Wednesday 22 November 2017

Unfolding Origami Thoughts

...Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

-Rumi- Mathnawi, III, 3769-3766                                                   

This mathnawi excerpt filled my mind with images of the dizzying zig-zag patterns of flocks of birds in flight. You know how they are all clustered on the ground and then in absolute perfectly flowing unison rise up all together? There are so, so many of them and yet, they're all flawlessly in sync.  I wondered if we humans could ever move like that. On a large scale. When it mattered. 
Soon, my mind wandered to the predicable pattern of visualizing these thoughts and resulted in the photo above. It's very meditative folding several origami doves. You should try it.
With each fold, I find I'm manipulating the wings in different ways and thinking about the expansion and contraction of the self. I wonder about going into that deep presence that Rumi talks about, and if that awareness would make actions more thoughtful. 
As my origami flock increases, I know feelings and thoughts are uniting inside me around the recent indelible story of the late Tanya Brooks. She was metaphorically paralyzed for most of her life and her story has now paralyzed me.   

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