Writer and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) was born on this day to an upper-class family in Englewood, New Jersey. Her father was the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico and her mother was a successful poet.

"For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair," she once said.

She married famous pilot Charles Lindbergh in 1929, two years after his remarkable flight on the single-engined aircraft, The Spirit of St Louis, from New York to Paris. A year later she became the first U.S. woman licensed as a glider pilot and joined her husband in the cockpit as co-pilot and navigator.

"Love is a force. It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces," she said. "It is a power, like money or steam or electricity."

A flight from Canada to China along the Great Circle Route (over the Arctic Circle) inspired her first book, North to the Orient (1935). By publishing her diaries and letters in Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead (1993), she shared the pain of the highly-publicized 1932 kidnapping and murder of her infant son.

"I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living."

The courageous pioneer wrote 13 books. The best known is the inspirational Gift from the Sea (1956), which celebrated love, happiness, and solitude.

"If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments," she said.

Be as patient and faithful as the sea.