Postcards Travel When We Can’t
Sending mail while traveling in Costa Rica. Image: Ted Hill/Wikimedia
Like walking a Camino, sending postcards on a Camino around the world is a solitary practice that connects people. Postcards are miniature worlds of art and perspective, and I was at one time renowned for squeezing an unlikely volume of miniature words on the postcards I sent.
On my first Camino, I mailed 40 postcards in 40 days to my 11-year-old daughter, a ritual that connected me to my youngest child and acted as a daily diary of my journey. Some days, I wasn’t in a village where I could buy or mail postcards or everything was closed for siesta, so I stocked up when I could and sent several postcards at one time from larger towns along the way.
I usually wrote postcards in the afternoon over a beer after the day’s walk or from my albergue bunk. Sometimes, I ran out of sellos (stamps) and I spent the rest of the afternoon looking for a tobacco shop where I knew I could buy them. Every time I slipped a set of freshly stamped cards into the round yellow mailbox on a Spanish street, I speculated about whether all would reach their destination.
According to some sources, the origins of the postcard was a Prussian postal official who first proposed an open post sheet made of stiff paper in 1865. One side was reserved for a recipient address and the other was blank for a brief message. His proposal was rejected on grounds that officials didn’t believe anyone would give up their privacy, which does make you wonder what they thought 19th century minds would write on those open sheets.
By contrast, a contemporary postcard art project called Postsecret.com solicits participants to anonymously contribute a secret by sending a postcard with a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation included for all to see. Anything goes, as long as it’s true and the sender has never before revealed it to another.
While the Prussian postal service grappled with privacy issues, several countries began to issue inexpensive blank postal sheets specifically for soldiers to send home from the field. A picture postcard with a lithographed design on one side was created in France in 1870, but there was no space for stamps and they were most likely posted inside of envelopes.
Postcards as we know them with a souvenir image on one side and room for a message on the other were first sent from Vienna in 1871. After the Eiffel Tower was constructed in 1890, a golden age of the picture postcard grew in Europe, followed by a similar craze in the United States from 1905 - 1915. The modern era of glossy, colorful postcards grew with color ink and photography advances in the 1930s and 40s.
Postcard collecting, or deltiology, is a popular hobby with postcard clubs in the United States and around the world. With digital images shared nearly instantaneously, postcard sales could have been relegated to the world of collecting had it not been for Postcrossing.com, created by a Portuguese student in 2005. Paulo Magalhães developed a digital platform to connect people across the world through postcards, independently of their country, age, gender, race, or beliefs.
According to Noël Frodelius, who founded the Puget Sound Postcrossing fan club in 2016, the idea is simple: You create an online profile with your address. When you send a postcard, you are automatically scheduled to receive one from someone else in the world.
Some people join Postcrossing to learn about and connect with people from other cultures in the pen pal tradition, others are stamp collectors, and still others collect postcard themes such as city skylines, light houses, or a series of postcards printed by an artist. One Postcrossing member requested postcards of inflatable tubes; Frodelius made a drawing. These days, Frodelius is collecting illustrated food images and oddly shaped postcards.
Frodelius maintains that the connection she gets with postcards is something she doesn’t get with digital communications. She likes the tactile nature of creating postcards, the ink sliding across the paper, the texture of the paper on her skin. Receiving a postcard in her mailbox makes her feel connected to the soul and intention of the sender, knowing the sender usually took the time and care to send a personalized message.
Some people write 4 postcards a day, and many turn that practice into a ritual of writing over morning coffee or only at a specific time of day. Frodelius says she wouldn’t call her approach a practice or a ritual. Customizing postcards, one with a short story she wrote for the recipient who was also a writer, doesn’t have the intention of ritual. She says it’s more of a hobby she pulls out when she’s inspired.
I was excited to reread the postcards I sent from Spain when my daughter pulled them out recently, until they got repetitive. Not a single card went missing, and every single message was about the blisters on my feet. My postcard writing ritual could have used more practice. I’m exploring the possibility of documenting my next long walk outside of Instagram and Facebook communities and completely through the ritual and practice of postcards. What do you think?
Do you have a practice you keep to improve a skill? Or a ritual you perform at certain times, perhaps to reduce anxiety or increase your confidence? What is it? How did you find your practice? Was your ritual a one-off or something you perform again and again? I would love to hear from you.