Every once in a while I test myself to see if I’m still able to fold the paper rose. A friend showed me how to fold one back in high school. There was no dia­gram, just visu­al learn­ing and mus­cle mem­o­ry. Per­haps that was how Japan­ese chil­dren learn origa­mi in the past.

And I’m always sur­prised to see that, after all these years, my fin­gers still remem­ber order and posi­tion of every crease and fold. After all, it’s a rather com­plex mod­el, involv­ing a long series of pre-creas­es and three-dimen­sion­al shap­ing. I’ve nev­er timed myself but I know that mak­ing a small bou­quet takes more than half a day.

For all the work that goes into it, I’m struck by how much it also resem­bles a crum­pled ball of paper when looked at from far away. In fact, I can eas­i­ly oblit­er­ate all the care­ful­ly cal­cu­lat­ed folds and metic­u­lous artistry with one squash of a fin­ger, reduc­ing it to noth­ing but a crum­pled bit of scrap paper. And how much, I thought, that resem­bles our human existence.

And yet our lives are so rich. We build rela­tion­ships. We share laugh­ters and sor­rows. We love. We may be here today and gone tomor­row, but the echo of our love is endless.

Ini­tial­ly I took the pho­to only for the post, but then I thought it would also make a nice wall­pa­per on my desk­top, so while I was cre­at­ing that I made sev­er­al dif­fer­ent sizes to share with you :)

Down­load wall­pa­per with origa­mi rose:
1920 x 1200
1280 x 1024
iPhone

Please refer to Con­tent Shar­ing for use of images from this blog.

If you’d like to fold your own paper rose here’s one instruc­tion.

Take care, friends.

 

If time is mon­ey, then I’ll spend it all for you
I will buy you flow­ers with the min­utes we outgrew
I’ll turn hours into gar­dens, plant­ed just for us to take
I’ll be reck­less with my days, build­ing cas­tles in your name

– Sleep­ing At Last, Next to Me