Anne Morrow Lindberg Quote
“Just how far can we implement this planetal 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…
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.
Faced with this dilemma what can we do?…
The here, the now, and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet, and–from time immemorial–the woman. In the small circle of the home she has never quite forgotten the particular uniqueness of each member of the family, the spontaneity of now, the vividness of here. This is the basic substance of life. These are the individual elements that form the bigger entities like mass, future, world…They are the drops that make up the stream…
When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.” Anne Morrow Lindberg