“With out a physique there’s no soul and with out the latter there’s no means to discuss the ocean,” the poet, painter, and thinker Etel Adnan wrote in her superb meditation on the sea and the soul. “Nobody may write in truth in regards to the sea and pass over the poetry,” Rachel Carson insisted. As a result of the seashore is the place the physique meets the ocean, it’s a place of encounter with the native poetry of the soul — a spot to be “washed of all of the excrescences of so-called civilization, which incorporates the incapacity to be glad beneath any circumstances,” as Anaïs Nin noticed in considering the beach as training ground for presence. It was on the seashore alone at evening that Walt Whitman touched eternity.
One summer season within the early Nineteen Fifties, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (June 22, 1906–February 7, 2001) left her husband and 5 kids dwelling within the suburbs of New York Metropolis and headed for seashore in quest of communion along with her personal soul. In Gift from the Sea (public library), in beautiful prose winged with the poetic, she channels what she discovered by way of the affected person work of give up and shimmering receptivity.
Lindbergh writes:
The seashore shouldn’t be the place to work; to learn, write or assume… Too heat, too damp, too tender for any actual psychological self-discipline or sharp flights of spirit… The books stay unread, the pencils break their factors and the pads relaxation clean and unblemished because the cloudless sky. No studying, no writing, no ideas even—at the very least, not at first.
At first, the drained physique takes over utterly… One is pressured in opposition to one’s thoughts, in opposition to all tidy resolutions, again into the primeval rhythms of the seashore. Rollers on the seashore, wind within the pines, the gradual flapping of herons throughout sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of metropolis and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls beneath their spell, relaxes, stretches out inclined. One turns into, in reality, just like the factor on which one lies, flattened by the ocean; naked, open, empty because the seashore, erased by at the moment’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.
However this elemental give up doesn’t come simply, or shortly, to the captive of civilization and all its deadening compulsions of productivity — it takes time to give up. For Lindbergh, in an period when airplanes have been younger and the Web unborn, that point was two weeks. I ponder what the technology-induced inflation can be at the moment.
She writes:
After which, some morning within the second week, the thoughts wakes, involves life once more. Not in a metropolis sense — no — however beach-wise. It begins to float, to play, to show over in mild careless rolls like these lazy waves on the seashore. One by no means is aware of what likelihood treasures these simple unconscious rollers could toss up, on the graceful white sand of the acutely aware thoughts; what completely rounded stone, what uncommon shell from the ocean flooring. Maybe a channelled whelk, a moon shell and even an argonaut.
In a caveat central to each meditation follow and each true unbidden love, she provides:
Nevertheless it should not be hunted for or — heaven forbid! — dug for. No, no dredging of the ocean backside right here. That may defeat one’s objective. The ocean doesn’t reward those that are too anxious, too grasping, or too impatient. To dig for treasures reveals not solely impatience and greed, however lack of religion. Persistence, persistence, persistence, is what the ocean teaches. Persistence and religion. One ought to lie empty, open, choiceless as a seashore — ready for a present from the ocean.
Complement with Rachel Carson on the ocean and the meaning of life, then revisit Lindbergh on embracing change in relationships.
