life

 WE are just  dust 

 Everything is dust in the wind."

That's probably not true, even in a long-term sense, even in the absence of any afterlife.

If we are "dust," we are spectacularly complex, colorful, and sensual dust . . . if we choose to be.

To suggest that "all we are" is dust in the wind is to belittle and devalue . . . it is to be depressive and misleading.

It would be like saying, "All the Louvre Museum is . . . is a temporary building with paint on the walls."  It's not that the statement is false.  In a poorly represented or misrepresented sense, the statement is true.   But the description is poor and base.  It removes the objects from all their historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts.

And with life, or the arts . . . context is kind of an important thing.  When a person begins to describe things by ignoring their context, they are, consciously or unconsciously, no longer considerately or comprehensively describing those things.

If a great picture is worthy of a thousand carefully-chosen descriptive words, certainly an individual human life, or the human race, is worth more than a one-word description, such as "dust."

If I am to be called "dust," I aim to be a marvelously multi-colored dust particle, looking for as many lights to reflect before I'm pummeled into oblivion.