Today is May 24, 2023. It is a Wednesday. I am in Los Angeles. I listened to side A of one of my favorite albums of recent years, the Turkish/British psychedelic funk band, Kit Sebastian. It rained. I painted in only primary colors. I thought about my mom.

Earlier this week, I started sending the last of my bonus postcards. There were a few people that never filled out the form. There were other friends who never even knew about this stage of the project. There were a couple strangers I met along the way. My edition of 365 had grown to 400 then 425 and then I just thought well I will know it’s time to stop when I finish sending cards to everyone that matters. I’ll just know. I send postcards to important people in my life all the time, but I hadn’t included some of them in this series and I decided I wanted to before closing it.

So I picked through the hundreds of unwritten cards and found the above one to send to my mom. I thanked her for instilling discipline and tenacity, but also kindness. It would take about 100 postcards to really thank her for everything she’s done for her family and for the wider creative community in her career, but I wanted to start with one.

I wrote it and then I sent it.

The sending was the hard part.

I like to practice. I could argue that I deeply enjoy the practice and face anxiety about playing. Or you could say I like to create but not to fully share. If you share only in tiny pieces, is it really sharing? Somewhere there is a story about exclusion and not just accepting one’s place as an outsider, but reveling in it.

Wearing my gloves, googles and respirator and painting on an old picnic table surrounded by my overgrown crumbling garden makes me happy. I find a different beauty in the spontaneity of the daily creation that I don’t think neatly fits into the traditional world of art. The time doing the daily work transcends the helplessness I feel about the violent state of the world. If I focus on making enough beauty, and then add peaceful messages to it, then maybe I can make the world a slightly more harmonious place. A place with more art and less violence. A place where random things can happen that don’t cause fear. Sometimes something simple like a card from a stranger around the world encouraging you to express yourself and if you are stuck, start with a simple idea, like writing the date.

Today is May 24, 2023. How do you express it?