Shipwrecked on the Sands of Time Painting
A Self‑Portrait Between Dragons, Birth, and the Celestial Witnesses
I was expelled into flesh through a woman’s body—terrified, unprepared, and instantly aware that I had been thrown into a world of beauty and danger I did not understand.
That shock never left me. Even as a child, I sensed that everything I loved — my family, my friends, even the earth itself — would one day vanish. It was too much for a young mind, so I buried it like a quiet shadow. But it shaped me. It shaped everything.
As I grew older, each loss — a friend, a mentor, a loved one — felt like another piece of my world breaking away. Life grew smaller, more fragile. I began to understand that we are all marooned on an island called existence, shipwrecked without our consent, left to navigate time with no map and no promises.
By midlife, that childhood awareness returned with force. I found myself caught between the person I believed myself to be — gentle, caring, compassionate — and the darker forces life can summon. My demons were real: anger I never meant to unleash, choices that left marks on my inner landscape. I cannot return to the moments that shaped my soul, but I can face their shadows and keep moving through time.
Shipwrecked on the Sands of Time is my attempt to paint that reckoning.
Above me, a honeycomb of celestial faces forms a silent host — the mystery I sensed as a child, the watchers who neither comfort nor condemn. Their presence reminds me that we are born into a universe far older than our brief moment within it.
Below them stands my self‑portrait, suspended between two dragons. They are not fantasy; they are the forces inside me — inside all of us. One protects. One threatens. Together they reveal the truth of being human: to awaken into a life we did not choose, to feel both love and destruction, compassion and violence, hope and despair.
To be born is to awaken into a battle already underway.
In the end, this painting echoes my first moment in this world — hurled from mystery into flesh. I’ve learned that living is both terrifying and wondrous, that every joy casts a shadow and every shadow carries a lesson. I can’t go back and undo the choices I made — whatever we do to others, we do to ourselves — yet those moments carved me into who I am now.
And so I stand here, shipwrecked yet alive, suspended between light and darkness, between what I fear and what I hope to become — a soul cast into time, haunted by its own awakening, still moving forward through the shifting sands.