A Gift from the Sea

During the summer of 1974, I took a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and spent an entire day walking along the shores to collect driftwood. Some friends accompanied me and were swimming and enjoying themselves playing in the water. It’s always been something fun for me to discover an interesting piece of driftwood and try to figure out what it looks like. For me, driftwood is nature’s sculpture. It’s nature’s art. When I look at it, I think of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from whose book I take the title for this meditation. Her reflections inspired me to think about my own life experiences.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, published in 1955, is a slim but profound volume, born of a solitary retreat on the Florida coast. In it, she meditates on the different shells she finds on the beach — each one becoming a symbol for a stage of life, a kind of relationship, or a spiritual posture. What struck me most deeply about her work was not the shells themselves, but the act of slowing down long enough to let an ordinary object speak. She wrote that the sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To find the shells and the secrets it holds, one must walk along without agenda, on the edge of the water, and live in the present. That idea has lived with me for fifty years. It is the reason I still walk beaches, and it is the reason driftwood continues to teach me.

That summer, the Outer Banks was full of tourists, but the stretch of shoreline on which I found myself that morning felt like my own private world. The sun was already high and the sand radiated heat up through my sandals. Every few yards I would stop, crouch down, and turn over a piece of wood in my hands. My companions called out to me from the water, laughing, splashing. But I was in no hurry. I was on a kind of pilgrimage, though I didn’t have the words for it at the time. What I know now is that I was drawn to something in those weathered shapes that resonated with something inside me — something I hadn’t yet learned to articulate.

Isn’t it amazing that driftwood is so strong, even though it has gone through so many changes? I think about the root of a tree, lifted out of the ground, broken by the wind of a hurricane, being pushed by ocean waves, brushed against the sand and rocks, until it eventually drifts to the shore, carried there by the ever-changing tides. Each piece has its own story — a biography written in grain and texture, in the cracks that run along its surface, like a map of old wounds.

Botanists tell us that the cellular structure of wood becomes denser and more compact when it is subjected to salt water and the mechanical abrasion of sand and surf. The wood doesn’t soften and dissolve; it hardens. It becomes, in a sense, more itself. What appears on the surface to be bleaching — a fading, a loss of color — is in fact, a kind of purification. The lignin that gives wood its golden or reddish hues, breaks down under ultraviolet light, and what remains is a purer cellulose, silver-grey and almost luminous. I find that extraordinary! The process that seems to be stripping the wood of its identity is in fact, revealing its deepest structure.

There is a particular kind of driftwood found along the Outer Banks that the locals call “ghostwood.” It’s almost white, the color of old bone, and it seems to glow slightly even in ordinary afternoon light. I picked up a piece of ghostwood that day in 1974 and I still have it on a shelf in my home. Every time I look at it I am transported back to that beach, that morning, that feeling of something opening inside me. It weighs almost nothing, but it carries the memory of everything.

From this thought, I take some life lessons. Driftwood reminds me that each of us has weathered difficult storms, hurricanes, and floods in our lives. We too have been pushed by turbulent waves, worked over by coarse sand, and pushed against the hard rocks of life experiences. I’m no longer the same person I was when I picked up those pieces of wood in 1974. I’ve been through some hard knocks and my personal journey has changed as a result of those hardships.

I’ve thought often about the way that suffering can either harden a person in the wrong way — making them brittle, closed, and fearful — or transform them in the way driftwood is transformed: polished, lightened, and made more beautiful by the very forces that might have destroyed them. The difference, as best I can tell, is whether we resist or surrender. Not surrender in the sense of giving up, but surrender in the sense of yielding to the process, trusting that the ocean knows what it’s doing, even when we cannot see the shore.

I’m not a theologian, and I don’t wish to turn this into a sermon. But I will say that my faith has been the anchor in every storm I’ve described. There were moments when I prayed to simply feel like a normal person.This occurred especially in my teenage years when I was embarrassed and unwilling to take off my shirt at the beach; or sitting alone in my room and unable to look at myself in a mirror because I could only see my scar. It took a long time for me to understand that the answer to that prayer was not to be given normalcy, but to be given the courage to redefine it.

Driftwood is not normal wood. It is extraordinary wood. And perhaps that is what I am too.

When I hold a piece of driftwood in my hands, I’m amazed by how smooth it is. All the sharp edges have been worn away. This brings to mind that as we grow and mature, we too lose our sharp edges.

We’ve learned that we should no longer pick fights we know we can’t win. We’ve learned from our past relationships, friendships, and family issues that we must choose our battles carefully. Just as the ocean waves polish the wood to a silver-grey finish, so too does our spiritual journey soften the edges of our being.

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