The 42 Beautiful Things Project
The 42 Beautiful Things Project is no longer accepting mailed submissions but remains on Facebook and Instagram for continued exploration. Those who wish to contribute a photo/written submission of a Beautiful Thing are welcome to do so by contacting me directly through email or Facebook.
As for the 83 Beautiful Things submitted between September 2015 – March 2019, I now display these in my office at Michigan State University where they continue to inspire.
“Mail a Beautiful Thing from Your World to Mine”
A hand-made postcard from a fellow artist.
How was it I had forgotten how wondrous it still is to open a mailbox and receive something beautiful from a friend?
How was it I had forgotten how life-giving it is to send Beautiful Things to others?
I had forgotten, but now I remember.
And now that I remember, I don’t want to forget. Instead, I want to multiply that joy.
Mail something beautiful from your world to mine and I will share it with the world!
Why 42 Beautiful Things? The Origin Story
The week leading up to my 42nd birthday, I worked on “42 Beautiful Things in My World on My 42nd Birthday–August 15, 2015,” a project to give to my artist friend Robyn with whom I was exchanging work at the time. I needed to write and share my original 42 Beautiful Things as I reflected on my life at 42, a birthday significant both because the previous several months had been personally and creatively transformative, and because as a life-long fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows, I understood 42 to symbolically be the “Ultimate Answer” to the “Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.”
For me, “42 Beautiful Things” both my original written 42 and the project it spawned, became a testament to the paradoxical randomness, unity, struggle, and beauty of that so-called Ultimate Question, made up of moments, objects, in-the-body experiences, and the insights they birth.
1. The flatness of northwest Ohio, like the flatness of northwest Indiana where I grew up, field after field of corn and soybeans in summer, green and fragrant and full of life, the flatness stretching out for miles, interrupted only by the occasional patch of woods.
“42 Beautiful Things in My World on My 42nd Birthday–August 15, 2015″
2. A memory of my dad telling me that only in fall do trees show their true colors, when they aren’t busy making chlorophyll and working to be green, when they can rest and just BE as they really are. I celebrate that, the way autumn leaves reveal the true colors of trees. And it doesn’t last long, this moment of revelation, this moment of revealing. Still, I celebrate it, want to live in this moment.
3. The starkness of winter trees, skeletal and hard, me remembering that they are not dead, just hibernating, simply still, storing deep inside the energy needed to generate life from within.
The more I grow into myself, the more I distrust the merely abstract and analytical, instead favoring the tangible beauty of moments no matter how fleeting, and perhaps because they are fleeting.
The more, too, I return to non-electronic forms of expression: pen-to-paper writing; scissors-and-glue collage; crayon-and-pen designs; and postcards, handwritten correspondence, and gifts that pass physically from my hands into the hands of others, often through the intermediary hands of dedicated postal workers.
So with $42 birthday money (a dollar for each year of my life) from my parents in August 2015, I began by renting a post office box in Defiance, Ohio, where I then lived, wanting it filled with Beautiful Things I could hold in my hands, sent from others’ worlds to mine.
By the summer of 2016, many things had changed: My name, my address, my family configuration, and my P.O. Box. Still, I kept growing my collection through 2019, curating a collection of 83 Beautiful Things which I presented on and shared in a variety of public spaces.
As people shared their Beautiful Things and I shared them with others, joy multiplied and conversations started. I continue to believe Beautiful Things are meant to be shared, and even without a P.O. Box, I continue to share Beautiful Things every day.
Dawn Burns 