Mailboxes

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, mailboxes are the windows to the world. One can pen their own form of chicken scratch in the middle of the desert in Egypt and call it calligraphy and send it via airmail to a PO box in the middle of a cultural desert on East Coast of the continental US and have it arrive within a day or two – a far cry from the Pony Express…although, I suppose, if it were really going to a mailbox in the rural domain of the East Coast the mailbox may be shaped more like a tractor than a mailbox. The unfortunate reality is that mailboxes, to most, are the place in which bills come in the form of paper envelopes and nothing more, and thus become a source of habitual disdain rather than an potential for extraordinary communication. Also, as what we now call ‘snail mail’ has become virtually replaced and made obsolete by electronic mail and other instantaneous forms of communication, mailboxes have also lost their mystique and intrigue because they are no longer seen as a conduit to Iceland, or India, or Istanbul, but a receptacle for one’s local car dealership to harass them with tactical marketing schemes that prey upon the basal economic instincts of most. But in a moment of uncommon sobriety in regards to the way things are, we may see that mailboxes are not simply deposit boxes for messages reminding us how much a consumer we are and how much we owe the world with reference to our utility usage, but can in fact be, and truly are, like magic carpets that can “show you the world” and show the world to us. Ordinary things don’t become extraordinary because we simply look at them a certain way. They were extraordinary the whole time and we have simply and perpetually failed to see it. If so with a metal box on a wooden post, how much more so with flesh and blood and spirit.