Geomancy Bird Parade

For a couple years now, I have written my daily, monthly, and yearly geomancy readings on little squares of paper which have been folded to demarcate the houses:

When my family left New York in a hurry last year, I destroyed all of the squares I had and switched to writing my readings in a diary; but once we moved in to our new house, I resumed folding my squares. I'm not really much for ritual, but I have long been fond of origami and I find the process of cutting and folding paper relaxing.

I realized, not so long ago, that the crease pattern in the paper is exactly that used for a traditional origami model—it doesn't have a widespread name in English, but in Spanish it is called a pajarita ("little bird") and in French it is called a cocotte ("hen"). (Personally, I think it looks like a sphinx, but my daughter says with a shrug, "It looks like a bird to me, daddy.")

Because the crease pattern is the same, the readings naturally want to fold themselves into little birds, so recently I've been letting them. I tend to keep my yearly, monthly, and daily readings upon the altar in my office and return often to meditate upon them... for some reason, the readings seem to have more of a personality when they're bird-shaped.

This week, I went through the stack I've been accruing all year and folded them all up. I've got a few hundred of them now, in all sorts of colors: a little avian army—air force?—carrying a year's dreams and experiences, crystallized.