One of the most potentially soulful aspects of modern life is mail and all that attends it: letter, envelopes, mailboxes, postage stamps, and of course the man or woman who delivers the mail. Junk mail and bills are only the shadow of an otherwise blissful institution. A great deal of pleasurable fantasy surrounds the important soul tasks of writing letter. An envelope is one of the few things in the modern world we seal, thus creating a private space for expression. Stamps are usually not mere tokens of monetary exchange, but small paintings...
The mailbox is a mysterious item, too. For the most part, we place our treasured letters in this box, and mysteriously our letters find their way around the world. I sometimes have the fanciful idea that the box is a black hole into which my thoughts and feelings fall, to be retrieved somewhat magically by another person participating in this ritual of self expression...
I don't mean to mystify letter writing, but rather to highlight some of the fantasy and ritual that go into this important technology of intimacy. Something happens to our thoughts and emotions when we put them into a letter; they are then not the same spoken words. They are placed in a different level, serving the soul's organ of rumination rather than the mind's capacity for understanding...
Letters take time to write, usually much more time than talk. They require a certain level of artfulness and thoughtfulness in expression. In a letter we "presence" our thoughts, giving them existence outside ourselves. Then they remain, to be reread, perhaps to be stored away for another day of reading, or even to be encountered at some distant time in the future...
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