Little Cranes Everywhere

Folding up every anxiety

Hello, friends.

It’s spring, the soggiest of times, a seasonal no-man’s land where, at least in Montana, the only solace is gaining an hour of light which is slanting into my front windows and creating brief outposts of warmth on my wood floors. Usually, either my dog or I lie down there to soak it up, and the other of us thinks, “Oh, great idea,” and joins in.

Since it’s been a while, here is a quick rundown of the sensory details of my life these days. There is a sporadic rumbling sound I hear when I’m in my house; I raise my eyebrows trying to figure out what it is, and then I realize it’s a large flat of snow sliding off the roof. This keeps happening. I’ve heard two types of birds return so far, after a long winter silence. The two-note bird (I don’t know what it’s actually called. We’ve just named it the two-note bird because it can only sing two notes, in the same order, at the same rhythm, eternally) came back about a week ago, and this week, I’ve heard doves calling twice. The temperatures are soaring into the 30s again, praise to all the heavens. That means I can grab something other than my heavy coat, and I haven’t worn gloves in days. I did slip on a patch of ice this morning, one so large I didn’t realize it was frozen ground, and I was lucky to have stayed on my feet, albeit barely.

The winter months are now like the forgotten stack of paperwork on the counter, every layer meaningful, but unsorted and hard to recall. I do remember my furnace tried to die, twice. My eldest dog did die, quickly, and of lymphoma. I turned 48, which may relate to an uncomfortable, emotional white noise going on for me which I’ll share in a moment. I stayed in a lot more than I would have liked. I started making origami cranes.

A senbazuru is a collection of 1,000 paper cranes, a Japanese tradition promising a wish to one who completes the task of folding them. My first encounter with a senbazuru was at a wedding, many years ago; I still have the dress I wore, kept more for the fact it was expensive than treasured, and I recall walking up a grassy slope, treading on the balls of my feet so my heels wouldn’t sink. The first sign of the celebration was a large tree with 1,000 white origami cranes hanging from its limbs. I wonder if their wish was to stay married, and I wonder if they did.

I had that wish once, and it didn’t come true. I don’t think a million paper cranes could have kept us together. But my current project doesn’t hold for me so much a single, weighted wish but rather a head-down devotion. It takes about two and a half minutes to fold one crane. Some quick math will tell you it will take me months to complete 1,000. I’ve folded around 240 so far; they were littered all over the house, so I began stringing them and hanging the strands in hundreds. But as I go, I’m thinking the Japanese have tucked some tricks into the practice. Perhaps the prize isn’t one wish coming true. The intentionality required, the dexterous learning curve, and the sheer amount of time spent bowed in repeated movement tells me there are gifts along the way.

I’ve started penciling one or two-word prayers or people’s names in the center of each flat square. I check in with my heart, find what’s stirring there, and send it inside a crane with blessing and surrender. It’s been comforting to know that once I have a string of cranes folded and strung up in my stairwell, when I no longer remember what I’ve written inside, God does. I am crafting a tiny bird, placing a prayer between her wings, and adopting her out, two and a half minutes at a time.

What feels ominous is knowing a senbazuru is often associated with trying to save someone’s life. My second encounter with the practice was when the kids and I went to see a children’s theater production of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, a true story of a girl made ill by the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima. Despite the valuable history lesson of a courageous child, it’s a terribly sad story. She doesn’t finish the cranes, and she dies of radiation poisoning. I’ve been trying to keep this narrative at bay as I schedule my second annual MRI, a rite of springtime now, to make sure my cancer has not returned. What’s even more ominous is that I just finished reading Tommorow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and was completely blindsided by a character folding a senbazuru to save someone’s life. The loved one dies anyway. This part of the story slid under me like a patch of black ice and almost pulled me down. Not the death, but the powerlessness.

This is the white noise I’m talking about, this background, subconscious reading of my own life like it’s being written and like I’m the sole audience, constantly combing for literary device, foreshadowing, allusion. It’s probably a trauma response to search for safety like I do, years of wiring in my brain sending signals of impending threat. And maybe I’m scribbling the names of others into my cranes because on a deeper plane, I’m conflicted by the compulsion to write my own name inside, over and over.

If you’ve been around here a while, you know I believe our stories are indeed being written, but hopefully with our participation. We co-author with the Divine (I was going to say ‘Ticonderogas in hand,’ but in truth we are likely both on laptops) collaborating, arguing, cracking up. Our stories are ridiculous and tragic and contain a glory I have to concede is otherworldly. The way my friends and I repeatedly convey this eternal truth is, “You can’t make this shit up.” Because we can’t.

We can only pray, bless, and surrender for two and half minutes before picking up another blank page and trying to remember how to start.

You are the Beloved,

Leslie

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*If you’d like your name tucked into a crane with prayer, leave me a comment, no details required, and consider it done.