The House Dressing Company

Today I am soooo excited to share a very special book with you.  But first, I hope you had a great couple weeks!  Did you get to see the torch relay?  The kids and I managed to see it twice on one day.  I know it’s something that they will never forget.

Also, we all had a fantastic family holiday and now we are excited for the coming of the holiday season.  Amelia is already asking when Santa arrives!  I can’t believe it’s November!

The book I wish to share is titled “Gift from the Sea.  My girlfriend Karen gave it to me years ago.  If you’ve never read this book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh I must say that it’s lovely and certainly a keeper and one that you will want to buy additional copies of for close friends.  It is the kind of book that you will read again and again for the special wisdom that she shares for our lives as women.  She wrote it in the 50’s and 20 years later for additional printings she wrote a foreword indicating her own utter surprise that the book still held strong wisdom that was to her, surprisingly timeless.  Here it is now 50 years later and I will probably read it numerous times over the next 50 years should I still be kicking!

I like to read it alone by the seaside, when I can,  particularly the tropical seaside.  We spent our family vacation in the Bahamas for 10 days. So I managed a wee bit of time alone on the beach to take in this lovely, much needed wisdom from her.  This is the beach that we stayed at, absolutely exquisite!

She so eloquently defines the stages of our lives with seashell analogies that make so much sense allowing you to clearly visualize and then remember.  An example is this paragraph below;

“Moon Shell, like a moon, solitary in the sky, full and round, replete with power.  Now it looks like the eye of a cat that brushes noiselessly through long grass at night.  Now it is an island, set in ever-widening circles of waves, alone, self-contained, serene.  How wonderful are islands! Islands in space like this one that I have come to, ringed about by miles of water, linked by no bridges, no cables, no telephones.                    ………We must re-learn to be alone. ( like the moon or the island)  It is a difficult lesson to learn today–to leave one’s friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week.  For me, the break is the most difficult.  Parting is inevitably the most difficult even for a short time.  It is like an amputation, I feel.  A limb is being torn off, without which I shall be able to function.  And yet, once it is done I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious.  Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.  It is as if in parting one did actually lose an arm.  And then, like the star-fish, one grows it anew; one is whole again, complete and round–more whole, even, than before, when the other people had pieces of one.”

Her seashell analogies and philosophies represent many experiences from the various stages of her life, from a new marriage thru to children leaving the nest, to aging with your partner or alone, while addressing such topics as youth and age, love and marriage, peace, contentment, and solitude.

I keep this book close to me so I can peek at it any time that I feel I need some woman’s wisdom and inspiration.  It is a very yellowed copy that has that old precious book smell.  I found my copy at Beacon Books in Sidney.  They often have copies, if not leave them a request to call when one comes in.  There’s something about having a used copy of this book, knowing that women before me have found wisdom in her words as well.

It’s funny too as I think about sea shells, and what attracts us to them.  Why are we so fascinated with them and have such desire to collect them?

I hope you enjoyed a glimpse of Gift from the Sea.  Let me know if you were curious enough to find your own copy- I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Have a wonderful week.