When Silence Grew Wings

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9


When Silence Grew Wings, Pebble Beach, CA, 2009

She was never born in the way we understand it. There was no egg, no nest, no trembling hatchling heart. The egret simply appeared one morning in the marshes of the forgotten, stepping out of a time that was no longer kept by clocks.

Locals say she had always been there, in one form or another—a mist on the water, a ghost in the reeds, a whisper on the wind. No one remembered the moment they first saw her. She arrived like a faded hymn, remembered only in fragments.

This image captures her in the moment between presence and fading, as though she is recalling her own story and realizing it might be too delicate to survive the telling. Her form is soft, the edges of her being gently giving way to the textured breath of time. Her feathers are not feathers, but layers of memory. Her body, not of flesh and bone, but of dreams compressed into shape.

She bows her head in reflection rather than submission, perhaps mourning what was, or blessing what still is.

And look closely: the cracks in the image are not damage but veins of history, maps of the forgotten. They remind us that nothing whole has ever truly endured, and nothing broken is ever truly lost.

She does not move, and yet we feel motion. A migration inward. A flight toward the sacred.

This is not a photograph of a bird. It is a portrait of the silence that follows revelation. Of grace that no longer needs an audience. Of the soul after it has learned stillness.

She is not alive, not in the way we know it. But she is awake.

Artist Statement

In this piece, I sought to blend the thresholds between life and memory, spirit and silence. The egret, often a symbol of purity and solitude, becomes here an emissary of the forgotten, neither wholly of this world nor entirely absent from it. The worn texture and faded color palette create an illusion of antiquity, as if this image were discovered rather than created, uncovered like an icon in a ruined cathedral.

I approach my art as a form of visual storytelling where the subject is less a character and more a metaphor for the holy quiet that sometimes arrives after great loss. The egret’s bowed head suggests not defeat, but reverence. It invites the viewer to lower their gaze in kind and meet the world with humility.

This work is an invitation: to pause, to feel what’s unspoken, and to remember what we thought we had forgotten.


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