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After making such a huge show of posting my letter to the Postmaster General regarding my misadventures in acquiring an International Reply Coupon, it seemed only fair that I make note of the response that landed in my mailbox yesterday. I have scanned it (with some redactions) and present it below.
(The full-size scan should be viewable here.)
I’ll have to get a few more International Reply Coupons sent in my direction to test the veracity of this, so if you know anybody outside the USA (or happen to be somebody outside the USA) who would like a scribbled flower mailed to them for the price of an envelope and an IRC, please go to the ten thousand flowers page for details.
This is the third in a series of experiments with doing Word Art in abstract patterns with, well, rather abstract words to go with them.
 Abstract #3 Waves of shining silver water caress a blue sand beach as you stand facing the horizon.
The sun is high and bright in a sky with the palest cast of pink.
You step into the water and feel your feet sink into the soft sand.
You kick clouds up as you progress.
The waves are light and offer no resistance so you continue forward until the waters close over your head.
As the waters embrace your body, you find that breathing is not necessary.
Sunlight shimmers overhead, fractured in a dancing web of light by the surface of the water above you.
Your feet find stone, ragged but level enough to tread upon.
A school of fish the color and translucency of amethyst rush past like a startled flock of pigeons.
The ragged stone progresses to tile and you find a road that leads deeper into the waters.
The road ends in a broad plaza surrounding a building of blue stone with a tall entryway flanked by columns.
You see no windows, but as you pass between the columns into the interior, you see that glassless skylights have been cut in the pointed roof.
It is a single room within.
Black and white mosaic tiles cover the floor.
At the far end of the room is an arched alcove enclosing a statue of a robed woman with blindfolded face and hands outstretched, hands that bear eyes upon the palms that face you.
“Speak!” a voice commands, and while the statue remains motionless, the voice clearly rings from it.
You say nothing, as words require breath, and you have taken none in these depths.
“Speak!” the voice cries out once more.
You remain where you stand in silence.
“Speak!” comes the third shout and this time you hold up your hands, palms faced forward in the manner of the statue and gently incline your head in a slow, deliberate nod.
“Well said!” the voice replies and you allow your hands to fall and turn to exit the way you came.
The road you arrived on no longer leads directly back towards the point of beginning, but now forks into two.
The mosaic floor now extends to where you stand and continues down each pathway.
The black and white tiles all pattern themselves to pure black down in one direction and pure white down the other.
The road of black tile is flanked by smooth white columns and the road of white tile has a pair of gleaming black columns in the same way.
You follow each path with your eye, trying to discern where they lead and while you can’t be absolutely sure, it seems to you that both roads curve in such a way that they eventually lead to the same spot.
Did I mention I’ve been reading a lot of Jung lately? Can ya tell?
I neglected to take a photograph of the framed result because I promptly took it down to WonderRoot to donate to the art auction at their Bomb the Moon event. I may have to go down just so I can get a picture of it.
Prints of this work are not available.
The original is not for sale.
I’m up to twenty flowers in my Ten Thousand Flowers project, with four sent out so far. I’ve gotten one envelope from across town, two from across the country and another from across the world.
I’d never had the occasion to use an International Reply Coupon before, but I didn’t think it would be any more complicated than taking it to the post office, finding the guy in the back who knew what to do with it and sending the flower on its merry way. Instead, the moment I got home from finally getting it sent out, I sat down and composed the following letter:
Mr. Patrick R. Donahoe
Postmaster General
475 L’Enfant Plaza SW
Washington DC 20260-0010
Dear Mr. Donahoe—
I wish to bring to your attention an inconsistency in the operation of the United States Postal Service that is of some concern to me and I believe should concern every citizen of our increasingly global society.
I have recently embarked on the project of giving hand-drawn flowers to anybody who requests one from me by mailing me an envelope and sufficient postage. While a SASE is easily obtained in the United States, in order to send my work to other countries I have requested an International Reply Coupon (“IRC”) with the envelope. It did not occur to me that there would be any trouble in exchanging one for sufficient postage to mail a single envelope back to its country of origin.
Unfortunately, I am perplexed to discover that some post offices in my area simply refuse to accept them. I recently received an envelope and IRC from a resident of New Zealand, and while she admitted to some trouble in acquiring one, I never imagined the trouble I would go through to redeem one.
