"The shape of my life is determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires. I want to give and take from my children and husband, to share with friends and community, to carry out my obligations as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen.
But 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 these obligations as well as I can. I would like to achieve a state of spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God...
Life today in America is based on ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national and international demands, through social and cultural pressures, through the mass media.
My mind reels with it. What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. This is not the life of simplicity that wise (wo)men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul...
With a new awareness, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing and rearing of children, to running of a house, human relationships with their myriad pulls-- women's normal occupations run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and the Home or Woman and Career, but more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life.
What is the answer? I have only clues, shells from the sea. The bare beauty of the channel-whelk tells me that one answer, and perhaps a first step, is in cutting out some of the distractions. But how? I must find a balance somewhere between island solitude and communion, between retreat and return."
-From Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gifts From the Sea
The last decade, I've concluded, was one of major metamorphosis. It was me, evolving, into the person I wanted to be growing up. Do I feel grown up now? Sometimes... sometimes in the right way and sometimes in the "this is all too much" way. Sometimes- I'd rather put on my knee-high boots, drink too many cocktails and go out dancing with my girlfriends... rather than dancing barefoot in my parents living room with my mom and Silas. But then again- it is joyful, unpretentious, soul-filled dancing... not hard thumping, bumping, grinding but drums and laughter and clapping and jumping.
