Gift from the Sea

In the first of two introductions, Reeve Lindbergh, the daughter of the text’s author, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, reflects on Gift from the Sea and her experience of rereading it in 2015. She tried to find the beach cottage on Captiva Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where her mother wrote the book in 1955. Reese explains that her mother’s friends, who originally found that cottage for her, told her it was gone. Nevertheless, Reese visited Captiva with Gift from the Sea to rediscover the wisdom and encouragement she previously found in the text. From her perspective, Gift from the Sea offers “a chance to breathe and live more slowly” (9). Both in its substance and its style, the book inspires the reader to live by a more natural and peaceful rhythm. Finally, says Reese Lindbergh, the book offers its readers “an unusual kind of freedom” (11), that of being open to life’s experiences in all their diversity and richness and of reaping the joy that is a product of that openness.