#artofremembrance

In the hush of autumn, when the cicadas fall silent and only the wind speaks softly through the trees, the dragonflies return to dance across the fields of Japan. Their wings shimmer like sunlight caught in morning mist, darting through time as if to stitch memory back into the world. To the Japanese heart, this season speaks not only of beauty, but of impermanence — of life remembered and life passing.

"Autumn," writes an old Japanese poet, "is the season of the ears," where the melodies of insects awaken recollections more than any sight can. Yet among these sounds there glides one creature in eerie silence: the dragonfly — tonbo, voiceless amidst the chorus of change, flashing briefly, beautifully, before vanishing again.

For over a millennium, the Japanese have seen in the dragonfly not merely an insect, but a spirit — swift, pure, and unyielding.

In Japanese folklore, dragonflies are messengers between realms. They hover near still water, where the living and the dead whisper across a shimmering veil. Some say the spirits of loved ones ride their wings in summer and autumn, visiting the earth once more before winter falls.

⪩༏⪨ ⪩༏⪨ It is this legacy that lives again in The Passage – Dragonflies, a ceramic urn handcrafted with reverence and sorrow. Each curve of its surface echoes the form of wings in motion, each etched dragonfly a memorial in flight. Not only an urn, it is a vessel of memory — a guardian of ashes, yet a symbol of ascent. As if, just as the dragonfly carries away the sting of the gadfly, so too does this keepsake carry away grief — transfiguring it into light, color, and silence.

Placed in a quiet home or beside a sunlit window, the urn does not weep. Instead, it reminds: that life, however fleeting, is luminous. That passage, however final, is a return to the wind, the sky, and the dance of light over the water.

⪩༏⪨ ཐི༏ཋྀ ≽༏≼

Thus, the dragonflies weave their tapestry of color across the land each autumn.