1000 cranes
An artist in a rural village builds suicide awareness by folding paper
A young man drowns in a village. We read about it and shake our heads. People drown all the time. We get used to it. People kill themselves all the time. Statistics shadow us like biting insects. We carry on. What does that mean-to "get used to it" or "carry on?"
A young man drowned in St. Michaels last week. Children, adults, visitors watched as others searched for him. A visiting artist teaching summer school, Leslie Kimiko Ward felt "the collective agony as they pulled his body from the lake." She questioned her place in a village she had only begun to know. She was there to teach dance and drumming, the thumping of life and creation.
Harder still, Ward heard from a teacher who worried about how the loss would impact the rest of the village of 350. Three people had already killed themselves during the school year, and despair, isolation and hopelessness follow. A tragedy can beget a tragedy, "like the aftershocks that follow an earthquake," said Ward.
So she started folding one thousand paper cranes for the village to "stave off my helpless feelings and create something beautiful in the wake what had happened."
And she emailed her parents. Her father responded to her email, "telling me of a parable that was given at the funeral services held this week for my great uncle Bill, a practicing Buddhist. The monk overseeing the services told the story of an oyster, and how it takes a grain of sand, a source of irritation and pain, and turns it over and over until it creates a pearl. The parable reminds us that out of something painful can come something beautiful."
So she decided to share her feelings, reach out, connect, and inspire a simple act of creativity that forged an ever-expanding gift of communal compassion and understanding. The resulting Facebook page, 1000 Cranes for Alaska, is meant to build awareness about loss and suicide, and about how grief and despair can seep through our communities and deepen our sense of disconnection.
The page with a tutorial on how to make paper cranes gained over 100 followers in one day, with postings and images of people holding their own paper cranes-kids from the village, kids from the Children's Healing Art Project in Oregon, people from Washington and Georgia, people with paper cranes on fingertips, in sand, on plants, in the hands of the people who made them.
The significance of the "thousand cranes" originates in the story of Japanese girl Sadako Sasaki, who folded cranes in an attempt to stave off her death from leukemia as a result of radiation from Hiroshima, said Ward. The idea is that the completion of the task yields a wish for the folder. The thousand cranes also serve as a symbol for world peace.
It turns out that the kids in St. Michaels knew the story of Sadako Sasaki. After seeing pictures of cranes posted on the Facebook page, they folded cranes beyond the end of the school day, and took home tiny piles of colorful paper so that they could teach their families and friends how to make them.
The cranes look different, some tidy and some rough. Some plain, others adorned. They are not individually art, really, but collectively they say something. They speak to humanity, perhaps, or the possibility of creating a new cycle.
Not one of loss, but of creation. Not one of isolation, but of solidarity.
Those of us who have lost friends and family members, leaders and visionaries, to suicide, know how it threads through what we do, what we believe, what we expect. In some small, strange and simple way, 1000 Cranes for Alaska begins a new thread.
Make a crane. Take a picture. Check it out.
Find 1000 Cranes for Alaska at
http://www.facebook.com/pages/1000-Cranes-for-Alaska/104843446277423 and the crane-folding tutorial athttp://www.facebook.com/l/c3852vbVXHHh-_uPGuJMzqAcXQA/youtu.be/FSijU52XJ7w
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