Gift from the Sea

On Izabella's advice, I finally got around to reading Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

That book is exactly up my alley right now. Simple and clean, the book reflects on the wider patterns of a woman's life: solitude, relationships, cycles of separation and togetherness.

Me, right now, I'm into solitude. This is, of course, damned near impossible to achieve, but I keep trying. I make little pockets of solitude for myself here and there: a cup of coffee alone in my craft room; a walk by the river; blotting out the racket of the TV set with a book and an iPod. It's not perfect, but I'll take what I can get.

I feel like I need to be inside myself, like a hermit crab testing the limits of a new, delicately spiraling shell. I feel like I need to be alone with the tides of my own rhythm.

I smell change on the wind; in part, I engineered it myself. Or did I only respond? Did I leave my job and open myself to subtleties because I sensed the change in barometric pressure?

For the past few months, I have been living pretty lightly. A couple of part time jobs and a manageable amount of home-making. The more I lighten up and open out, the more sensitive I become to quiet voices that whisper on the breeze.

They tell me to get even quieter. They tell me to be alone, watching the skies.