“Your cranes are beautiful,” she said. “What are you going to do with them?”
I hadn’t thought about that.
I had folded over two hundred of them, and they were starting to pile up.
And then I got a vision of my paper cranes flying up the stairs as they were stuck to my wall.
I had bought a townhouse condo with a tremendous wall space, and for two years, that space had me stumped.
Since the small upstairs bedroom didn’t extend across the stairwell, the main wall at the bottom of the steps was fourteen feet from floor to ceiling, and at the top, it was seven feet. The wall space was 270°, resulting in a wrap-around effect as it turned in the narrow width of the stairwell and turned again where the outside wall of the small bedroom faced the main wall of the staircase.
With such a big space to play with, I wanted something more special than the usual pictures, posters, or prints. I couldn’t think of anything, so I did nothing and that massive wall space remained bare.
All of a sudden, my wishing meditation had a purpose.
Not only was this going to change my life, it was now art in the making.
I went from origami paper to folding photos from magazines, yellowed pages from my favorite book, bright white pages from my abandoned novel to make the cranes that would transform my staircase and make it magical.
I folded cranes everywhere I went and got a lot of people’s attention.
I gave them away at random for I had so many and it seemed like good karma. I left them with the tip in restaurants I ate in, to the barista who made my mocha, to the florist who arranged the flowers. I gave them to classmates, to friends, to strangers.
At work, I covered for the receptionist for a week, and my respite supervisor sulked when I gave other colleagues a crane and didn’t think of her. So of course, I let her pick her favorite.
I’d look up from wherever I was and see somebody smiling at me as I folded those cranes bringing me closer and closer to my wish.
The anti-war movement had a dedicated following here in Juneau, and I strongly suspect many people thought I was folding peace cranes in protest to the President (George W at the time).
But I was only thinking of myself.
Around 300 cranes, a good-looking bad boy entered my sphere.
I thought he was obnoxious, but I also thought I could get him if I wanted to. We disliked each other, but our conversations were loaded with energy because we didn’t agree on anything.
It was exciting.
I also had my eye on a gym rat with a questionable reputation - sought after and commitment afraid. What a conquest!
We had a couple of dates; and it didn’t matter that the gym rat was leaving town to travel for six months - I was elated. I was finally on my way to being lucky in love.
And it occurred to me that I didn’t even know what that meant
When I first made my wish, the image I had in mind of what it was to be lucky in love was to win over the ones I yearned for.
But the more I observed those sought after beloveds, it was obvious that they were not the ones who yearned.
Most of them were good people.
Others were nice in some ways and not so nice in others. And there were plenty of beloveds that had all kinds of unlovable attributes – shallow, vain, self-absorbed, rude, vicious, cruel, selfish.
The list could go on and on, but they all had one thing in common. They loved themselves. It didn’t matter whether it was too much or just enough, but matters of the heart were not something they fretted over as they went about their day.
One morning, I was folding cranes in my favorite breakfast joint, occasionally catching a phrase here and there from the table across mine by two out of town men who were in Juneau for a hunting trip.
The cell phone of the man facing me rang; he answered and sounded very happy to have been interrupted.
The person on the other end was probably his wife and I believe his child was also on, because he ended each chat with “I love you.”
Of course, that got my attention.
He seemed like such a good man and I was so struck by the ordinary scene I recorded it in my journal, where I wrote that the people who were his wife and child were very lucky indeed.
Meditation is a strange trip, leading to unexpected places within one’s psyche.
