Between the Folds

I woke up chilly this morning, and thankful for my flannels sheets and the warm kitty nestled at the foot of my bed. There's a fine layer of snow outside. It's no more than an inch thick, but it's very pretty and white and clean on such a frigid day.

Since it's nearly the holidays and I have two part-time teaching gigs lined up for January, I'm taking some time off from my job search. Instead of spending another day slogging away at resumes and cover letters, I've spent my afternoon in a very warm kitchen. There's a loaf of white bread rising in the bread machine for dinner, a pan of gingerbread cooling by the stove (expect pictures soon!), and a package of spicy Italian sausage waiting to be cut up and simmered in marinara sauce for dinner.

I've been thinking a lot about how people discover what they really love in life and how they reshape their lives to fulfill their passions. I started thinking about this because of Between the Folds, a documentary that premiered last night on PBS. Part of the Independent Lens series, this hour-long documentary tells the stories of scientists, mathematicians, and artists who have dedicated their lives to origami. Each origami artist tells how he got interested in paper folding, and a few of them describe the fear they felt about abandoning successful careers as engineers and sculptors to pursue origami full-time.

Their work is beautiful, complex, and astonishing: life-like men and gnomes molded from thick, woolly paper; flat flowers that pop up into three-dimensional towers; dragons with a thousand scales made from a single uncut square of paper; flimsy white sheets folded once and twisted deftly to resemble birds and angels; and even simple pleated contraptions that twist naturally into flexible, springy parabolas.

I loved origami as a child and spent hours folding paper, but these men have transformed this seemingly simple craft. Their work is truly art, and, sometimes, it's even a mathematical playground that allows them to study geometry and theoretical algebra.

But what struck me the most about these men is how dedicated they are. Their eyes flash with excitement as their thick fingers crease and crumple sheets of paper. Their pieces show hours and hours of work: each piece requires hundreds of tiny and seemingly irrelevant manipulations that add up to something fantastical, and fantastically delicate--if a single step were missed, the construction would fail.

Yet no matter how complex and beautiful the final objects appear, each piece is still just a sheet paper, hollow and light enough to be picked up by the wind, delicate enough to be mashed by one misplaced elbow.

To live one's life for folding paper requires a passion and engagement that few of us will ever know. Last night, as I watched the documentary, I wanted to be like those men. I didn't want to be a paper folder, exactly, but I did want to be someone who loves what they do, whose eyes shine as they perform the same complex task again and again, endlessly inching closer and closer to mastery in their pursuit of beauty.

(For more on origami, read Susan Orlean's fantastic profile of Robert J. Lang "The Origami Lab."