I am larger, better than I thought; I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me.
Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;
Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me.
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Here on the mountain we are halfway through what the National Weather Service is calling “the biggest snow event of the year.” The nor’easter began Monday night; our power went out a little after 1 a.m.; and with luck and pluck, I got our backup power generator working some time before our recently forwarded clocks struck 3. With another six hours of snowfall predicted, some of the snowdrifts building up around our foundation are already 5 feet high.
Faced with this all-too-familiar scenario—I grew up just outside Syracuse—and knowing I have a date with our new snow thrower, I decide to dig in … and do some origami. When the going gets tough, the tough get folding.
I’ve practiced the Japanese art of paper folding since age seven, the same year I discovered magic. For years I thought this twin fascination was unique to me, but I later learned that many magicians practice origami. Some became origami masters themselves, including England’s Robert Harbin and my fellow Vermonter, Robert E. Neale. Bob Neale is one of magic’s original thinkers, the author of magic books with titles like This Is Not a Book and inventor of amazing origami models that let you perform tricks.
In fact, it is Bob’s “Bunny Bill” that I folded this morning. Here is the finished piece and a bit of magic (I say “a bit” because it’s not meant to be a fooler):
“Bunny Bill” is not easy to make. In fact, the folding—quarter-inch corners, precision angles, razor-sharp creases—takes practice much like a magic trick. To make it I use special hand tools my son, Jay, gave me and that he uses for his own incredible paper sculptures.
“Bunny Bill” also won’t perform for you if it’s made from regular or origami paper. The paper engineering Bob Neale created for his most famous model takes advantage of the special properties of printed bills, which are made of cotton, linen and blue and red synthetic fibers. Folding U.S. currency in certain ways creates tension and spring, which is what causes the bunny’s head to pop out of the hat. I find it all fascinating and fun.
But that is not the reason I am still practicing origami more than 50 years after my sister, Kathy, gave me origami paper and an instruction book one Christmas. Or why I am sharing this with you now. When I unwrapped that gift, I wasn’t just delighted at getting two presents from one sibling (I was just learning math) … I was enchanted that you could take a single flat piece of paper and, without cutting or tearing, make it come alive with your own two hands. To discover that I had that power at age seven, well, that did something for my soul.
I recently reminded Kathy of how she got me started on this long paper trail all those years ago. She said she didn’t remember, though it gladdened her heart to hear. It’s just another example that we really have no idea whether we’ve changed other people’s lives for the better with bits of generosity here and there, much as other people don’t know how much they’ve changed ours. Had I not mentioned this to Kathy on a recent phone call, she might never have known that something she did when she was 13 would one day be helping her 61-year-old brother avoid firing up the snow thrower … that when I needed to counter the force of a blizzard with my own free will and tend to my spirit, I turned to the ancient, meditative art of Japanese paper folding. Arigatō, kyasurīn.
And yet this is how lives unfold, or can. I recently wrote about The Great Unfolding, this time we are in when, if we choose to, we can see greater and greater acts of love taking place all around us. They always have occurred, these acts, for there has always been far more love in the world and much more kindness than hate and aggression. Love prevails. If it didn’t, you and I wouldn’t be here. As humankind continues to unfold and we become, in the words of Walt Whitman, larger and better than we thought, whatever spiritual practices we may have can help us reconnect with the divine inside, that beautiful something toward which we are always unfolding.
If you don’t know what your spiritual practice may be or could be, think back to when you discovered something that set your soul on fire, or at least made it tingle. A piece of music? A work of art? A book? A seaside vacation? A successful first batch of cookies? Help from a stranger or a stranger helped? What was it?
Go back and unwrap that gift. Try to remember what works for you without fail; it is easy to forget amid the weather events of our daily lives. For before we can unfold, we need to unwrap. And before we can unwrap, we need to remember there was a time when we were immortal, and even the gods knew we had the power to bring the sometime flatness of being to a fullness that could breathe life into a paper doll, a freshly inflated football or a secret poem we dared to write.
You don’t have to pull a rabbit out of a hat, in other words. You only have to believe there is nothing you can’t do.
Behind the curtain
Nearly 20 years ago I met Bob Neale at a Saturday afternoon gathering of magicians he had invited to his Vermont home. After we all performed our latest magic for each other, I pulled Bob aside to thank him for inventing the Bunny Bill, which I had only recently mastered. “Oh, that was pure luck that I came up with that!” Bob laughed. All these years later, I hope that Bob, who is in his nineties, has an inkling of how many thousands of magicians carry a Bunny Bill in our pockets, as I have for 20 years. As we say in the magic biz, it packs flat and plays big.
You don’t have to be an origami fanatic to get in on the fun. Try learning my all-time favorite origami model, the fox finger puppet, from this excellent tutorial.