Acrylic by: Josephine Banks || Acrylic name: Beach Haven
Written By: Layna Girata
Feathers of a bird long passed float in the swirling green waters, drifting in delicate spirals like thoughts lost to time. The memory of the bird, dark and gray, is part of a vast chasm of forgotten memories and untold lives. This small, weightless fragment of nature represents an entire lifetime, yet is all that remains.
Is it not curious, then, to examine the impact of our own lives? Even if they are cut short, our flame burns out before its expected time. Can we honestly say we have fulfilled our destiny on this Earth? Each breath we take is but a moment, passing on into the next, repeating in an endless cycle of forgotten memory, one overshadowed by the generations that have come before, and those that follow after. Will your story be told, or will you, like the dark feather, fade away into the waters of time?
Your legacy is simply a feather left behind after your death.
Your life is as fleeting as a bird passing by overhead, momentarily disrupting the sun’s rays.
No bird pressures itself to be perfect. No bird expects more of itself than it can give. No bird wastes its life on trivial, meaningless things.
How are we, as humans, any more important than this bird, whose only impact is a single feather? Perhaps we are not. And in that realization, there is freedom – the freedom to soar without fear, to die without regret. Like the bird, we only need to live, accepting our place in a much larger story, stretching before and beyond us.