Painted Rocks and Paper Cranes

It turned much colder overnight, 34 degrees out on the dune-top deck this morning, where I did my Tai Chi to the accompaniment of that ebullient mockingbird that has taken up residence somewhere nearby.  I checked the forecast for the week and it looked absolutely wonderful.  

It being a perfect, cloudless sunny day, we decided again to drive to Fort Macon and hike the entire 3.3-mile loop of the Elliott Coues Nature Trail.  The parking lot was full and there were more people out on the trail than we have ever seen before, all of them having made the same decision we had.  Martha spotted this rock adjacent to the path that runs along the salt marshes, just on the other side of a wooden walkway.

She knew something about painted rocks but I did not.  I did some research and learned that they are a kind of nationwide scavenger hunt meant to promote positivity and kindness.  Smooth rocks of different sizes are painted, sometimes with faces or looking like ladybugs, often with inspirational words written on them.  Local communities are often involved, and there is a presence on social media.  There is an “NC Painted Rocks” Facebook page, for example.  What do you do when you find a painted rock?  If it is a small one, you can put it in your pocket and take it home.  This rock was about eight inches wide and would not have been easy to carry along this path, at least a half-mile in either direction.  So I left it where it was, wondering what the abstract picture was meant to represent.

When we returned to the condo, I set to work on a new skill that I have stumbled into – making paper origami cranes.  I can’t remember exactly where I first read about paper cranes recently, but the idea stuck in my head.  I learned there is an ancient Japanese legend that promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes (千羽鶴, senbazuru; literally “1000 cranes”) will be granted a wish by the gods.  The legend was popularized in a book called Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, the story of a Japanese girl who was two years old when she was exposed to radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II.  The girl soon developed leukemia at the age of 12 and began making origami cranes with the goal of making one thousand.  Tragically, it is said that she folded only 644 before she became too weak to fold any more, and died in 1955.

I have been writing some poetry on our Sabbatical, and one of them is about paper cranes, and begins like this:

 I made a thousand paper cranes
From the silence within me,
And released them one by one. 

Since I was already so deeply invested in paper cranes, I decided I should learn to make one, which was more difficult than it looked.  After referring to a You Tube video several times, I was finally able to memorize the steps, folding and refolding, and folding again.

It was a little like memorizing a new piece of music, something I am also doing these days, the steps finally committed to memory.  I remember my piano-teacher Dad telling me, Practice Makes Perfect.  I practiced enough that I can make a paper crane out of any piece of square paper.  But in the process, I went through several sheets of print paper.