At first, she noticed his wild hair. Then, almost immediately, she caught sight of her future painting: the freedom of a multi-racial spirit blowing in the wind. It would be a breeze, she thought to herself, assessing the easiness of her future project. But little did she suspect it would take her almost a year conceptualizing and working in three continents and morphing dozens of models to discover the real personality of the portrait.

Little did she know that a mysterious character on her canvas would experience sixteen distinctly different identities, eventually liberating and releasing all but the most inhibited. Sixteen Lives in the Wind became a story of consciousness revealed through intense experiences and expressed through integrity—a story of finding contentment through honest, humble and grateful living. All the masks of survival and their crippling beliefs, illusionary or true, and all the influences of epigenetically revealed or still dormant ancestry codes had been blown away in the wind. All the confusion, resentment, and grief had been finally released, giving way to genuine peacefulness and harmonious self-awareness. Repainting the canvas, searching for the right emotion and letting one face go after another, turned into the most grueling, the most agonizing and the most relentless creative endeavor Akiane had ever encountered. Yet there was no other way of capturing the movement of silence and the inner light she was seeking. No other way of finding the true living spirit within one man.