I visited the post office closest to me and the overwhelmed clerk apparently had no idea what to do with the IRC—she put a stamp on the envelope, another stamp on the IRC and then asked for payment for both. I explained that the IRC was the payment and one manager and supervisor later I was informed that the location did not accept them. Fortunately, the stamps were easily removed and I returned home and called another location recommended to me to confirm that they accepted IRCs. I was told that they did not and I asked which location did. I was provided with a phone number that was busy every time I attempted to call it. I called your information line at 800-ASK-USPS and the gentleman I spoke to assured me that any postal location would accept my IRC. He seemed genuinely surprised to learn that this was not the case, and provided me with phone numbers of nearby locations with the suggestion that I call them directly. I finally reached someone at Buckhead Station who was likewise surprised to hear that certain locations refused my IRC but assured me that it could be redeemed there. I drove there and Mr. _____ behind the counter took my IRC, placed three beautiful stamps on my envelope and sent it on its way. (Mr. _____ was a joy to work with, by the way, and should be commended for his service.)
A simple postal transaction should not be rendered a bureaucratic tangle this way. If individual post offices are going to be inconsistent in whether or not they accept IRCs, this information should be made available on your website so that consumers can plan accordingly. Otherwise, all post offices should be prepared to accept IRCs at any time, no matter how intermittently they may be needed.
Thank you for your time and attention to this matter and for your service to the United States Postal Service.
Sincerely yours,
Sheila O’Shea
I have no idea if it will make any difference, but I felt the need to make the effort. At any rate, I do at least know of one post office near enough to me that will accept any International Reply Coupons, so I should be able to continue my global flower distribution efforts unimpeded.
Yesterday I went to the office supply store and bought a pack of unlined 3-by-5 cards. I started using the fine point Sharpies that I’d obtained and found still too blunt to do my word art work with and drew flowers on them.
 Ten Flowers The first five were drawn yesterday, the next five today. I have decided I want to draw and give away ten thousand flowers to anybody who asks for them.
(If you’d like one, go here for the details.)
The thing that struck me when the intention to do so finally locked itself into my brain was how ridiculously, delightfully right it felt and how, almost instantly, my inner gremlins were on the scene, trying to talk me out of it.
Everybody who creates has to deal with the gremlins. There are all kinds of names for them–Resistance, the Lizard Brain, the Inner Critic and even the Inner Mean Girl–but whatever you call them, you know what they are. They’re the voices in your head, the parts of your multitudinous self that try to stop you when you try to do something new and strange. There are lots of different ways to deal with them, but one thing that I realized when I was working my way past them for this particular project is that they can sometimes be quite useful.
This is a rough approximation of the objections the thing raised when I settled on the ten thousand number and how I responded to them.
This is so stupid. Who’s going to want one of those ugly scribbly flowers, let alone ten thousand of them?
Well, out of a billion people on the Internet, surely I can find ten thousand who will find a scribbly flower something worth obtaining, as something kind of fun and goofy to make them smile.
How are you going to pay for all the 3 x 5 cards and the postage and the envelopes? You’re still too broke to eat out at a restaurant!
This was actually a valid concern. This is a way that gremlins can be helpful. I brainstormed a bit and then smacked myself on the forehead and realized that I didn’t have to spring for postage or envelopes–I could just ask people to send a SASE to my box. Problem solved. Sure, ten thousand 3 x 5 cards are still going to cost, but I can take care of that a few bucks at a time. My first five hundred should last me a while and I can scrape together the money for the next batch of five hundred in the meantime.
What if nobody asks for one? What if nobody cares at all?
Then I’ll have a lot less work to do, won’t I? And I’ll get to keep the flowers!
You’re just going to flake out on this. I’ve seen you go off on these crazy ideas and then fall down on the follow-up.
This is, again, a valid concern. But I figure if I keep it simple enough I shouldn’t get too overwhelmed. It’s not like I’m going to get ten thousand requests overnight or anything. If I keep steadily making flowers and keeping the supply ahead of the number of requests, I should be fine. Plus, I tend to flake out more with things that only I know about. Once I’ve told the world, I tend to be a little better about sticking to it.
What happens if people start coming to your blog and trolling you and making fun of you?
I delete the comments and spare a moment of pity for people who are so dead inside that they feel a need to be cruel to somebody for the crime of making scribbly little drawings to give away to people for fun.
Why are you even doing this? What’s the point?
There are a lot of points to it, really. One is because it sounds like a pretty nifty thing to do. Another is because I’ve felt so pinched and deprived that I really wanted a simple way to give the world something from a place of generosity, that fits with who I am and how I function. I’m too painfully shy for most volunteer work, I’m too broke to donate much in the way of money, but this is a way I can try to make ten thousand people just a little bit happier and hopefully make myself feel a little bit happier as well.
At this point, the gremlin’s down to the usual “nobody’s going to care about this, you know” mantra, to which my response is “that’s nice, I’m going to finish this blog post anyway.” So there you are.
Again, the page for instructions on obtaining one of my ten thousand flowers is here. I check my mailbox about once a week, though that may change if I get enough requests. Thanks for checking this out!
There’s far too many lucky stars to count
–The Tender Idols, “Six Minute Feeling”
When I finally settled on pricing my art at the rate of five dollars per square inch, I decided I needed some form of one-square-inch art so just about anybody could afford at least something of mine. I came up with the idea of doing wee magnets of Word Art with very short pieces on them. I did the first batch of them at the Upper West Side Folk Art Market and dutifully transcribed all the original words into my iPhone so I could hang on to them:
 Wishing Stars Wish #1
This star is a wish for freedom to be whoever you really are. It is a wish that you may live without a sense of not being the way you should. It is a wish for you to love freely what or who you love and never feel the need to apologize for it
Wish #2
This star is a wish that the cracked places will find healing. It is a wish that your heart will expand in a way to your utter surprise. It is a wish for beauty, grace and for life in all its perplexing ways.
Wish #3
This star is a wish that you will always carry peace within your heart. This is a wish for serenity that knows beyond any knowing to breathe and let things be what they are. This is a wish for the wisdom to recall that all storms will pass and the rain exhausts itself into sunlight.
Wish #4
This star is a wish that the bright light of your inspiration will shine brightly for the world to see. It is a wish that your light will be seen as clearly as possible without filters to obscure the true colors and the true brilliance of it.
Wish #5
This star is a wish for you to know laughter, for you to take all things lightly. It is a wish no matter how critical the situation can become, it does not ever become serious. It is, in a way, a wish that you may see things from the outside and laugh now.
Wish #6
This star is a wish for a rich life full of all the marvels and wonders that this world has to offer to every one of us. It is a wish for you to lack for nothing in life that you have true need of and to embrace gratitude.
Wish #7
This star is a wish that your life may be filled with surprises of the happy kind. It is a wish that you will be gifted with presents you didn’t even know that you wanted until you received them. It is a wish for happy random perfection. It is a wish that apparent chaos may resolve itself into fractal beauty and perfection.
Moon
Sentinel of the night sky, perpetual in change and strangely constant for even as change will come over the face the same face is turned to us each night and only the shadow will shift. We are similar.
Actually, I did the moon first. I’ve only done it once and I’m not even sure if I’ll do it again or just leave it on my fridge as a reminder of how this all started.
At my first art show, I swapped a wishing star with Chris Hubbard for a lucky star from his booth. Somebody else bought another. Then I came to the question of how to replenish my stock. I decided to allow myself to repeat myself a bit and re-do some previous wishes. Then I discovered how much easier said than done that was.
The first few stars had been tossed off rapidly–sketch in the stars and come up with words. Then trying to repeat what I’d done left me wondering how in the heck did I do that in the first place. It didn’t help that I’d been quietly raising my standards so that stars I would have used before started to appear too shabby for public consumption. Finally, I hit a wall and could barely even make myself make them anymore.
Eventually, I nudged myself past my reluctance and starting refining my methods so the results both looked better and were easier to do. (Templates are a beautiful thing, y’all.) I tweaked my process a bit more as I sat in my booth at the Art-B-Que and while I didn’t sell much in the way of magnets, I did wonders in producing the things.
Just a quick post to let people know I’ll be sharing a tent with my brother Sean O’Shea of Industrious Designs at the Art-B-Que this weekend in Avondale Estates, Georgia.
Think maybe I should get some more art made for it?
I’d hoped to have some new art to post about but my inspiration logjammed to a halt and I was only able to get one more abstract done, which is destined for the Possum Trot auction tonight as the pre-game to the Doo-Nanny this weekend.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish packing.
This was a first attempt at what I plan to be a series of pieces that are abstract shapes with words that aren’t completely required to make sense.
- Abstract #1
Wake up to an iridescent sky and razor angular clouds burning in the blood rose glow of a sun that dangles on the horizon but doesn’t move for hours.
Walk outside to perfumed air, sweetened like sugar, brushing against the skin like a flirtatious lover.
All the birds have learned a new set of songs that remind you of the music you heard on the radio from the backseat of the car as a child.
You walk past a man wearing a crisp lavender suit.
He flips a shiny silver coin in his left hand and asks you in a smooth voice if you want to play a game.
His face is trustworthy in its featurelessness, but the coin has a sinister glint when it catches the light and you think it better to continue along the way.
Instead, you find a shiny red ball that seems to change color each time your foot connects with it, and you kick it through the spectrum down a mosaic street of cracked and crazed tiles.
You step aside for a singular vehicle passing through—a brocade tent mounted on wooden carriage wheels, drawn by a pair of blonde ostriches.
A glossy blue dog trots up to where you left the ball and sniffs at it.
As you come closer, the blue dog picks up the ball in its mouth and runs off with it.
The world blurs as you give chase, feet pounding and lungs aching by the time you catch up.
The dog rests at the foot of a large and gnarled tree with feather-white leaves.
It drops the ball at your feet and fixes you with a look of head-cocked curiosity, as if to ask “Why do you strive so hard to retain that which you’d only just acquired by accident?”
A leaf falls lightly from the tree and lands on your forehead to melt into your skin like a snowflake.
“When do we wake up?” you ask the dog.
“Wake?” it asks (this time aloud) “What makes you think we’re asleep now?”
Originally, I tried a jagged edge and red and black ink, but the words that came (I drafted them in a notebook first) were ugly and dystopian and I didn’t like them. Merely changing one of the potential ink colors to purple was enough to shift my thinking to something more pleasant and after a botched first attempt, I shifted to curves instead of diagonals and did the tricky work of breaking the color exactly at the line even if a word intersected. The result is something that looks halfway decent from a distance and hopefully intrigues on closer examination.
I’m running out of frames to play with, so a trip to the thrift shop may be in order. I hope I’ll be able to get more done soon.
Prints of this work are available here.
The original has been sold.
I had it in my head that I would do something simple and easy to add to my collection of Word Art. Two colors bisected by a narrowing crack between them. Something about the breakings of things. Should have been able to knock it out in one evening.
Didn’t.
My inspiration ground to a halt in mid-sentence. And there is perhaps some significance in the fact that the point I stopped at How can any of us hope before setting aside the pen and leaving the work undone for days which became weeks and weeks which became months.
My time filled up with other matters. Matters of survival, to some degree, but also matters that were less challenging than buckling down and making myself finish this thing. I couldn’t even seem to make myself start on something else until it was completed, perhaps for fear that I’d wind up just as stuck partway through.
One fine Saturday afternoon, I crouched down on my bedroom floor, yanked out my art supplies, pulled out the notebook I’ve been drafting things in and forced myself to at least get a few more words down. I ended the incomplete sentence, hammered out another and then had to get ready to leave. But I’d done something.
One week ago, resuming my post at the Glenwood, listening to the Taylor Kennedy Group, I drank a glass of wine and word by word, line by line, filled the page to the end.
I nearly always title things once I’ve finished them, rather than beforehand, since I don’t always know how the words are going to turn out. The words “Breaking Awake” came to me as I prepared to write the title down and thus it has become.
 Breaking Awake Nothing ever remains unbroken.
The earth or the air or time itself will shift and what lies in the wake of that shift has no choice other than to bend or break.
And no matter how pliable you make something, materiality itself is rigid enough to snap under just the right kind of stress.
Even the bonds of water molecules will separate into droplets or steam.
What breaks is never mended to precisely its original state.
It is at best similar, much like what it was, but the world will have shifted around it in such a way that it will not and cannot by quite the same thing.
A crack can only be solidly filled by adding to whatever already was.
