The Art of Sending Postcards

I have spent the past 35 years purchasing art postcards whenever I visit an art museum.  I buy in bulk!  Usually, between 11 and 26 of the same card.  Why?  Because I use them to create random acts of kindness in the lives of friends and acquaintances.  I'm sure you are familiar with that expression: "Do random acts of kindness", right?  It's a lovely sentiment, but how do you make it real?  For me the answer is found in two things I love: Art & Poetry.  The conduit being art postcards.

How does it work?  I read a lot of poetry.  When I find a poem that I like, I write it out on the back of one of the postcards.  In fact, I write it out on the back of a lot of postcards combining the poem with the work of art.  Sometimes the two go together in a way that is obvious.  Sometimes they don't go together at all--and yet, I have heard from those receiving them that even those pairings find some crucial or whimsical meaning in the minds and hearts of the recipient.  Isn't that the magic of Art and Poetry?  To transcend the common, the obvious and lead one to ideas and feelings deeper within?

Some people have been getting these little emissaries of kindness for decades.  They have travelled all around the world.  They arrive without warning (random).  They don't commemorate any event or occasion.  They just show up and hopefully bring a moment of delight...a knowledge that I am thinking about them.  I do not sign them--not ever.  Sometimes I have continued to send them to addresses that either knowingly or unknown to me the person no longer lives at.  This simply means that some stranger is benefitting from the act.  In some ways that thought is more enjoyable to me still.

And there is a blowback benefit.  From time to time I receive postcards from friends.  Like today!  A little wisdom from Bette Davis from my friend who is an actual published poet and librettist of operas--the kind that get staged in opera houses.  You know I don't think I've ever told him that long before we met and became friends, I sent some of his poems out into the world of kindness.  Although I find the massage on the pillow to be words of great importance: "Old Age Ain't No Place For Sissies", I am baffled as to why he would choose such a sentiment or send it on to me.  I guess he must be fantasizing about the day when our trains will arrive at the station.  Yeah, that's gotta be it...

Well, now that you know how easy it is to foment
radical happiness in the world, you have only one choice: Go forth and do likewise!