Gift from the Sea

"For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of attainment is that steadiness preached in all rules for holy living. How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist or saint- the inner inviolable core, the single eye.

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with it's thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls- woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.

What is the answer? There is no easy answer, no complete answer. I have only clues, shells form the sea. The bare beauty of the channelled whelk tells me that one answer, and perhaps a first step, is in simplification of life, in cutting out some of the distractions. But how? Total retirement is not possible. I cannot shed my responsibilities. I cannot permanently inhabit a desert island. I cannot be a nun in the midst of family life. I would not want to be. The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return. In my periods of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into my worldly life."

This passage from one of my favorite books, Gift from the Sea, sums up my heart attitude toward life these past few months. How to live with the inevitable and necessary duties and distractions of life that pull parts of me away from the whole- how to hold onto and foster the parts that make me me, such as creativity and independence, even though they're at odds with my outward life. I struggle with this so much, and that's why I've been so focused on simplifying my life as a whole. I don't want to lose parts of myself. I had an epiphany reading the analogy of the swinging pendulum- what a perfect way to describe the possible balance that could be achieved in a mother's life. Balance does not come from smoothing down and simplifying everything outward- it comes from embracing the outward and all it's distractions and making inward retreats a priority. I love the word retreat. Re-treat. Giving yourself a treat (the treat of solitude) over and over. I feel like I finally understand and am figuring out how I can navigate these precious child-rearing years and still keep the main parts of myself intact.

This book is amazing, and if you haven't read it yet I highly suggest you do!