A Year by the Sea:
  Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman
   Joan Anderson
  1999 Doubleday NY USA
   ISBN: 0767905938


Joan chooses to retreat to their cottage by the sea instead of following her long-time husband to his new out-of-state job. There in solitude & beauty she rediscovers her life & her marriage. Being a writer, she records her adventurous year.

I like this Joan Anderson - she has a lively, eccentric sense of humor & blithely puts herself in hilarious costumes & places. She does, however, put herself in some awesome meditational reaches. She's read a lot so the wise thoughts of others surface at appropriate times to walk her through her bottlenecks of fear into a broader consciousness.

A Year by the Sea is all about coming into consciousness; about sitting still enough to turn an hourglass to watch the sand trickle, remembering the thoughts that come up; recording each day to grasp a reality from it that is elementally one's own.

For women, becoming nurturers is second nature - from their earliest years to the hormone years of relationships to friends, boys, music, horses - to every thing; then later when most of us naturally walk up an aisle to begin the really big career of caring as wife & mother.

So for an ordinary woman, who is skilled with words, to step outside her envelope to discover who she really is, now that the children are raised, the pets dead, the house stale & the husband off onto his next career plateau, what is there left to do?

There is a little seaside cottage with winter up ahead. There are days melting into weeks when Joan's exploration of her insides as well as the outside world of sea, beach, seals, weather reminds me of an archetypal quest - the solitary retreat - such an indulgence for us nurturers! So very needed too! I've lived in a trailer by the Sound & my mother in a thousand-year-old cottage on the edge of the Fens.

This is one short teaching: the making of a heroine in her own life. Her musings, her epiphanies, her returning to the sacred in her life & her relationships, reawakening your own appetites, humor & curiosity.

I learnt a lot, remembered my focus, chuckled & blinked back a few tears. A wonderful, wonderful read! Thanks, I needed that!

Joan Anderson has authored many children's books as well as the critically acclaimed Breaking the TV Habit.
(09/05/99)

Rebecca