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.

It was such a beautiful dream that when I woke up that cold and rainy Saturday of that now nearly forgotten October, I pulled a blanket around my shoulders and dug about in the many boxes in my storage closet looking for a book I hadn’t touched since my early childhood—an origami book that my mother had bought me one summer with the hopes of occupying me for a few hours. I found it, still in the haze of half sleep and thumbed through the pages. The remnants of failed cranes fluttered out and lay sadly on the ground. There were still a few pieces of good uncreased paper in the mix of half folded models and so I sat at the dining room table with a yellowed sheet in front of me and followed the diagrams as best I could.

In retrospect, I don’t know what I expected would happen. Sometimes powerful dreams fuel us to do strange things on waking. When I was little I had once dreamed that our buffet server could grant wishes and my mother found me early that morning with hand on wood wishing for a cat. It didn’t work of course, and I felt silly afterwards, but how quickly such things are forgotten when a new dream happens along. I don’t know what I expected, but I know I didn’t really expect a crane to emerge from my efforts—yet, after an hour of work, one did. A perfect paper crane. It didn’t fly out of my hands. It didn’t tremble with the joy of living. But it existed. And that, it turns out, was enough.

I remember the Netjeru whispering to me then that this would be a useful skill to develop, though I never saw much use in it. I made a variety of things—mostly animals—but other creative pursuits stole my attention and the harsh bits of life stole my time. I still made little cranes from stray bits of paper at restaurants, but origami as an art slipped out of my life, and my fingers lost the memory of the folds for everything except the little cranes.

I started again recently: idle fingers looking for something to do while monitoring a student credit recovery lab, the dull task of watching the security software flip through student screens looking for wayward youth playing games or watching music videos illicitly. A student saw one of the little cranes and asked if I could make a fox. I did—after much trying and relearning how to read diagrams. Then a student who saw the fox asked for a butterfly, and a student who saw the butterfly asked for a bat, and the boys who made such a fuss over the bat prompted a sudden interest in paper lizards. Then it was flying squirrels and ferrets and deer and moose and a menagerie of other things. I rediscovered the joy and sank myself back into the world of folding. Then I heard the whispers again: this is something useful, They said.

Useful for what?

I went looking for an answer to that question. Just a sampling of what I found I will share here:

"Ancient Egyptian Scarab" by Yureiko

"Anubis Head Sculpture" by Jacky Chan

"Bastet" by Joseph Wu

"Eye of Horus" by H.T. Quyet

I am a long way from the kind of skill needed to design or mimic such models (none of these have diagrams), but I’m working towards it. I want to fold the image of my Fathers and my Beloveds. I want to fold them and memorize them and have them always at my hands in any place where there is a table and paper. I want to never be without their image. Yes. This is a useful thing to develop.