This post is not strictly about travel, but it is about a journey. Many of you know that I have become possessed by an Origami obsession. A couple of weeks ago, a story started to ask me to write this piece down. This has happened before with various writing adventures. I don't have any feeling that it is my work of fiction, but more that my hand happened to be the one holding the pen as the story leaked onto the page.
My deepest thanks and appreciation to my volunteer editors, especially Chava and Sydney.
The Five Minute Rule
Orange Crane
Primary fold, Valley fold, Reverse fold
My whole life I have been fascinated by Origami. I was never very good at it, and I would set aside my attempts in frustration. A few years ago I treated myself to a trip to the 100 Yen store I saw and bought a packet of paper. Kami. Later that week I was bimbling through a second hand store and saw an Origami book. It was a perfect match for my skill level, and I was hooked. From that moment on, my purse always had a packet of paper.
Yeah I made a lot of snowballs. The release of frustration of crumpling up a figure that just would not work. It led, ever so slowly, to making figures that actually looked like something. My house became littered with cranes, bunnies, a squirrel and a rocking horse that hang in my window.
My friends, at first amazed and honored by a gift, began to balk at taking one more origami. So I came up with my Five Minute Rule. Enjoy the figure for five minutes, then you can give it away, throw it away, stick it in a corner. It doesn’t matter.
One of my favorite places to fold was at a coffee house, preferably in a sunny window where the light is good. The first time I felt like a real origami folder was when the waitress said she liked the things I was folding. Her tip was left in the wings of an Orange Crane. As I walked out the door, I could see her grinning as she carried it back towards the kitchen.
Bright Blue Horse
Origami is perfect for when you must sit in one place for hours. Time chunks can be dedicated to matching corners, to making creases crisp, to practicing the same fold time after time. Hundreds of snowballs, but also brilliant flashes of the Ah Ha! Moment when a difficult fold falls into place. The biggest Ah Ha! Was when I realized that those books were not instructions, but puzzles to be solved.
I learned to recognize the art of teaching. All of those books I had amassed, and set aside in dusty piles were not badly presented instructions, but actually masterpieces of storytelling. OK, not all of the books were masterpieces. Some of the teaching was rubbish, but even those books taught me valuable lessons at deeply appreciating the masters: John Montroll, Robert Lang. I started watching videos with the rapt attention of someone addicted to pornography. Gen Hagiwara, Joe Nakashima. These people have the gift not just of folding, but of teaching the folding and the calm that can be found in the folding.
I have always traveled. My work took me hundreds of miles in my van up and down the left coast. Lots of nights solo camping. Meals on the road. Retirement has not meant less travel. Grand kids in distant places changed travel from van to airplane. Lots of time to fold. My tray table would be littered with snowballs.
One particularly long flight towards home I managed to learn a horse. Technically not Origami, as the paper needed to be cut which is an offense to purists. And since a blade is not allowed on the plane, I had to figure out how to tear the paper just so. I reached that moment where the figure actually looked like a horse. I sat back, with satisfaction, looking at my creation. The smug young stewardess efficiently swept up all of my paper into her rubbish sack.
Accepting this lesson in managing my frustration, I pulled out my last piece of paper, a brilliant blue. The pony came out almost alive. Prancing. Tail held proud in the air. I gave him to the steward, a pleasant man who helped me to get my bag down. He seemed pleased.
Rabbit, of found paper
I became a bit obsessive. Everywhere I went I left pieces of Origami.
I am convinced that our society has made a big mistake in allowing the professionals to be in charge. We don’t play sports, we have professionals to do that. Only teachers employed at schools and institutions teach. If you are not An Artist, you can’t do art. My small fight back is to do all of these things, if poorly, and to get others to do things too. It is about the making, not what you make.
By the time a person is an adult they have a hard time doing things outside of their area of expertise. Doing things just because they can, so my cohorts are often children. I like to invite kids to fold with me. If I see a kid at the café watching me, I invite them to fold with me. It will often be the kid destined to become the math nerd that folds a water bomb with glee. Or the preschooler that is interested in so many things that s/he can’t sit still, proudly taking the triangle back to show mom.
And I felt compelled to give away my Origami. It is not the finished paper model itself. The object may only last 5 minutes. It is the possibility of the fold, that it can be learned that is the true treasure.
A medical scare gave me lots of time in medical waiting rooms. I could escape the interminable waiting in by doing a fold. All of those useless medical pamphlets that are left there became fodder for my folding. I was particularly pleased with a large rabbit I made from a poster for an event the week before. I left him standing on the corner table. I could see another nervous woman looking at him. She seemed a bit calmer with the sight of him.
Brown Bear
On one of my flights my seat mate had a large shaggy dog. Bear was a service dog, assisting his handler with mobility. It turns out that he also has a talent for finding people in difficult circumstances. He was part of a search and rescue team that had been assigned to a building collapse. His handler was telling me that this had been a particularly difficult assignment. Dogs get depressed when they have very few live finds. Sometimes volunteers would hide and the dogs would be given a happy find. Even so, you could tell that Bear was feeling low.
Three shades of brown that show up in my favored brands of multicolored paper. One of them exactly matched Bear. This paper is a bit small for the bear figure, but I called on my bestest technique and the fold revealed a bear that resembled the large shaggy dog.
