800 cranes -- and moving backwards?

I'm worried.

As I pass the 800 mark and draw ever nearer my goal, the anger still flares. What happens if I fold 1,000 cranes and I'm still the same angry person I was when I started? What if I'm forced to admit this was all for naught, that I've failed, that I'll never conquer my anger?

To be fair, it's the holidays. My three children are home from school, alternately bored and bouncing off the walls about Christmas. The noise level in the house has escalated. I'm also deeply depressed about the effect the holidays have on my kids (greed, etc.). I feel like a failure when I see how this soulless, technophiliac culture has sucked them in, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

And yesterday, with Christmas Eve bearing down on us, I finally had to dive into the fray and spend several hours roaming Target to buy all the junk that will make my children "happy." Yuck. I dislike shopping at ANY time of year. Talk about a living nightmare! I had a raging headache by the end of it. And I'm still not done. Must go again, either today or tomorrow.

I'm like a dieter struggling to get through the holiday season without packing on 20 pounds. Only, I'm struggling to get through without exploding 20 times.

But if anger is going to be vanquished, it has to be vanquished no matter what the circumstances or time of year. If I'm to be a peaceful person, I'd like to be peaceful on December 23 as well as January 19 and April 3 and July 14.

Maya Angelou once said that you can tell a lot about a person by how she handles three things: lost luggage; rainy days; and tangled Christmas lights. That's it, exactly. The stress of the holidays is no excuse for losing it. In fact, here lies my greatest opportunity to show who I really am.

Or who I aspire to be.

Birds of heaven

A few years ago my friend Peter Matthiessen, the novelist/naturalist/Zen master, wrote a book about cranes called "The Birds of Heaven." What a lovely title, and how apt. Cranes can soar as high as 20,000 feet in the sky. Their annual migrations are as long as 3,000 miles. Surely they glimpse heaven on those journeys.

No wonder many cultures have revered cranes for centuries, and consider them symbols of good luck and longevity. In Japan, cranes are nearly mythical beings, capable of granting a wish to whomever folds 1,000 paper likenesses of these majestic birds.

Once in my life, I was near a whooping crane. What a transcendent experience! These incredible creatures have a wingspan of eight feet. They are immense and white, and quite intimidating up close -- yet beautiful. Messengers from heaven.

A friend of mine invited me to come with her to the Kissimmee Prairie in the middle of Florida, where volunteers and scientists were caring for a nonmigratory flock of whoopers -- part of a national effort to preserve this fragile species, which remains in grave danger of extinction.

While the wildlife experts took blood samples and other measurements from each crane, the volunteers held the other ones and tried to keep them calm, sitting in metal folding chairs, one bird in each lap, fitted with a canvas hood so it couldn't see its surroundings. Because I hadn't been trained to work with the cranes, I was not allowed to hold one but that was fine with me. These huge creatures, as tall as five feet, are a bit scary at close quarters. I sat next to my friend and watched. We had to be very quiet, to keep the cranes' stress level to a minimum.

As I fold these little squares of origami paper, I think of that day and the profound silence in that circle of chairs. We were in the presence of heaven, I think.

700 cranes -- and counting

I've now folded 700 paper cranes. Hard to believe. The goal of 1,000 is slowly coming into view on the horizon. At my rate of 10 cranes per day, I am only 30 days away from senbazuru. About a week into the New Year.

Even this far along, I still struggle. The last two days, I have felt intermittently crabby -- no huge temper outbursts but snappish and surly. I've fallen back into my old habits of staying up too late, so this is caused by lack of sleep, I'm pretty sure. Earl(ier) to bed tonight, and we'll see if that makes a difference.

For inspiration, here are the words of wisdom on the tag attached to my tea bag in tonight's cup of Yogi Tea:

"Your strength is in how calmly, quietly and peacefully you face life."

Birthday blessings

Today I have been blessed with many beautiful gifts from Mother Earth:

1. I didn't go to bed until after midnight, so was awake for the first few minutes of my birthday. The day began with a silent white moon, waxing full, sending its light through the cold window beside my bed.

2. At dawn, standing in the freezing dark at the school bus stop with my daughters, I suddenly heard a heart-stopping (for me, anyway) sound: the honking of Canada geese. I looked up into the sky and there they were, in a ragged V, soaring overhead, trumpeting their call. Absolutely lovely.

3. Later in the morning, I walked out my back door and there, not 20 feet away, was "Scott," the resident hawk of our neighborhood, skimming low through the branches of our woods and calling Happy Birthday to me in his unmistakeable voice.

4. During our drive up into the mountains, in the yard of a farmhouse: a brown dog, lying on his back in the grass, all four paws wriggling in the air. A sunbath on a winter morning. Such joy.

5. A walk through a chilly Appalachian cove forest and finding, at the end of the trail, a half-frozen waterfall.

6. In the evening, as we sat by the fire on the back porch, the moon was wreathed with a giant silver corona. I haven't seen one of those in years.

Beautiful, beautiful day. I'm filled with gratitude.

The Peace Tree

Our Christmas tree this year is a little different -- a lot different, actually. The usual ornaments never even got unpacked. Instead, we put my origami peace cranes all over the branches. A few white snowflakes, too.

The crowning touch is an unusual tree topper I found last summer in Boulder -- a lighted peace sign.

As soon as we decorated the tree, my cat curled up beneath it and has been there ever since, snoozing. He feels the peace vibes!

644 - In honor of Sadako

Tonight, I have passed the 644 mark, which seemed very far away when I began this experiment.

644 is significant because of a little girl named Sadako Sasaki. She is partly my inspiration for all this. Sadako was born in 1943 and lived in Hiroshima. When the atomic bomb fell, it was near Sadako's home. She was not injured but, like hundreds of thousands of people, exposed to intense radiation. Ten years later, at the age of 12, she was diagnosed with leukemia. While in the hospital, she decided to undertake the Japanese tradition of "senbazuru" -- folding 1,000 origami cranes in hopes of having a wish come true. Sadako's wish, of course, was to survive her illness.

Sadly, that did not happen. She died in 1955, a few months before I was born. One version of the Sadako story says that she finished her 1,000 cranes and folded even more before her death. Another version (the one I like better) says she only made it to 644 -- the same number I completed tonight -- before dying. Her classmates at school folded the remaining cranes and all 1,000 were buried with Sadako.

Either way, it's a stirring story, one that has inspired a book, several songs and two memorials to Sadako -- one at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima and another in Seattle. At the memorial in Hiroshima, schoolchildren constantly visit with offerings of paper cranes they've folded. (An interesting aside: The "world's largest peace crane," with a wingspan of more than 200 feet, was constructed inside the Seattle Kingdome in 1999. It was made from hundreds of scraps of paper with peace wishes written on them by children from all over the world.)

Supposedly, Sadako composed a haiku about her crane folding. It shows that her wish went far beyond being cured of her illness. Her wish was the same as mine -- peace.

The English translation of Sadako's haiku:

"I shall write peace upon your wings, your heart and you shall fly around the world so that children will no longer have to die this way."