Cranestorm is Complete

The Brain Injury Association of Minnesota recently completed their massive Cranestorm project.

Picture taken by my friend S.B.

They have over 140,000 cranes!

There is another picture and short article at the Star Tribune.

Cranestorm Has Reached Its Goal!

The people over at the Brain Injury Association of Minnesota have reached their goal of collecting 100,000 cranes! Now they will be hosting events to string up all the cranes. From their site:

The Brain Injury Association of Minnesota will be holding crane stringing sessions at our office where you can bring your kids, spouse, friends, or anyone you may know who is interested in helping us get the art installation ready. The times are open and you are
welcome to drop in whenever it fits for you. Also, if you know of any groups who are looking for something to do this Spring, please let them know about these dates!


Thursday, April 7 from 1 to 3 p.m.
Saturday, April 9 from 1 to 3 p.m.
Thursday, April 14 from 1 to 3 p.m.
Saturday, April 16 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Thursday, April 21 from 1 to 3 p.m.
Saturday, April 30 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

I'll put them on the calendar as well.

Origami in Video Games

A friend of mine is currently playing a Japanese video game called Persona 4. The basic premise of the Persona games is a little beyond my grasp, as half of it seems to be micromanaging the schedule and social life of a Japanese teen while the other half is fighting ridiculous monsters in alternate realities. In Persona 4, the alternate reality is accessed by entering a big screen TV in the shopping mall....

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that in micromanaging the schedule, you get to choose activities for your teen to do. Some are jobs and some are not. While going about the game, my friend ran into this:

If your character has Diligence, they can use it to earn Understanding. By folding origami cranes! I immediately remembered about the Cranestorm project that is still ongoing. For that project, you can donate cranes and have it counted as volunteer hours. Origami Minnesota has been helping out with that for a few months now. If you want to be a part of it, definitely check it out!

CraneStorm

I attended the November meeting of Origami Minnesota recently, and we talked about a new project called Cranestorm! 

The Brain Injury Association of Minnesota had a meeting a while back where they decided that they wanted people to "see" how many people were affected by brain injuries in Minnesota. Their estimates are that roughly 100,000 (yes, that's one-hundred-thousand) people in Minnesota (which has a population of 5,266,214) are suffering from a brain injury. 

The problem is that people cannot really understand such a large number as 100,000 unless they see 100,000 things all in a collection. To facilitate this, the BIAM is building an instillation piece in their headquarters. It will be 100,000 paper cranes hanging about the lobby. 

Now, I don't know how many of you have folded a thousand cranes (personally, I am at 0256/1000) but it is a lot of work to repeat the same model over and over. Even if you are comfortable with the process, it still takes a lot of time to fold all 1000. Now imagine doing that 99 more times!

Luckily, no single individual is going to fold all of them. They are soliciting donations of cranes from groups all over the world and have collected over 28,000 at the last count.

So, if you want to help out, go to the BIAM website and check it out!

Happy Halloween!

Hiden Senbazuru Orikata

The Hiden Senbazuru Orikata (The Secret of 1000 Cranes Paperfolding) is the first origami text in existence.

It was first published in 1797, and does not appear to have been republished since. It marks a turning point in origami tradition when the method for teaching shifted from exclusively direct instruction to text and diagram instruction. Now, people in one hemisphere teach people in the other hemisphere without ever meeting. There are untold hundreds (or thousands?) of origami books out there, everyone teaching everyone.

This particular book is not the most helpful. If you are a beginner, it lacks many diagrams, and all the models rely exclusively on cutting the paper.  Specifically, it shows various ways to precut sheets of paper in order to create connected cranes. 

I suggest checking out the full book. There is more to it than origami. It has a few pictures of people playing with cranes, both the animal and the folded paper. I find it very charming. But remember, Japanese is written from the opposite direction, so page 6 is left of page 5, for example.

I would love to be able to read the text, but I do not know how to read Japanese, yet. If anyone thinks they can translate, I would be interested.

[I should mention that the pictures were originally hosted by the Japan Origami Academic Society, but were taken down. The web archive still has the original page up. If it works for you, great, but if it does not, I took the liberty of putting them here.]

Daily Crane Meditation

I decided a long time ago that I would meditate every day.

That plan failed.

Then I read a book by the Dalai Lama and one by a zen priest and listened to a meditation CD and tried to make it happen. But for some reason, I simply do not have the right frame of mind when I wake up in the morning to sit down, and just breathe for some number of minutes every day. I cannot focus. Eventually, I simply gave up.


But, as part of my 1000 cranes project, I decided that it would be a real boost if I committed to folding at least one crane a day. So then I combined that with my desire to meditate daily and formed my daily crane meditation. Now, by any objective standard, when I fold the crane in the morning I am not really meditating, but I do take the time to focus on my breathing. One benefit to the crane is that I am so familiar with the model that I do not need to think about how to fold it. I've gone beyond simple memorization of the crane to something intuitive, like how an athlete does not remember how to move, they just do. I just fold the crane without thought which frees my mind to focus on breathing.

These folding meditation sessions are probably much shorter than if I were to set aside a block of time to meditate the zen way, but they are infinitely longer than the non-sessions I had been doing. And, with a bit of luck, getting in the habit of doing the daily crane meditation every single day could pave the way for a larger commitment that is simply not an option right now.