His handler was in that exhausted semi sleep that one gets on a flight home from a difficult situation. I slipped the figure into an unzipped pocket in Bear’s service vest and quietly told him “Thank You”. The last I saw of them was as they walked out the ramp. Everyone jostling down the ramp, making way for the returning heroes. Bear was just a little bouncy, his short tail just a bit wagging.
Hearing a voice behind me, I thought I must have left something on the plane. It was a steward, but not the one from my section of the plane.
“You are the foldy lady! I have the horse you gave me in my kitchen window. I look at it when I eat breakfast.”
It is good to know that some small art you released into the world has brought some joy.
Red Dinosaur
Giving away oddly folded pieces of paper became the center of my existence. There was really no gain to it, other than the occasional thank you. I began to be aware of small collections of origami at a few restaurants. A small bit of extra niceness added to a tip, but honored as art by the wait staff. I may never become one of those extraordinary folders that make you gasp at their beautiful, technical folds. But my figures became more complex, more lovely over time. I would share folding to anyone that would have them. And I gave away my little bits of art.
My primary audience was at my favorite cafe. The owner was not one that appreciates the pieces that I left in a discrete corner of the counter, tossing them as soon as I left. So I gave my folds to friends and strangers. I tried to remember to tell them of the Five Minute Rule, relieving them of any guilty feelings when the figure would get damaged, or was no longer amusing.
The kid at the next table was a bit extra squirmy. “What is your favorite animal?” Thankfully I know a good, quick dinosaur.
“You pick your paper.” “What shape is this?” Square. Then Rectangle. Then Triangle. He sat immobile, in rapt attention. Then he could see the dinosaur start to emerge in the paper. I made two people happy that day. His mom was grateful for a few moments to sip her latte while it was still warm. And the last I saw of him was him holding onto his red Dinosaur like a holy amulet in his chubby hand.
The Last Fold
The Heart is a fun one to teach. I found it on a video. Not a particularly satisfying video, as it was a small part of a complex rotating tessellation. But the presenter was focused in showing off his amazing skills than in teaching how to do the skills. I had spent the better part of a day watching the video, slowing it down, backing up over and over until I could do it.
The tessellation was a series of interlocking parts, and each part looks like a heart at one step in the folding. None of the folds are very difficult, but I could find no diagrams of it. I am a terrible diagramer. But I gave it my best.
Looking for other figures that would be good for this group, I came across an old diagram for the Lover’s Knot. Perhaps from the 50s from the look of the typing and the style of descriptions, using none of the names for folds that are in current usage. No artist or author. Page 1004 at the bottom of the page was the only information I had on its origin. In the middle of this instruction was The Heart.
I printed it out, and went to my folding area (kitchen table covered with papers.) Over and over I folded The Heart, The Lover’s Knot, and the Tessellation. I looked in all of the books I had, and it was not there anywhere. These three related knots, and I was the one to make the connection . This is the moment of discovery, pure joy that every artist aspires to, that every historian lusts after.
I chose my favorite paper, that special stash of paper being saved for just this perfect fold. I folded hearts, and knots. And I assembled the rotating piece. Turning into itself, over and over.
-*-*-
P waves are the ones that make the hair stand on the back of your neck, that make the dogs howl, and the horses run madly in their paddocks. When you have experienced several big earthquakes you start to recognize the sensation. S waves are the ones that do all of the damage. And there was a lot of damage.
Bear’s team was one of the first assigned because they lived nearby. There was a lot of damage, and a lot of chaos. The best they could do was to start where they were, and follow the dogs as they searched the rubble.
The smell of coffee, broken cups, a café. Bear indicated a find, sitting in his special way when he had a find. A cook and waitress were trapped in a corner where the walk-in cooler held the roof up. As they climbed out the handler could see that the office wall still had the cork board with the receipts and an orange crane still tacked on.
When the dog was set off on his next search, he came to an older house that had fallen off its foundation. When Bear did his indicating bark, the family in the house started to call out. The doors were jammed, the window barred, and they were unable to get out. Volunteers with hammer and pry bars opened up the wall. The first one to be handed out was a small boy, clutching a red paper in his chubby hand.
A new apartment building, collapsed into the below ground parking garage. Bear found an airline steward and his husband, hiding under a table. A partial wall, with the window oddly intact, blinds, shelf, and a blue paper horse. As the team extracted the two men, the window fell from the damaged frame, cutting the handler.
The hospital was in shambles. That happens when they are built directly on the fault line. But the outlying clinics were standing, and doing what they could for the injured flooding into the place. People chipping in, doing what they could with what supplies they could salvage. Most people had to wait. The table in the corner had been cleared and a box of cookies and water bottles had been placed there, and a large paper rabbit in the back.
Triage is the difficult duty of deciding which injury is treated first. The handler’s cut was bad, but not dire. So she found an unoccupied chair to wait for her turn. Bear sat carefully on her feet. In disaster work, one learns to catch what rest one can whenever the opportunity. Before closing her eyes, she reached down to connect with Bear with a pat. Her hand touched his vest, and she noticed that one of the zippers was not quite closed. A brown piece of paper was stuck in the zipper.
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