Forward from Here

I first began reading Reeve Lindbergh because of her famous mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose Gift from the Sea has always been a favorite of mine. Reeve's memoirs Under a Wing: A Memoir and No More Words: A Journal of My Mother provide the inside stories of her upbringing and her mother's final years.

Like her mom, Reeve writes with a friendly, accessible style. And because Reeve grew up with a writer (actually two of them; her famous father wrote books too), she learned early on how writing can help make sense of things.

Reeve is an unabashed journal-keeper, and though she laughs about using her journals as an escape from other writing chores, she also says that much of her material comes straight from them.

"To write as honestly as I can in my journals about my everyday life and the thoughts and feelings I have as I go along is an old, tenacious yearning," she writes. Writing is "comforting and steadying," she says. It was so even when she underwent brain surgery, which she did while writing Forward From Here, the book I just read and from which I quote.

In a later chapter, she talks about moments of well-being when she's "suddenly, acutely conscious of being alive: on a spring morning when the first V of wild geese flies over the farm; any time I see one of my children again after a separation; whenever I look out over the hills and pastures, or up at the stars.

"I'm convinced that what we really need most to sustain us as we grow older, more than any drug on the market, is this kind of appreciative awareness, along with compassion, a sense of humor, and simple common sense."

To which I can only add ... amen!