The Channeled Whelk

In her book Gift From The Sea,

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

highlights 5 seashells

that she finds on a solitude

vacation at the beach.

Each shell represents something

that she wants to remember

when she returns to her family of

5 children and a hectic life as a

wife and mom.

The first shell is the channeled whelk.

The hermit crab who may have

once inhabited the shell is

now gone. "But his shell--it is

simple; it is bare, it is beautiful.

Small, only the size of my thumb,

its architecture is perfect, down to

the finest detail. Its shape, swelling

like a pear in the center, winds in a gentle

spiral to the pointed apex.

My eye follows with delight

the outer circumference of that

diminutive winding staircase up which

this tenant used to travel.

My shell is not like this, I think.

How untidy it has become! 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 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. The bearing, rearing,

feeding and educating of children; the running

of a house with its 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. What is the answer? There is no

easy answer, no complete answer. I have only

clues, shells from the sea. The bare beauty

of the channeled whelk tells me that one

answer, and perhaps the first step,

is in simplification of life, in cutting

out some of the distractions."