'The Writing in the Shell...'

       IT WAS CERTAINLY A WINDY DAY, BUT WARM. And it was on a distant beach that it happened. I had been collecting shells, the fragile outsides of fair creatures that had departed this world. I found an especially large pink scallop shell with its two halves still joined. It was nicely empty, except for some sand. So I bent down and washed it where I stood in the little lacy waves of the sea lapping at my ankles. Then took it up to where we had been sitting and had left our towels. I didn’t swim; the water was far too cold. So I lay down in the sun, and after awhile I fell asleep. I dreamed. I think. Although it was so real, it could have been some sort of picture-vision. Such things happened to me, from time to time; and I never really knew whether it was my imagination gone ‘riot,’ or creativity gone ‘crazy,’ or the gracious gift of Everland; which of course it was, anyway; for it was not of ‘me.’

       Dreaming, I was looking at the scallop shell; only it wasn’t the same; it was much larger, and pinker. Inside it, I saw some pieces of something. I looked again, a second time; and saw clearer. The things inside looked like small slips of ancient parchment, written on. There were twelve in all. I reached in, and took them out. But when I tried to read them, I could not, for they were all written in an alphabet or cipher that ‘I’ could not understand. They were in the language which I knew and spoke, but in Everland’s communicating of it through the Spirit, the shape of the letters of it had become entirely ‘other;’ …strange, beautiful, complex; and impossible to read! Yet as I held them, I knew they were being given me, to give; and that whoever could bare them, and their message, would be able to read them. I saw that wherever desire to own knowledge for my own gain, was let go of, I was granted another gift; and this time, the ability to understand the writing in the shell, and by the invisible influence of love, in the moving of the Spirit within me.

       Looking again, the third time, I saw something else within the iridescent pearl-pink shell: a scrap of lambskin; and inside it another small slip of parchment. It was the key to understanding the strange writing, which I immediately perceived could no longer be hidden from the world, as it had been for generations through the fear inherent in human nature. What would set me free I unknowingly hid; the price of freedom, too costly. In my fear of any loss I hide from the light what I know the light will expose in me to set me free; though, of course, I don’t realize that! But I am my own hinderer; not of my self only for as that influences others, has it not hindered them? I put my hand in the shell, and took out ‘the key of knowledge;’ and put it with the twelve other parchment fragments…in; …in my heart… Suddenly I couldn’t see them anymore. I woke up and saw that I was holding strands of seaweed, ‘Neptune’s beads,’ which I had collected earlier that day, and the scallop shell, which looked so very dull now.

        Later, when I was alone, I wrote down the inscriptions that I had seen, (they were in the memory of my spirit,) and I wrote them on pages of paper, one copy, in Everland’s own beautiful cipher. And I waited to see if anyone would ‘hear, through ‘the falling,’ the sound of them,’ and be drawn to read them, and understand – and enter in. I put the cipher key with the inscriptions away amongst the leaves of the light tree in the shoebox; and waited for that happy day when ‘a peculiar people’ would be abundant upon the Earth, bringing light for all, no longer any walls to shut it in…!                                                            

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