Reverse Origami

We spend much of life trying to fold it into shape.

We crease the years into plans. We press our expectations into sharp edges. We tell ourselves we will become something recognizable ~ successful, secure, settled, certain.

We hold the picture in our minds and work backward, bending each day toward it.

Then life blows in like a hurricane and humbles us real quick.

A career changes. A friendship deepens ~ or ends. A door closes without explanation. Someone arrives late and becomes essential. Something we once wanted loses its shine, while something overlooked starts calling our name.

The shape we were so sure we wanted begins opening along its creases.

Often, we mistake the unfolding for unraveling. We look at the creases and wonder what went wrong. We grieve the little figure we meant to make ~ the neat bird, the perfect flower, the life that could be held in one hand and understood from every angle.

Life Is Reverse Origami

It doesn’t become more beautiful by growing more precise. Beauty appears in our lives as they open up. All we have to do is get out of the way, and the universe delivers us something more sublime and fantastic than we ever could have hoped to make ourselves.

Who are we to think we can see the pattern of the grand tapestry? We are each a single thread, entwined with countless others. How could one thread comprehend the whole design?

Each unfolding reveals more ~ more color, more room, more beauty.

The creases remain, transmuted into meaning in ways that are better left up to God or Source or Whatever. Faith in the Goodness of All, along with acceptance, allows life to unveil the grand design in its own time, as soon as we are ready.

Every time we resist, we crease the paper. Every crisis is transformed into an opportunity. Failure leads to success, and pain is the beginning of growth. The risks, the love, and the seasons when nothing seemed to move all leave their marks. Every fold matters. Every fold helps shape us into who we were always meant to be.

It’s okay to make a mistake. All things arise as they were meant to ~ life delivers us exactly what we need, right on time. Allow it to unfold. Release the things you are holding on to. Open your eyes to the magnificence and perfect progression of time and space.

Be courageous. Become larger than the shape you forced yourself into. There is freedom in discovery. There is grace in letting the full experience of our lives spread before us across the table.

The Pattern From Above.

Perhaps that is why some of life’s most beautiful turns make sense only after we release ourselves from our bonds. The wrong road introduced us to the right person. The long delay gave us time to change and grow.

The ending we fought against so hard cleared the space we needed for a beginning we could not yet imagine.

Folding yourself can hurt. Letting yourself open up to life is blissful and sublime.

We discover that we contain more than one possible life. We can start again without returning to the beginning.

We carry the creases when we refuse to let ourselves flatten and relax. We heal when we let go ~ we feel connected when we accept ourselves and remember who we are.

One day, we look down and realize that what seemed like a ruined shape has become something wonderful.

Not the life we folded up and contorted into the shapes we thought we were supposed to be ~

The life that unfolded into infinite tessellations of beauty and meaning.

We let ourselves unfold in the Reverse Origami of Life, and it is beautiful.