Our lives are filled with countless stories–stories we tell, stories we hear, stories we make as we live our lives day-by-day. I look at my daughter, now almost a year old, and I wonder what kind of life she will live, what the world has in store for her.
What stories will she tell? What stories will she write with her days? Whatever they may be, I hope they will delight and amaze her. Looking back through the stories of my own life, I touch upon many that still move me to tears, others that fill me with renewed hope.
Would I go back and revise any of my own stories? That’s something I ask myself on occasion, but I don’t think I would. At the most, it would be nice to relive those stories to gain a fresher perspective or to find details that I’d forgotten. Every chapter in every story of my life has led me to my current place, to my current story (and it’s not something I would change for an instant).
All I hope for is that the pages will not fly by, that the story will unfold gradually, and that we will be able to savor ever word and phrase. Alas, if the last ten months have taught us anything, it’s that nothing can stop the story from being told at its own pace.
I know that her stories will soon be her own to make, whether I’m ready for it or not. But I know that we will be there to guide her. We will teach her to craft these stories from her imagination and her dreams, gaining inspiration and giving life to characters from stories that have come before. We will show her the boundaries and principles of good storytelling, show her how to break free from those rules to create something unprecedented and full of wonder. We will teach her to listen to the stories of others, and hope she realizes it is the stories that link us all together as one race, one nature, one world.
Whatever lies in store, I can only hope that we will be able to share in some of those stories, some of those adventures.
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This piece is something that’s been scrambling around in my head for a little while now. I knew it would be a multimedia piece from the beginning, though I wasn’t planning on incorporating as much photography as I did.
In addition to photographing the hieroglyphic plates and cloudy sky for the background, I was able to use the head and arms from a recent model shoot as the basis for my dreamer. Pencil and pen sketches formed the foundation for the “tree of life,” which was finished with digital coloring.
“May she be given life”
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