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There is a small clay pot sitting in my studio that I treasure. Dawna Markova, my cherished mentor, made it with her hands and gave it to me, a single seashell pressed into the clay before it dried. It is not grand. It is not decorated with anything other than that one small shell, slightly uneven, the way real things are. And every time I look at it, something in me goes quiet and then, slowly, more alive. I have been rereading Dawna's book I Will Not Die an Unlived Life this month. Not as a writer studying craft, though her sentences are the purest I have ever found. I have been reading it as a woman of 85 who suspects she may have been floating on the surface of her own life... looking luminous, perhaps, staying busy and purposeful and well-dressed, but sometimes skimming rather than swimming. Dawna writes about what she calls our sacred hungers. Not ambition. Not achievement. The deeper hungers: to be known, to love and be loved, to feel that our presence in the world carries meaning. She says that when the shell of our protective life gets too thick, if we listen in the silence, we will hear our soul keening. I heard it. The little pot with the seashell brought me back to another book I have loved since I was a young woman: Anne Morrow Lindbergh's A Gift from the Sea. She wrote it in 1955, alone in a cottage by the ocean, and it remains one of the most honest books ever written about a woman's interior life. She used seashells as her metaphors for the different seasons of a woman's soul. The channeled whelk, solitary and simple. The moon shell, urging us to be alone and quiet. She was asking, even then, what sustains us beneath the surface of our accomplished lives. Both women are asking the same question that I find myself asking this July morning. What is really living in me, and what am I merely maintaining? I do not ask this from despair. I ask it the way Dawna taught me to ask, with curiosity rather than judgment, with openness rather than urgency. I ask it standing in my home that I am curating as a museum of beauty, holding a small clay pot that cost nothing and means everything. Here is what I know at 85: the compliments are lovely. The books are real. The movements and the forums and the newsletters and the friendships, they have been the great privilege of my life. And beneath all of it, quieter than any of it, is a woman who still yearns, still reaches. Who still wants to go deeper than the cultured surface into the place where the real life is happening. Dawna ends her book with a question she asks of herself and of her reader. She asks what our sacred hungers are, in the silence, in the stillness, when the world is elsewhere with its noise. I am asking you the same question this July. What is your little pot with the seashell? What is the small, unspectacular thing in your home or your life that holds more meaning than it has any right to? And when did you last sit with it long enough to hear what it is trying to tell you? Write to me. I would love to know. With love and deep questions,
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