Anne Morrow Lindbergh
1906-2001
Environmentalist and author whose Gift from the Sea became a meditative classic, her life shadowed by her son's kidnapping and her aviator husband's politics.
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This video is an AI-generated active imagination of what might be said to us today based on the written historical record.
The Circle Too Large
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The search for outward simplicity, for inner integrity, for fuller relationship—is this not a limited outlook?
Of course it is, in one sense. Today, a kind of planetary point of view has burst upon mankind.
The world is rumbling and erupting in ever widening circles around us.
The tensions, conflicts, and sufferings even in the outermost circle touch us, reverberate in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations.
But just how far can we implement this planetary awareness? We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds.
The inter-relatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather—for I believe the heart is infinite—modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry.
It is good, I think, for our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to be stretched; but body, nerve, endurance and life-span are not as elastic.
My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds.
I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them all as I would my parents in illness or old age.
Our grandmothers, and even—with some scrambling—our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds.
We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.
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