Cranes and Peace

Christmas often comes late for me because people mail gifts to me when they’ve finally taken care of everyone who cares about getting them on time. I don’t actually do much in the way of gift giving or receiving at Christmas, but the things I do get are always welcome. What came to me in yesterday’s mail was a crested crane. It is a beautiful, delicate, and graceful little bird, about ten inches tall and made of fired, glazed clay. Its legs and crest are metal, its base wood. It is made by a Guatemalan artist, Marco Tulio Garcia Sol, whose work is sold in the U.S. through a friend of mine in Wisconsin. Awhile back, we had some of his smaller birds for sale here in Point Roberts down at the Blue Heron and this Christmas there were some tiny bird earrings that he made. The cranes are a new venture for him and my friend thought I would like to see them. And I thought other people might like to see them. (There is no website for the cranes right now, but if you are interested in them, email me (address is over there on the right column under profile, and I’ll send the site address to you when I get it.)

Cranes, crested or otherwise, are not birds I have a lot of familiarity with, although the first time I went to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary just over the border in Ladner, they had a kind of pet sandhill crane hanging around—he had flown in from other parts and just decided to hang around permanently. Or maybe not: I haven’t seen him there in the last few visits I’ve made to the reserve, so maybe he changed his mind and has flown back to the other parts. And once I went to the Bosque del Apache reserve, just south of Albuquerque in New Mexico, where you can see hundreds and hundreds of sandhill cranes flying in as the sun goes down. (And a Crane Festival in November of each year.) A pretty amazing sight. Cranes--at up to 14 pounds--are much heavier birds than herons although their wingspan is about the size, and I’m still amazed by seeing one heron at a time pretty regularly. Think if there were hundreds at a time every day and about twice the size.

Looking at my new crane, and thinking about prior crane exposures caused me to think about cranes more generally. Anything that splendid must have a lot of symbolic history. I had a vague sense of cranes being associated with New Year’s, so it seemed particularly appropriate to be thinking about cranes, but when I googled ‘cranes myth,’ I found nothing about New Year’s but lots about other things. There is mythology of cranes being the first birds on earth. What a good piece of work that would have been for evolutionary work: starting a little high on the achievement scale, I’d think. Still, if you had birds like that around, I can imagine why you might begin to think of them as a kind of Platonic bird, a bird that holds the essence of all other birds.

Cranes are good luck and hold the promise of springtime, as well, and I’ll keep that in mind as we go through January, which is not looking like it’s going to give way to crocuses by Valentine’s Day. And then, the biggest crane phenomenon for our lives, they are symbols of peace. That could be a constant reminder in a world that is desperately in need of some serious peace. Enough said about the Middle East right now, but surely not enough being done for peace there.

The crane as a peace symbol comes from a Japanese girl who died of leukemia secondary to being in Hiroshima at the time of the atomic explosion these many years ago. Before she died, she wanted to make 1,000 origami cranes. She didn’t quite make it, but her school friends finished the thousand, and a lot of publicity followed and now there are cranes for peace everywhere and origami crane festivals to further them.

So, I ended up spending much of yesterday afternoon figuring out how to make an origami crane. There are plenty of good instructions on the net, even if I’m a little slow about being able to follow them. And while folding, I was asking myself whether there’s some way to make origami cranes out of fabric and into a quilt, but they may well be too three-dimensional for that kind of project. But I’ll keep thinking about it. And about Peace! If there were something more to do about it, I'd do it.