Brought Into the Fold

I started folding some seven years ago after a strange and potent dream. It was 2006, some seven months before my mother’s diagnosis, when I first dreamed of paper birds. I dreamed of my fingers gliding over creases and angles of white and red coming together slowly in a figure that was more than the sum of its parts. I dreamed that the paper bird suddenly came alive and flew out of my hands, delicate and trembling with the joy of living.

Returning to A Space to Exist

After the fact, I wasn’t even sure what had happened, but I woke up with a sense that the unremembered night had been important. It was the first real snow of the year and if I were being cynical, I might think it was the cold which woke me before my alarm (despite my perpetual state of sleep deprivation). I wasn’t being cynical, though, so I thought first of my Father’s connection to the winter storm--and that’s the true miracle of the thing: that my mind leapt to the unseen explanation.