Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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Anne Morrow Lindbergh (22 June 1906— 7 February 2001) Author and pioneering American aviator; wife of Charles Lindbergh

1 Sourced
2 Attributed
3 External links

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Sourced

Dearly beloved—late again!
- Dearly Beloved (1962) First lines

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The Unicorn in Captivity (1955)

For a page with the entire poem online click here

Here sits the Unicorn
In captivity;
His bright invulnerability
Captive at last

Here sits the Unicorn
In captivity,
Yet free.

He could leap the corral,
If he rose
To his full height;
He could splinter the fencing light,
With three blows
Of his porcelain hoofs in flight—
If he chose.
He could shatter his prison wall,
Could escape them all—
If he rose,
If he chose.

Here sits the Unicorn;
The wounds in his side
Still bleed

Dream wounds, dream ties
Do not bind him there
In a kingdom where
He is unaware
Of his wounds, of his snare.

Here sits the Unicorn;
Leashed by a chain of gold
To the pomengranate tree.
So light a chain to hold
So fierce a beast;
Delicate as a cross at rest
On a maiden's breast.
He could snap the golden chain
With one toss of his mane,
If he chose to move,
If he chose to prove
His liberty.
But he does not choose
What choice would lose.
He stays, the Unicorn,
In captivity.

Yet look again—
His horn is free,
Rising above chain, fence, and tree,
Free hymn of love; His horn
Bursts from his tranquil brow
Like a comet born;
Cleaves like a galley's prow
Into seas untorn;
Springs like a lily, white
From the Earth below;
Spirals, a bird in flight
To a longed-for height;
Or a fountain bright,
Spurting to light
Of early morn—
O luminous horn!

Here sits the Unicorn—
In captivity?
In repose.

Forgotten the strife;
Now the need to kill
Has died like fire,
And the need to love
Has replaced desire

Quiet, the Unicorn,
In contemplation stilled,
With acceptance filled;
Quiet, save for his horn;
Alive in his horn;
Horizontally,
In captivity;
Perpendicularly,
Free.

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Gift from the Sea (1955)

Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach— waiting for a gift from the sea.

The shape of my life today starts with a family. I have a husband, five children and a home just beyond the suburbs of New York. I have also a craft, writing, and therefore work I want to pursue. The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many other things; my background and childhood, my mind and its 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 to man and to the world, as a woman, as an artist, as a citizen.

But I want first of all— in fact, as an end to these other desires— to be at peace with myself.

I want, in fact— to borrow from the languages of the saints— to live "in grace" as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony.

I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be "in grace" and other periods when they feel "out of grace," even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one’s tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide; and in the opposite state one can hardly tie a shoe-string. It is true that a large part of life consists in learning a technique of tying the shoe-string, whether one is in grace or not. But there are techniques of living too; there are even techniques in the search for grace.

I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.

I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily— like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
- Variant: Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

We must relearn to be alone.

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Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928 (1971)

People don't want to be understood - I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left.

I wonder why I bother to tell the truth when people ask me what I think of this and that and how I feel about this and that. I get so complicated and introspective that people often don't understand and are frankly puzzled and (naturally enough) bored. So why bother! It would be so much easier to say what they expected you to, and everything would be easy and pleasant.

I want to write - I want to write - I want to write and never never never will. I know it and I am so unhappy and it seems as though nothing else mattered. Whatever I'm doing, it's always there, an ultimate longing there saying, "Write this - write that - write -" and I can't. Lack ability, time, strength, and duration of vision. I wish someone would tell me brutally, "You can never write anything. Take up home gardening!"

It doesn't matter that it can't last, that we don't find it more often. To know that there is such perfection, that there has been such perfection - it is worth living for. It exists. It has been - it is. One can contemplate it and feel complete peace.

I have come to believe that you can get along without anyone - that is, without the close contact of any one person. That is a terrible shock to me, but I think it is true. You do need companionship, but wherever you go, in whatever new environment, you will find people who, to a large degree, take the place of those you left...The intimate companionship goes, I think, when you leave a friend, but friendship stays. It is an inherent possibility of relationship that, once admitted - well, there it is.

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Attributed

A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.

A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.

After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day— like writing a poem or saying a prayer.

Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone.

Charles is life itself— pure life, force, like sunlight— and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him— caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in.

Don't wish me happiness— I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor— I will need them all.

Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.
- Variant: Duration is not a test of true or false.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

Him that I love, I wish to be free— even from me.

I believe that what women resent is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.

I feel we are all islands— in a common sea.

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

Life is a gift, given in trust— like a child.

Lost time was like a run in a stocking. It always got worse.

Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages.

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen— no retouching, no shadows, no flattery— just stark me.

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

Only with winter-patience can we bring The deep-desired, long-awaited spring.

Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.

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.

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
- Variant: The most exhausting thing in life is insincerity.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.

There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.

Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us— many days, many nights of stars.

To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission.

To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.

What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it— like a secret vice.

When one is a stranger to oneself, then one is estranged from others, too.

When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race.

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