International Peace Day Cranes

Early Saturday morning at our school's Homecoming, my daughter, who is one of the environmental club kids that I sponsor at my school, helped me chose a beautiful tree beside the children's tent to tie the hundreds of recycled paper cranes we made in celebration of International Peace Day. If you were to have seen the cranes floating as the wind cosseted them, your heart may have been lifted up with joy. Many of the cranes were made from old maps while others were made of shiny wrapping paper salvaged from a Recycle Depot. Later in the day, I discovered that early in the 1990's, Kevin Fowler and his environmental club planted the tree that the cranes were tied to. The tree is called a Golden Rain Tree. I also discovered just today from Rhonda Spidell that this tree has a special history in Japan. "An early researcher posited that the Golden Rain Tree may have first appeared in a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto around 1220 AD, grown from seeds brought from China. Also, a prominent Japanese botanist of the twentieth century, believed in the Buddhist connection, pointing out that the species had naturalized near temples along the shoreline." http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/1835.pdf. You may know that I recently travelled to Japan this summer. The inspiration for the paper crane making came from my experience listening to a survivor of the Hiroshima bomb. The survivor told us that he is a Buddhist and believes that for world peace to occur, we must all forgive each other for past grievances.