Pulling Art from Thin Air

Megan Hicks is a wonderful storyteller who also utilizes origami to engage the listeners' imagination.


Here's an example of one of her teaching tales, posted just in time for next year's Valentine's Day (^_~) :

She has a wonderful post illustrating how "what goes around comes around", and how we impact lives both seen and unseen; and our influence upon the world, like ripples in a pond, can reach far and wide.....and come back to us:

And then at lunch…something Came Around.

Behind me in the lunch line, one of the women in my session thanked me for giving her a couple of new paperfolding stories. She said, “I already do a story with the paper cup. And I do that hat — you know, the one with the feathers…”

I perked up.

“…and the little girl — Triangle Girl…”

I got very still.

“Tell me that story,” I said.


“Well, she’s taking a nap and her mother wakes her up and tells her a friend’s coming over to play and she needs to put her hat on, but she can’t remember where she put it. So she looks under the carpet, and then under the carpet pad. No hat. She looks under her blanket. Under her pillow. No hat. And then she turns around and sees two feathers sticking out from under something and that’s how she finds it… I don’t care how many times I do it, the kids just love that story!”

Chills washed up and down my spine right then.

“Where did you learn that story?” I asked.

“From one of the other librarians I work with. I don’t know where she learned it. I don’t know if she knows where it came from. Maybe it’s traditional.”

I know where it came from.

That particular version of that particular story, with the main character named Triangle Girl, came from me. More than twenty-five years ago, when I was still living in Oklahoma City, going to library school. It was one of my first origami stories. I taught it to all the older kids I worked with at the Montessori school. I shared it with other folders at the Origami Conventions I attended. As they shared their folding stories with me. After the conventions we would sit for hours in diners —  folding, sharing, brainstorming.  A lot of cross-pollinating.

That little story came back around. Alive and kicking. Being passed on by people I’ve never met. The Folk Process at Work, and me right smack in the middle of it. I don’t know if I have ever felt more affirmed than I did in the lunch line that Thursday afternoon.

Read the whole blogpost and also learn the story of the Triangle Girl and the Lost Hat.

With this blogpost, I spread Megan Hicks' influence to touch more lives and stir more imaginations...

"That which makes us happy, makes us wise."

-John Crowley