Paper Love: Held Together by Folds, Glue, and Softness
A meditation on paper as memory and meaning… from scrapbooks and cranes to golden trees and waterfalls, exploring how handmade art holds love.
Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes
The Symbolism of Paper
Some traditions celebrate the first year of marriage with a paper gift. More substantial materials — gold, silver, gems — are reserved for later decades, once love has endured. I’ve often wondered about the symbolism behind a paper gift for that first year, often the hardest. Paper feels fragile, but it also holds infinite possibility. It can be torn, yes, but it can also be folded, layered, and made into something lasting. Perhaps that’s the truest metaphor for early love: tender, unfinished, and full of potential, held together by care. In its simplicity, paper might just be the most poetic of them all and perhaps that’s why it appears so often in my art.
Scrapbooks and Beginnings
My first foray into paper craft came through a friend. My first scrapbook wasn’t one I made myself, but one made for me by a teammate. She collected photographs and newspaper clippings from our volleyball season and presented them as a gift at the end of our senior year. Each page was layered with wins and losses, big and small moments I might have forgotten otherwise. It remains one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.
Now, in the digital age, that scrapbook feels even more sacred. It’s the care in the collection that moves me most. Someone gathered, arranged, and held those moments with intention. Every taped corner and handwritten note reminds me of a tenderness pixels can’t touch.
I carried that lesson forward, making scrapbooks at baby showers. I brought blank pages, glue sticks, markers, and stickers, spreading the materials across a table and inviting each guest to make one page. My only guidance: share your friendship origin story, offer advice for the new parents, and write a letter to the child.
One Thousand Paper Cranes
That impulse, to make meaning through paper, began much earlier, watching our mother fold paper cranes, a story shared in One Thousand Paper Cranes: How a Family Tradition Took Flight.
Folding cranes became a communal ritual of remembrance. My sisters and I folded, laughed and cried — and through it, we grew closer. The cranes carried reflection, care, and connection.
A Golden Tree
When a friend’s father passed, we returned to the ache of our own loss, our father’s passing, from decades earlier. We felt the familiar weight of grief, one that never departed, only transformed. We recalled how the death of flowers given with love added to the sadness; their beauty never lasted long enough. We longed for a way to keep others in mourning with us.
That same impulse behind our one-thousand-crane project evolved into the Living Memorial works, where folding became tearing, gluing, and layering.
Our first Living Memorial was a golden tree housed in a shadow box. We invited all who hurt to participate by writing on a leaf and dropping it through the top. The memorial was ongoing. And it would never wilt.
We began by selecting colors of the sky that matched our mood, then tore and glued strips of paper, trusting the chaos to add its own beauty. As our golden tree evolved, we smoothed its angles and followed each branch as it reached beyond the edge of the page. The gold represents the light that remains, even after loss.
A Waterfall
Our Waterfall Memorial honored a friend whose life was cut short, but whose impact would last. Loved ones wrote notes on paper water drops. Because of him, we remember: every drop matters.
When a colleague passes and there is no pause, a dissonance emerges that tears at what makes us human. The work continues, but something else erodes.
This memorial created a space for colleagues to place their collective grief.
Grief is lighter when we hold each other. Our trees, our waterfalls, our cranes — they’re just vessels. Our hope is that others will find their own ways to honor and remember, to create small sanctuaries of care in the places that forget to pause.
Love deserves that space. So do we.
Thank you for reading.
~ Onjena Yo, Coach TJ & Rynaidrosa
#VillageValues #OurWorldOurHeart
