A View From My Window

Nantucket

I'm spending some time here in advance of my family's arrival on Thursday. This will be the third year that we have gathered here for the end of the summer, and Ben's birthday. This year will be his 35th--big milestone.

I'm glad I came early although it's a bigger house than in the past, and the first couple of days I was here, I rambled around alot. Sometime yesterday, I made the shift from loneliness to solitude. Maybe it was the salt air, the sound of the sea, the brilliant Milky Way making its swath along the night sky.

This morning, I found "Gift From The Sea", a little book I hadn't picked up in 30 years by Anne Morrow Lindburgh. She wrote the book about her time alone at the sea, and describes the essential nature of solitude.

"What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive. Solitude, says the moon shell. Center-down, say the Quaker saints. To the possession of the self the way is inward, says Plotinus. The cell of self-knowledge is the stall in which the pilgrim must be reborn, says St. Catherine of Siena.

Voices from the past. In fact, these are pursuits ...Not done because everyone else is doing them, almost no one is doing them. Revolutionary, in fact, because almost every trend and pressure, every voice from the outside is against this new way of inward living. "

Help me be present today, God.

M.C.