbed by the thought of how much would be involved to bring about that change. That is the mind thinking. What if I shifted into ‘accept’ mode and let it happen. It’s all about the feeling and then letting it go. And in the interim I have the chapter on Moon Shell waiting.
(orig. published May 2008)