Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh 📚

Found this book via Ryan Holiday and it reminded me of the Pearl Protocol.

the curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand.

Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego. Perhaps one can shed at this stage in life as one sheds in beach-living; one’s pride, one’s false ambitions, one’s mask, one’s armor.

We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, overreaching and overstraining ourselves in the unnatural effort.

It has a natural balance of physical, intellectual and social life. It has an easy unforced rhythm.

A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules.

One must accept the security of the wingèd life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.

each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.

For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms.

And when I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

usually select the known, seldom the strange.

Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding

Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world.

what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present?