Filling Up the Sea
A Chinese fable:
The youngest daughter of the Emperor one day took a boat out to sea. As she sailed, the Ocean grew fierce and a storm blew up without warning, capsizing the boat and drowning the girl. She was transformed into a magical bird, living on an island rock in the middle of the Ocean. Each day she would fly back and forth from her rock to the Ocean, dropping one stone or twig at a time into the pounding waves, crying, "Jing wei jing wei!" as she did so (and thus how she came to be called the jing wei bird).
One day the Ocean grew tired of her pestering. "Why do you throw your little stones into me day after day?!" the Ocean roared.
"I will fill you up with my twigs and stones, that you claim no other hapless victim!" the jing wei bird responded.
The Ocean laughed. "Foolish little bird. You cannot fill me up! I am vast and endless!"
The little bird was not deterred. "I will continue to throw stones into you, and I will succeed even if it takes me a thousand years!"
And so the saying came about that One has the indomitable spirit of the jing wei bird.
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About Me
Stephanie Pui-Mun Law has been painting fantastic otherworlds from early childhood, though her art career did not begin until 1998 when she graduated from a program of Computer Science. After three years of programming for a software company by day and rushing home to paint into the midnight hours, she left the world of typed logic and numbers, for painted worlds of dreams and the fae. Her illustrations have been for various game and publishing clients, including Wizards of the Coast, HarperCollins, LUNA Books, Tachyon Books, White Wolf, Alderac Entertainment, and Green Ronin. She has authored and illustrated “Dreamscapes, Creating Magical Angel, Faery & Mermaid Worlds with Watercolor” (2008, North Light Books), a book on watercolor technique for fantasy, and a sequel to be released in 2010. She is also the creator of the Shadowscapes Tarot deck (Llewellyn Publishing, 2010).
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