mail therapy

I made significant progress today cleaning the living space stacks as well as keeping up with today’s dishes and laundry. I am feeling proud and accomplished.

A lot of first aid supplies. Need those. My mind makes up rules that I have to live subjugated under.

I sent out a fuckton of mail today.  This is only a portion of it.  I like getting that bee in my bonnet.

Some of it is letters, mostly letter plus zine or zines.  A sticker or two.  A business card at times.

Writing a letter is therapy for me!  Have I ever told you about that?  It’s meditative truth telling.

I think of the person I want to talk to.  Choosing some stationery they might like or a little book I made is kinda fun.  I write the date, situating myself in time.   Oh yes, it’s September again, my favorite.

Then I decide how to address the person.  “Dear friend” is a favorite greeting, but I can also use their name or something more creative.

I imagine the person, feel how I feel toward them, conjure up what I want to say.  Maybe I’ve been storing things up, to say to this specific person, or there are topics I want to discuss in general.  But it’s going to come out tailored to them.

Often I talk about food, the season, what I did that day.  Moods, community events, how Ming is doing.  Then I get into what I really want to say, a deeper layer of truth.

Today I used the last of a notecard, and there was a piece of cardstock in the package I was going to throw away, but I made two ATCs instead, out of the cardstock, and painted them yellow.

Then I drew this palo santo that’s been on my desk, three sticks, begging me to draw them.

I realized I wanted palo santo in my oracle deck, so I redrew the sticks on a green card for the oracle deck.  They’re slightly different.

Making art heals me.  I feel intensely grateful to my good friend.  She led the Las Vegas Radical Mental Health Collective art workshop that helped me lose my fear of making art.

And I’m also so grateful to mania and hypomania, for loosening me up and helping me ditch my art filter, so now I just make the art I need to make without thinking too much.

Mania and hypomania are old friends, not visiting at the mo, but they teach me lessons I keep with me.  I’m so grateful I can hold onto the good parts and let the unwanted parts float away.

Making art really does feel like pulling some meaning to this world from the other world.  So thank you to artists, mail artists, outsider artists, street artists, trained artists, artist friends, and all brave people who risk silliness or drawing the wrong line.

I’ve drawn a lot of the wrong line.  That’s cool.  I love the wrong line.