Pulvis et umbra sumus. (We are but dust and shadow.)

Truly, we are dust and shadow; truly, desire is blind and greedy; truly, hope deceives.

None to witness. Dust of dreams, dust of all that we never achieved. Dust of what we might have been and what we cannot help but be.

I have never liked the phrase that says we’re just made of dust and return to dust. We are energy, which is interchangeable with light. We are fire and water and earth. We are air and atoms and quarks. Moreover, we are dreams, hopes, and fears held together by wisdom and driven apart by folly. So much more than dust. The biblical verse should say, “Miracle thou art and to Mystery returneth.

We are a blend of dust and divinity.

Let’s return now to the dust as the dust we are

We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone.

We call out into the distance... Less than a pearl in a sea of stars, we are a lost island in the shadows.

The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death.

That we have first rais'd a Dust, and then complain, we cannot see.

We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.

We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live

People were just like that. We couldn't even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds.

That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust.