Crickyn

I have a dear friend I have never met who specializes in spreading mail art treasures around the world. Being a lucky recipient of everything from mini zines on bees and elephants, full sized zines, including one featuring the Hand as a symbol, slips of poetry from some of the worlds best contemporary poets, printed on vellum and illustrated with rubber stamps, computer art and many 3-D stitched items, kiragama, origama and found objects. Even the envelopes are beautiful, adding an anticipation to the opening of the mail. Lunar Daughter has been sending me mail since 2000 and I have been saving it because it is too precious to dispose of. Period. In this day of hasty emails and faxes, who has a message worth saving like these are? I’m going thru all kinds of stuff in this house and I’ve run across this collection. At first I thought I might put the art into my own journals, with the poems and the stitching and the 3-D jewel encrusted branches and thereby mingle the contents with my own art and collection of ephemera. But handling the treasures, I realized I no more want to dissect these than to get a stick in the eye. The care in creation, concern for me expressed, concern for the environment discussed, the sheer loveliness of the objects Lunar Daughter has wrought require not disassembly for expediency’s sake but a place of honor. So I am devising a means to store these, better organize them and a mission to take them off the shelf periodically to review their individual and collective loveliness. Sometimes we need to slow down and examine what has heart and meaning for us, even if it means another small, decorated box on the shelf to hold that which has been created with joy, time and talent.