A Little Peace in the Mail

With the proliferation of instant digital communication, the magic of the mail has only grown stronger. I remember the pure joy of receiving a handwritten letter from a friend who lived several states away. The way she'd swirl glitter pens in different colors across the pages and seal the thing with an absolute frenzy of stickers. It was like packaging up a piece of her.

Maybe it's partly those memories that encouraged me to sign up for my first round of World Peace Poets Postcard Fest several years ago. While it's not exactly convenient these days to find 28 postcards, plus postage, and write a poem to a stranger every day for four weeks, it is a beautiful experience. I love getting a peek into the very present thoughts of poets from around the world. These aren't generally long-toiled-over pieces, edited and pared down to perfection. The idea is to write every day, and so often, the poems are extraordinarily fresh and lovely in their unbuffed state.

And the writing part? Even better.

The first couple days are tough because getting started on a new habit is always a little sticky. But then it gets easier. I skate through day twelve, excited to be delving into my creativity in a way I haven't in ages.

It's around day fourteen that the boredom hits. Not boredom with writing, but boredom with my own repetitive thoughts. Why am I love with the same six words? Why does peace make me think only of soft and warm things, pink things, puffy clouds, dewy grass? There are a million ways to talk about peace, and I have somehow found myself locked in a box of stardust and moon shadows and freckled noses.

One of my favorite college courses assigned exercises like this regularly. Our professor asked us to free-write as many different ways to describe something as possible, not allowing ourselves to censor our the 'bad' ideas. The coolest thing about this method is that you can always come up with more stuff---even when you think you've completely exhausted every iteration of metaphor that exists. The truth is that the best ideas usually come from that place.

Why is that? For one, you're more likely to have reached the 'I don't care if this sucks' stage, which allows you to try something truly new and exciting. And of course, by this point, you should have already used up all the cliche comparisons you've heard a hundred times. Anything that comes from scraping at the very bottom of your creative barrel is bound to be intriguing.

I can't say that I've written anything I'm exceptionally proud of this month. But I am proud of persevering in the face of poetic stagnation. I've found myself looking for inspiration in new places to help me eke out more ideas. I'm not giving in to the pull of writing the same poem ten different ways (although that is a good exercise for other purposes).

And perhaps most importantly---I'm not taking my poems too seriously. When I think of peace, I do not think of judgment or stress or strict timelines. I think instead of being deliberate and patient with myself and my work.

I hope a bit of that gentle spirit passed into a stranger's mailbox this month.