TheUnintended "Western" (or Modern?) Zen Quotes

& Other Fascinating Quotes of

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

(June 22, 1906 - February 7, 2001)

Collated by Paul Quek
Email: paulquek888@aol.com

Notes:

• Anne Morrow Lindberghwas the wife and subsequent widow of Charles A. Lindbergh, who was the first person [or aviator] to cross the Atlantic alone in an airplane.

• "From the moment he landed in Paris on May 21, 1927, [Charles]Lindberghfound himself thrust upon an odyssey for which he was ill prepared - the first modern media superstar, deified and demonized many times over in a single lifetime", according to the publisher's note, vis-a-visthe book Lindbergh, by A. Scott Berg.

• The same publisher's note mentions the "controversies surrounding the trial of his son's accused kidnapper; the storm over Lindbergh's fascination with Hitler's Germany and over his active role in the isolationist America First movement; and his remarkable unsung work devoted to medical research, rocketry, anthropology, and conservation. At the heart of it all is his fascinating, complex marriage with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a relationship far from the storybook romance the public imagined, one filled with sudden joy and bitter darkness, and which forged her into one of the century's leading feminist voices. [The author, A. Scott]Bergexposes the many facets of the private Lindbergh, including his ingenious medical work with Dr. Alexis Carrel, developing the precursor to an artificial heart; his pioneering support of rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard; his soul-searching visit to Camp Dora at Bergen-Belsen; his life with the primitive Masai tribe in Africa, and his discovery of the Tasaday in the Philippines; his fight to save the whales off the coasts of Japan and Peru; and his deeply moving final days in Maui, where he supervised the digging of his own grave."

• Anne Morrow Lindberghwas also the first licensed woman glider pilot in the United States.
  -- From the website of TheCharles A.and Anne Morrow LindberghFoundation
  (http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/history/amlbio.html)

• Much time during the early years of the Lindberghs' marriage was spent flying. Anne[Morrow Lindbergh]served as her husband's co-pilot, navigator and radio operator on history-making explorations, charting potential air routes for commercial airlines. They made air surveys across the continent and in the Caribbean to pioneer Pan American's air mail service. In 1931, they journeyed, in a single-engine airplane, over uncharted routes from Canada and Alaska to Japan and China, which she chronicled in her first book, North to the Orient. They then completed, in the same single-engine Lockheed "Sirius," a five-and-one-half-month, 30,000-mile survey of North and South Atlantic air routes in 1933 (the subject of Anne Lindbergh's book, Listen! the Wind). Charles characterized this expedition as more difficult and hazardous than his epic New York-to-Paris flight in 1927 in the "Spirit of St. Louis."
  -- Extracted from the website of TheCharles A.and Anne Morrow LindberghFoundation
  (http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/history/amlbio.html)

"Western" (Modern?) Zen Observations

• A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart's. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand; only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back -- it does not matter which. Because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.

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

• 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.

• Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Love is a force. It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces. It is a power, like money or steam or electricity.

• 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 when a tree has fallen can you take a measure of it. It is the same with a man.

• 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.

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

• The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

• 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 sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach -- waiting for a gift from the sea.

• 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.

• 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.

• We must relearn to be alone.

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

Personal Observations

• 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.
  
  

• Dearly beloved-- late again!

• 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.

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

• 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 talks to more than four people it is an audience, and one cannot really think or exchange thoughts with an audience.

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

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

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

• 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.

Contemporary Life, Women & Other Observations

• 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.

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

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

• Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

• I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

• I understand why the saints were rarely married women. It has primarily to do with distractions ... Woman's normal occupations run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.

• 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.

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

• 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.