My friend Donovan (who you will probably hear more about once my music comes around) once told me about a parable from Buddhism called the parable of the raft. It essentially posits a healthy way to look at your past. The raft represents anything you’ve put time and effort into to keep yourself going. It could be an addiction, a relationship, a habit, an item, etc. The idea is that once you’ve crossed the body of water you needed the raft for, are you going to drag it through the forest and make it that much harder to move on, or let it go and continue on your way? After being told the story, I decided I wanted to expand on the conversation a little. What happens when you do drag the raft through the forest, unwilling to let go, and you come across terrain that would make it impossible to keep bringing it along. In this case, that’s a broken bridge. The path itself is a stand-in for the timeline, in a sense it’s a path you have no option but to walk. The path actually extends into the sun, and the sun itself represents an end, although that can also mean a new beginning, should you continue on the path beyond that point, even though what’s beyond it is entirely unknown. If you’ll notice, the shadows are all inverted and actually being pulled towards the sun on the horizon, even the moon is darker in its relative space to show how all things are headed towards the end of that path, even light. At the time of me drawing this, I was dragging a raft myself. Initially I hadn’t intended for the person in the image to be me, but as I was finishing up I realized I saw myself in that position more than I had previously been aware, so I ended up making it look like me. Finishing this project helped me to let go of my raft, and maybe looking at it will help you to do so as well. In all honesty I might return someday with materials to fix the bridge and maybe affix some wheels to the raft. It was a good raft.
