Hako Sakuramon
St. Bonaventure, someplace in The Mind’s Journey to God, speaks of the problem of lost meaning. Not that I remember where. Meaning, like mass and unlike my dilettante learning, cannot be lost. What doesn’t get communicated through speech returns to the Godhead.
A comforting thought. But when one doesn’t speak Japanese, one wonders what will happen when one bangs words together, like steel and flint, and waits for sparks of meaning to take place.
Sakura is cherry. Hako is box. Mon is crest, as in family crest. I have a theory that stringing the words together in this fashion will communicate something. Something along the lines of “Box with a Cherry Blossom Crest on Top.” I am more than willing to be set straight. (Hi ho, Silver?)
This is a problem that comes to me at night. Specifically, between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning. Why can’t you twist a pentagonal tube into a nice compass rose shape? Because odd numbers cause an offset. One can live with it, as I did with the Star Vase, or learn to work around it. This is, I think, a rather elegant work-around.
I have no directions, yet, but I do have a crease patterm:
Update: I fixed the mountain/valley issue on the petals, June 18, 2006.
The dotted and dashed lines are as they always are – you’re looking at the white side, the blossom side, of the paper. The solid lines show the guidelines you use to find the intersections you need to make the folds. Not intuitive, perhaps, but not entirely dependant on divine inspiration, neither.
