Correspondence
In fourteen forts across the country individuals wrote and received letters from someone they didn’t know. These letters were taken through the air and over land to the next city where they were handed out in a different fort, with different people.
Hundreds of letters continue to be sent and received setting off a wave of correspondence across the nation that connects laureates person-to-person again and again.
Write a letter of truth to someone you don’t yet know
Duration: 20 minutes
Props: paper, pen, envelope
Effect: grounding
Letters are like little bottles that you can tuck thoughts into and send out into the ocean. They are sealed, stamped and sent before you have a chance to reflect on what was written. These bottles are sent onto the seas, through the winds and skies in the hope that they find a home in someone else’s heart.
You are a child today leaning backwards.
The exercise is simple, you are writing to a friend long removed but oft familiar. They may have been in the Amazon for the past ten years—lost in the jungles or simply they may have been lost in a relationship and removed from their once prominent place in your life. Such is life. Do not lament nor mention this gap for today you have an opportunity. You have found a way to reconnect through a single letter, a single piece of paper which you will write on today.
You yearn to speak of you childhood, of past memories, of the dreams and ambitions you once had and where you are today in all of the turns and twists that your path has taken. You wonder about your friend—do they remain the same character you have etched in your mind or have they changed harboring new secret dreams and desires for their life? Share yours and ask theirs.
The familiarity of this friend enables you to skip the small, the surface, the ephemeral and jump into the heart-- the last time you cried or the last time you laughed. You truly don’t know who you are sending this to yet you know that there is a familiarity; there is a sense of kin and a bond that this letter will re-establish. You could very well be setting off a torrent of correspondence—leading to who knows, a friend, a love, a secret confidante.
You can only hope that when the letter is received the person is present to that single voice on the page speaking in that moment separated from the bounds of time.
When it is read does that moment become alive again?
Does that moment translate? Is it not the ultimate in space travel? If we each have this ability, this power to recreate moments in the hearts and bodies of others why do we cast it aside so flippantly?
Do not cast this aside today for the letter is so powerful a tool. It is a transporter of moments-- time delayed and refined in its eloquence, in its ability to portion up and present life as a waft of time unleashed with the opening of each bottle.