I am enjoying a new online group for my local calligraphy guild – Friends of the Alphabet (FOTA). Our mid June prompt was A River Runs Through It. Create something inspired by a river. I am no illustrator, so the thought of having to draw a river was not one I wanted to engage. I decided to go graphic and created the black letters first, then soaked the middle area with ink to represent the water, then added the white letters once it was all dry. I greatly enjoyed the movie A River Runs Through It, directed by Robert Redford, so this quote from the movie is the one I chose to utilize:
Not far downstream was a dry channel where the river had run once, and part of the way to know a thing is through its death. But years ago I had known the river when it flowed through this now dry channel, so I could enliven its stoney remains with the waters of memory.
– Norman Maclean ‘A River Runs Through It’ 1992
The movie illustrates for us that our lives are touched by the people with which we share our days. We are fortunate when those people are ones we see every day. We are blessed and have become who we are today by the people we can no longer see each day. They have moved on, changed their lives, or even left this earth. We now stand as witness to the person they were and how their brief time in our lives changed us forever. Sort of like a river that has run dry. The marks it leaves on the earth cannot be forgotten by anyone who encountered what it was when it ran full.
Today I encourage you to think about the people in your own world who have made a mark on your life and helped you to become who you are today. No matter how often you see them, if they are even still with us, their lives will never be forgotten as a result of the way you live out your days. AND, how are you giving their gift forward? Where are you investing their wisdom into the future generations? No matter how we invest, when we give of ourselves we keep that river flowing full and strong.
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