Bridgette’s Shell – The Inspiration – FROM PARADISE WITH LOVE AND RUM

As always, start the music and read on!

Kabua, Marshall Islands

MV Guidance

12 May 1971

Apia was Treanor’s last port of call in his journey wandering through Mother Ocean’s paradise. I saw him off at the airport on his way back to California and The World. I could blame it on our talks, but the ghosts of my life back there (back then?) increasingly haunted my thoughts. My questions about Bridgette were still unanswered and possibly always would be. They seemed to all start and end with “Why?” Why were we shown what that love could be and then have it taken away? Why did it have to be her and not me? And why is she coming to me so strongly now? Polynesian spiritual practices say souls are a physical thing. At death, a soul exits the body from a tear duct and begins a wandering, instinctive journey into the uplands for a time and then proceeds along the path of the spirits to the place on each island where the souls jump off into the land of the dead. Did Bridgette miss that leap?

Have you ever met someone who was simply inherently wise? Pia was that in spades. If he wasn’t working he was perched as far forward in the bow as he could get and just watch. Later as he sat with us laughing and drinking his fingers would be using sticks and shells to recreate exactly what he saw that day. Sticks would show wave and wind patterns showing free passage or cross waves bouncing off islands that were represented by cowri shells. He explained it was an art form and something from deep in the culture of the Marshalls and he had been taught by his great grandfather. The maps he made were fantastic on their own but when you learn what they depict yet another veil is lifted and layers of other meanings appeared. A map maker, I was told, always uses a special shell for his home so that he will always see the way there.

Shells have always been more than they seem at first glance. They come from the beach, which is neither really land nor really sea. It’s the same with a lot of cultures’ thoughts about what death is—a state where you’re neither fully gone, nor fully of this world. As beautiful as the life that was once occupied the shell was, the spirit was ten times more. A shell was once full of life and is still here and like that a person’s soul or spirit lives on as an eternal thing more free and more beautiful than the body no longer there. It sums up as the idea that your journey through the vastness of the Universe does not end with your physical death.

Very early one morning Pia came walking across the deck smiling like the Cheshire Cat. He took my hand and carefully placed in it a gorgeous Tiger Cowri. “I found this in the shells you brought me yesterday. I think this must be your home shell. Sure looks like a map! She said you ‘d figure it out” and turned to leave. I grabbed his shoulder and asked who “She” was and he told me it was “…just some woman I spoke with in a dream last night. She said she visits you”.

No big thing, right?

We docked later that day at Majuro and Pia was gone. He was home again and done with traveling. There seemed to be a lot of that going around. I was left with yet more questions, but some warmer feelings about making up my mind. Meanwhile, I need to make a map.

Here’s the recipe for the shells…