The Spirit of Peace

I heard about a monument that essentially was honoring the orizuru (the traditional paper crane). I followed the vague directions and found a place called Lyndale Park and more specifically, the Peace Garden. There I discovered quite a bit of garden, all quite beautiful.

Then off to the left I noticed a statue surrounded by fourteen stones. The statue is a column of stages in the folding process, starting with the Preliminary Base, to the Bird Base to the completed crane. There are six stages, one on top of the other.

Each stone has a plaque embedded in it. There are diagrams with instructions guiding the folder as they circle the statue.

The whole piece is titled The Spirit of Peace and was designed by Caprice Glaser. It is a part of the worldwide effort to honor peace and remember the horrors of the atomic bomb. It was the story of Sadako Sasaki that brought such a union between origami and peace together, and the monument is to honor her as well.

I recommend that you visit Lyndale Park. If you do, they have origami paper in something like a mailbox so that you can fold your own crane!

[These pictures are my own, taken of The Spirit of Peace designed by Caprice Glaser and owned by the city of Minneapolis]

The Crane

So, I know that this blog is devoted to origami, but for me an important part of origami is the traditional orizuru (paper crane). I am constantly in awe of the power of the symbol of the crane. It has become a symbol of peace, so much so that thousands of cranes are sent to places in distress as though the folded birds are a salve to be applied to a social wound. Maybe you recall the the Thai crane drop where millions of cranes were dropped on a region of the country devastated by violence. And so inspired I wanted to take a glimpse at the creature that inspires all this.

All crane species are strictly monogamous, have long pair bonds and a prolonged period of juvenile dependency, and are highly territorial during the breeding season.
-Paul Johnsgard in Cranes of the World, p.44

Possibly the most common symbol is of the family. Cranes are often the symbol of marriage and attentive parenting. Cranes stay with their mates, live long lives, and protect their young longer than other species. The crane is then a symbol of loyalty and longevity. Also, they are famous for their mating dances and their duets. It is common for a pair to sing a variety of songs together.

The death of Ibycus is probably the most famous of crane stories from ancient Greece. This poet of Rhegium (who lived about 550 BC.) was set upon by robbers, and before expiring looked up to see cranes flying overhead. With his dying breath he told the robbers that the cranes would avenge him. Some time later, in the market place of Corinth the robbers saw the cranes flying overhead, and one fearfully exclaimed to the others, "Behold the cranes of Ibycus." thus overheard, the men were detained and questioned by the authorities, and later confessed their crime.

-Ibid. P. 72

The crane is a common symbol in mythology. The ancient Greeks considered cranes to be intelligent, watchful, orderly, democratic. The flock works to protect the flock, rarely fighting. They band together when larger threats appear and they share the burden of cutting the wind. The mountain of Gerania (now Yerania) is named after the cranes that led a drowning city out of the flood. And cranes are credited with carrying smaller birds on their back during migration.

There is much more to be said about the crane, but what it comes down to, is that this bird seems to be one that I want to be associated with.

First 10 Cranes Complete!

I've finished my first ten cranes and distributed them around the city! I've left one of them in an origami book, but most of them are left in semi-public spaces where someone may find them, in stores and restaurants. I wrote the blog web address on each one, so its actually quite likely that you found out about this blog via such a crane.

I would have folded more cranes by now, but I have been distracted by another project. Specifically, I have been tracing crease patterns of all the folds that I know and cataloging them in a 3-ring binder so that I can compare and contrast different patterns.

Origami Notebook

One way to record a folded design is to map out all the creases necessary for the final product to emerge. Creases that are a by-product of some other fold, for example a crease that is used only as a reference point for another fold, need not be recorded since they are not folds in the final aspect.

Here I have a scan of a crease pattern that I traced for the traditional crane. There is an awful lot of symmetry for this design. Some patterns have more symmetry than others. An octopus I designed is perfectly symmetrical on four planes while the crane is perfectly symmetrical on only one plane, and nearly symmetrical on the other three. Some patterns are not symmetrical at all.

If I properly mapped out this crane, it should be possible to set all the creases along the traced lines, making the solid lines into mountain folds and the dotted lines into valley folds (or vice versa), then collapse the sheet into a crane in one epic fold!

[The image is my own, of the traditional crane]

First Project!

There is a popular belief that if you fold 1000 paper cranes, you may have one wish granted, much like finding a magic lamp. If you know of this, it is likely because of the children's book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr, which follows Sadako Sasaki, a young Japanese girl who became ill with the "atom bomb sickness" (leukemia) after the United States nuked Hiroshima. She folded cranes while in the hospital, hoping to fold 1000. According to the book, she reached 644 before passing away. Her friends and classmates completed the other 356 so that she could be buried with all 1000.

In many ways, this is such an important aspect of origami in the world. This story is what has solidified the paper crane as the peace crane. It is one of the reasons people even are introduced to origami in the first place. And so I have decided that I will fold 1000 paper cranes to pay respects to the tradition.

I have no idea how many cranes I have folded thus far in my life, so for this project I will begin at 0001 and work my way up. I have been known to abandon origami in public places, and therefore cannot expect to possess all 1000 cranes at the end. Instead, I will write which crane it is, and then leave it so that someone may find it. Sometimes my origami comes back to me, so I guess I will see if that happens again!