This is how we grow, how we expand and it is also how we contract as we refine ourselves, chip away the stone of our lives to unlock the angel inside us.
We must break things in order to live.
We must break from our pasts so that we can embrace the moment as it truly is.
We must break away from paths that will ultimately lead to suffocation.
And yet it is also our nature to mourn when the porcelain of our perfected lives ends up shattered upon the ground.
How can any of us hope to become greater than what we are if we continue to be confined to the boundaries of all that came before, even as such limits have been blurred by time?
All the fractured places in our lives do not require mending before we can progress.
That is a lie that we tell ourselves in order to keep us comfortably within the lines we draw around our lives.
What is true for our bodies is not always true for our souls.
While it is hazardous to walk upon a broken leg, it is not the same risk to love through a broken heart.
A heart is mended by the flow of love into these open spaces.
The mistake (the common, the tragic, the foolish mistake!) is the believe that this healing must only come from outside sources.
The breaks in the heart are filled by what pours out as much as what pours in.
A seed must crack its shell in order to sprout into what it was shaped to become.
So much our hearts, our spirits, our lives.
We do not have to wait for forces of nature to smash things open for us.
(Though they inevitably will if we hold ourselves too rigidly.)
Nor do we need to damage ourselves just to make a clean break of things.
We can tap against the shells we find ourselves in and form those fractures with utmost care.
Everything we think we are can be broken.
It is all in how to choose to fill in or widen those empty lines that shapes us.
And here then is the paradox that takes some lifetimes to ever understand—that when we open ourselves wide enough to take in all the gaps, the unfinished places, the ways we are torn open and left incomplete, when the hollowed spaces in ourselves, in our hearts, in our lives are allowed to remain unfilled, when our flaws, all of our fuck-ups and every imperfection is gently held open, then we find that then, without striving or struggle, we are truly whole.
My only hope is that I will remember these words when I embark on my next piece. Particularly since it seems to me that the one thing that was holding me back from completing this piece was a nagging urge towards perfectionism.
Prints of this work are available here.
The original is not for sale.
One year ago yesterday was the night I mark as the start of my art career.
One year ago today might be the day that I first considered all the implications of what that might mean.
One year later, and now I’m contemplating all that has resulted since then.
I certainly have some good stories to show for it, from the gift I gave to Neil Gaiman to my first art show and my crazy time at the Doo-Nanny. I sold a few pieces, which is more than I would have sold if I’d never done it at all.
But I also slammed into a brick wall of inaction as my efforts started to feel more and more futile. I did art shows and sat at my table at watched people walk past and sometimes look more closely and gape in astonishment and say things like “Wow! Honey, look at this! This is amazing! This is incredible! I’ve never seen anything like it! Good luck! Bye!” and walk away. My words started to seemingly repeat themselves, and I worried that my well of ideas had already run dry. And, most damningly, I looked at my own work and the flaws seemed more numerous than ever and I felt appallingly arrogant for even expecting anybody to want to pay money for it.
I learned that a blog is not enough. A Twitter account is not enough. A Facebook page is not enough. An Etsy shop is not enough. Having something that nobody else seems to be doing is definitely not enough. (I can’t even give the stuff away, it seems at times.)
I learned, most of all, that my self-sabotaging tendencies are not that easily defeated. That the demon in my head that stands between me and doing my work is constantly finding new strategies to keep me stuck and that each time I strike it down, it rises again in a new form sooner or later. The path of the year behind me is strewn with missed chances, things unsaid and undone and a thousand little rationalizations that let things slide for one more day.
The most insidious weapon in the head-demon’s arsenal is this–it takes the hopes I have of where I’d like to be and then, after throwing everything it can to stop me so that every stumbling step towards my goal seems some kind of victory, proceeds to mock me for being a failure because I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked.
There are two paths I could take here. One would be to conclude that I’m just not cut out for this art business and reduce it to a nice little hobby while I look for a proper job on the side. A tempting prospect, but one I can’t accept.
The other is to recalculate my efforts, amplify my ambitions and give the demon a harder fight than it’s ever had from me. And, more importantly, to recruit backup instead of trying to carry this all on my own shoulders.
We’ll see where I stand come next December 5th. But wherever it will be, it can’t be any farther back than I’ve come so far.
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