Visions of Hokusai / Breakthrough / Synchronicity

A friend I've had for 51 years sent me a book of origami and haiku from the British Museum.  The package arrived on my doorstep on Christmas Eve after I'd gone to sleep, and I found it when I opened my front door at 4 a.m. on Christmas Day.  My first reaction was delight.  My second reaction on opening the package was a sinking feeling because in all my life I have never had any luck with origami, only annoyance and frustration and that terrible sense of inadequacy I have often experienced when it comes to following written instructions.  In addition, because I had come down with an upper respiratory cold on December 20, I was in the depths of the type of debilitating depression that always arises when I have a cold.

Nevertheless, I found the book to be beautiful.  The origami paper at the back of the book is exquisite.  In the midst of that depression, something urged me to attempt origami once more.  Before I went to sleep at the end of Christmas Day, I succeeded in folding a boat!  I decided to attempt only one origami a day.  To my amazement, I was able to continue to follow the written instructions one day at a time, as the folding increased in difficulty.  Folding the origami became the high point of my day.  Here is what I had folded by the January 1, 2019:

 Yesterday I felt well enough to go  out to look for a journal for 2019 and found this:

This morning when I was looking at the stats for my blog, I noticed that someone had visited this post from August 2009:



"... and what a wave must be."

Last night I folded a grasshopper:

To add to the synchronicity, it was in June 2009 that David Carradine died.

In the next three days, I will fold a horse, a flower, and a crane.