She Speaks for Me

I want first of all, to be at peace with myself.

I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life

that will enable me to carry out….obligations and activities as well as I can.

I want in fact – to borrow from the language of the Saints – to live “in grace”

as much of the time as possible.

-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I must admit, the name of her husband Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. was more familiar to me  than she was. She was the first licensed woman glider pilot in the US. And I didn’t know  that she writes until I encountered her  inspirational and probably her best-known work,  The Gift From The Sea, a small and hardbound volume  which I enjoyed reading tremendously. It’s a book of essays which was first published in 1955.  I was born a year after its publication and yet her book speaks for women of all ages – about life, love and marriage, peaceful solitude,  and  soul-searching.  She writes with a poetic style that makes you savor every page because she is telling the world what you can’t verbalize yourself,  that sort that gets into you and you can relate to  it like it was your story too.  And you wish that you would be brave enough to do the same, just waiting, waiting for a gift from the sea.

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