Quick Link: Making a Flying Paper Lantern

Author: Quill / Labels:

Instructions to Make a Flying Paper Lantern


Instead of my usual explanation, I'd like to tell you a story that meant a lot to me.

On the evening of this past 4th of July, my family and I went into the city to watch the fireworks. As I wended my way through the crowd that had filled the parking lots and side streets which were blocked off for a fair in its honor, I saw lots of things: loud people, various radios playing their own brand of loud music, food on the ground that had been crushed into the pavement, colorful drinks sweating in the heat, kids running and their parents shouting after them, puddles from the recent rain, and precious few clean places to sit.

This surely makes me sound like a puritanical bore, but I had done nothing but work, work, work as of that time for the past several months as I scrambled to get all the illustrations done for the comic book I'm producing with my teammates at MixMinds.  I knew that as soon as I got home it would be time to get right back to work.  It was natural, then, that I cast a bit of a critical eye at the outside world that was both my distraction and my supposed respite.

The sun went down and it was dark, the kind of milky not-quite-darkness that can only happen in the presence of street lights, however dimmed.  Then they were turned off. Things got a little quieter and I sat with my husband and our kids idly watching the sky until the show began.

And then I saw it.

Not far away from where we sat, a glowing orange light, an ethereal ember, was slowly lifting off over sea of strangers.  It was a paper lantern and I was glued to the sight of it.  It climbed softly into the sky, now a denim blue, and I watched until it was nothing but a speck and then was gone.  What a sight!  Like a little leaf riding the surface of a smooth running stream, like a tiny flame that dances on the tips of a log when the rest of it is only char, it was captivating because it seemed pure and calm in a dirty, overwhelming place.  After a few minutes pause, another took to the air on the other side of us, and then another much further away, nearly across the river.  There was an intensity to their burning, too, because we all know they won't burn for long.  But it will burn on nonetheless, and that is all I can manage to think about a life well lived.

Burn on, my friends.

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