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February 2 - February 2, 2023
At whatever point one opens Gift from the Sea, to any chapter or page, the author’s words offer a chance to breathe and to live more slowly.
Gift from the Sea offers its readers an unusual kind of freedom.
the freedom that comes from choosing to remain open,
I began these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships.
Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—waiting for a gift from the sea.
What is the shape of my life?
I have also a craft, writing, and therefore work I want to pursue.
to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life
By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.
Simplification of life is one of them.
What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives.
how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter
One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full.
One finds one is shedding not only clothes—but vanity.
I have shed my Puritan conscience about absolute tidiness and cleanliness. Is it possible that, too, is a material burden?
I begin to shed my Martha-like anxiety about many things.
I am shedding pride. As little furniture as possible; I shall not need much.
I shall ask into my shell only those friends with whom I can be completely honest.
I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a ...
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most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is...
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prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring.
we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication.
survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on man.
To ask how little, not how much, can I get along with. To say—is it necessary?
One is free, like the hermit crab, to change one’s shell.
you have set my mind on a journey, up an inwardly winding spiral staircase of thought.
An island from the world and the world’s life.
Islands in time, like this short vacation of mine. The past and the future are cut off; only the present remains.
Every day, every act, is an island, washed by time and space, and has an island’s completion.
How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.
We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen.
Even if family, friends and movies should fail, there is still the radio or television to fill up the void.
It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone.
Beauty of earth and sea and air meant more to me. I was in harmony with it, melted into the universe, lost in it,
the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.
I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.
Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one’s resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion.
The more one gives, the more one has to give
we are hungry, and not knowing what we are hungry for, we fill up the void with endless distractions, always at hand—unnecessary errands, compulsive duties, social niceties.
Even purposeful giving must have some source that refills it.
Solitude, says the moon shell.
Actually these are among the most important times in one’s life—when one is alone.
women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves:
“the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.”
the problem is how to feed the soul.
Quiet time alone, contemplation, prayer, music, a centering line of thought or reading, of study or work. It
every voice from the outside is against this new way of inward living.
Every relationship seems simple at its start.
true identity is found, as Eckhart once said, by “going into one’s own ground and knowing oneself.”
One must lose one’s life to find it.
