Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life Read Online Free PDF

spring, Anne met a woman who would become both a confidante and a midwife to her work. Ernestine Stodelle, a protégée of Doris Humphrey, ran an academy of dance in the basement of a local church. She was a vital, self-educated woman, the mother of three and the wife of the Russian theater director Theodor Komisayevsky. Married to a man she deemed a “genius,” and dedicated to her home and children, Ernestine believed that the conflicts in her life were much like Anne’s. But she felt like “pottery” to Anne’s delicate “porcelain.” Tall and lean, muscular yet graceful, with a sculptured face and riveting eyes, Ernestine was confident and unencumbered by guilt. She saw her commitment to theater and dance not as self-indulgence, but as a necessity to her living a whole and balanced life. “I knew how to live,” said Ernestine:
    I was dealing with one reality on top of another. I was working all the time with the reality of one force pulling against another. I didn’t have self-pity. I didn’t feel like a suffering genius. I was caught up in life … But Anne was suffering—feeling thwarted. I tried to help her. 9
     
    She taught Anne to use dance as therapy, and she shared Anne’s desire to read and to study. While Ernestine admired Anne’s physical strength and mental precision, she believed her “rhythms were out of sync,” and she taught her to balance “on a moment in time,” at the nexus of breath, body, and spirit. It was a lesson Anne would carry back to her work, using the fluidity of dance to harmonize the dissonance of her feelings and thoughts.
    Together, they read Greek, Christian, and Indian philosophy and mythology. They studied Freud and Jung and went to the theater anddance concerts. Comforting each other with their poetry and letters, they read the works of poets and novelists, hoping to find inspiration. As they studied the diaries of Katherine Mansfield, they taught one another the art of surrendering to universal truth and confronting the necessity of human suffering.
    Like so many of the women from whom Anne had sought comfort—Mina Curtiss, Margot Loines Morrow—Ernestine was both strong and visionary, compassionate and provocative. Ernestine later said she gave Anne courage, “divining things in her that came to pass.”
    In the summer and fall of 1950, Anne worked on her manuscript in Darien and returned to Captiva in January. Margot and Anne’s sister Con would come and go, grateful for their time together, away from their responsibilities of motherhood and home. Con and Aubrey Morgan now had three children and lived in Oregon. Margot, also the mother of three, was divorced from Anne’s brother, Dwight, and was finding her way as a single parent. Together, the three women walked the shell-laden beaches, talking of religion, philosophy, and literature, and of their need to find balance in their domestic lives.
    Anne completed the book in 1953. After setting it aside for several months, she took the manuscript, which she called “The Shells,” to Kurt Wolff, publisher and editor at Pantheon Press. She had met him by chance at a meeting of the International Goethe Society in Aspen at Christmas 1948. Drawn to his incisive and cultured mind, Anne found him warm and responsive. He understood her needs as a writer as well as the demands of the literary marketplace. They had sustained their friendship through letters and visits, and now she sought his professional advice. Immediately, Kurt recognized the literary and commercial value of Anne’s book. He published it in March 1955, under the title
Gift from the Sea. 10
    The book, a prose poem, rose out of her diaries, her talks with her sisters, her family, and friends. It is the product of a quest for faith and harmony—for “grace,” not in the theological sense, but a state of peace and blessedness. “I was not looking for God,” she later said. “I was looking for myself.” 11
    To accomplish her task, Anne makes a