Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Lindbergh snaps the camera away from the self and refocuses it on the ordinary world that keeps performing, on schedule, feats we’ve stopped noticing. The line begins with a confession disguised as a complaint: “private, individual, selfish miracles” is an indictment of the way we bargain with life, treating wonder as something owed to us personally - a rescuer that arrives on demand, preferably tailored to our anxieties. Her word choice is surgical. “Asking” implies petition and entitlement; “selfish” doesn’t just scold, it exposes a spiritual consumerism.

Then she pivots to “every year,” the quiet power source of the sentence. Annual recurrence makes dogwood both less dramatic and more astonishing: a miracle that doesn’t need to break the laws of nature to feel like grace. That’s the subtextual turn: maybe the problem isn’t that miracles are rare, but that our definition has become so ego-shaped we can’t recognize what’s freely given.

The “white dogwood” matters, too. Not roses, not something cultivated and performative, but a specific, modest flowering tree - regional, seasonal, reliably timed. The whiteness suggests clarity and renewal without lapsing into religious melodrama. Lindbergh, writing out of a life shadowed by public scrutiny and private loss, isn’t offering a cute nature aphorism. She’s trying to re-train attention: away from crisis-driven wishing and toward a steadier, less narcissistic form of reverence. The sentence works because it shames gently, then opens a door.