I was surprised and humbled to go to my Post Office Box 205 yesterday and find a pile of letters from very different places with different ideas but one common theme that ran through all of them was that they gave thanks for my blog. So this post is about my giving thanks to the blog, about you giving thanks to the blog, and about me giving thanks for you. Sounds a bit sappy, but my Post Office Box is helping me finally understand what the blog means to so many people out there, in so many different places. The people who write me at my PO box (it is Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816) seem to be individualists to me, people who care about communicating and who do not wish the Internet to be their only means of communicating with people. They care about living their lives, and  they follow my life and Maria’s, and those of the animals here.

People like Jan Mitchell, a photographer and card maker from St. George, Utah. She says she was very pleased when I got a post office box, “sending an e-mail to a stranger seems like an invasion of privacy. We haven’t been properly introduced. Sending a letter or card through the mail seems to me to be a proper introduction. It takes time to prepare, time to send it and be delivered, time to sit in the mailbox waiting. It is not so presumptuous as to demand your immediate attention.”

This sense of boundaries and appropriateness has been largely obliterated by the Internet, where complete strangers offer advice and criticism as if you had known them for years. They also offer love and support and connection. It is different.

Jan wrote to thank me for the blog, which she has been reading for years. She has watched my growth as a photographer, and especially loves the landscape photos I’m doing. “It must also be said,” she added, “that a good part of the charm is the ongoing story of the animals. The way you present them it is easy to see their individual personalities and develop and affection for each of them. I shed a few tears when Rose and  Izzy died.”

“Last but not least,” Jan added,” Maria is such a wonderful part of the story and it has been a pleasure to watch her blossom as a person and an artist. She deserves the success.” Amen to that. Jan enclosed a beautiful photo card of a cabin in Montana that she made.

It is hard to describe the impact of graceful and heartfelt letters like this, they are all treasures, gifts, shafts of light. They help me see my work through the eyes of others, help me understand why I am  here, what I am doing with my life, what the purpose is. So many people tell me they have been following the bog for years, they have seen so much, they grasp Maria’s great heart and hard-won blossoming. It is rare to get a letter these days without a mention of Maria, and the P.O. Box almost always has some beautiful handkerchief or piece of fabric, it is part of the river of life, the flow of energy and connection that seems to swirl around the farm and especially, the blog.

Nancy Todd, also of Utah, sent me a $3 check because she had to  cancel her Paypal, she wanted to pay me for my work on the blog. She thanked me for the blog, and added “I am replacing my own ideas of an unhappy relationship with the possibilities of the Jon & Maria mode. Thank you so much!”

Thanks back, Jan and Nancy and the other letter writers,  I am grateful to you, I give thanks for you, I love the letters I get in my Post Office Box, Jan is right, there is something especially meaning about them and the work and time it takes for them to get to me. I am thankful to all of the people reading this.

 

 

.