Now address your cards to yourself and stamp them.

Give whole stack to a friend and tell him or her to mail you cards throughout rest of 2002. Make sure he or she does not tell you when each is posted so your receiving your cards will be a fine surprise for you each time one arrives.

Receiving a card will add a new and bright dimension to your day. And it will again invoke powerful phenomena of self-fulfilling prophecy and law of attraction.

CARE PACKAGES

Next prepare a Postcard Care Package for someone else. Give this person seven stamped postcards and seven pens, one of each color of rainbow. Give him or her instructions above on preparing Positive Postcards. Recommend that, after he or she has prepared seven Positive Postcards and given them to someone for mailing, he or she prepare a Postcard Care Package for someone else.

See potential here? If people prepare their own Positive Postcards AND give someone else a Postcard Care Package, mails in 2002 will be filled with Positive Postcards arriving to surprise, and to affirm marvelous traits.

Please participate in Positive Postcard Project. How do you join? Simple. Just start ball rolling, and cards flying all over world.

January 2, 2003, is first annual Positive Postcard Day. By then, it will be time to start another whole round of talent-affirming, gift-affirming, genius-affirming Positive Postcards.

Better start writing now.

©Copyright 2002 Stephanie West Allen

BECOMING A JESTER

A jester must have three skills.

The first skill jester needs is a sense of humor. A fine and enormous sense of humor. The Jester lives in Comic Zone, not Drama Zone.

The second skill a jester needs is ability to adjust to whatever comes up. The jester can hop, skip, work, and play through life because of his or her skill in adjusting to unforeseen and unplanned.

The third skill a jester needs is to “make believe.” He or she says: “In this situation (this day, this life), I think I need to be like this,” and then creates and becomes that “this.” The jester “makes believe” until one day he or she wakes up having truly become person imagined before.

Let’s begin to enlarge jester ranks.

And today . . .

Start a Jester Journal. Make it sturdy. This Journal is meant to become dog-eared, written in, carried around, color crayon-ed, eaten over, played with.

Pretend today that you are outside of fishbowl. Observe things. Maybe imagine that you are a visitor from another planet. In your mind, question everything you see. Ask “why?” Ask “why?” again. And then ask “why?” some more.

Why is that clothing appropriate dress for this situation? Why is this music being played now? Why is meeting being held here? Why is she sitting at her desk instead of on floor or in a park? Why is this program on television? Why am I watching it? Why are there no animals in this setting? Why did I have that for breakfast? Why are people doing this? Why is this in newspaper? Write your observations in your Jester Journal.

And then write new ways you would like to see things be. Use much playfulness. Dogs, puppets, and ant farms in workplace. Meetings in amusement parks. Hokey Pokey in street. Cookie-handlers standing on street corners handing out cookies to passing cars. Singing at power lunches.

More miming, less talking. Frequent standing ovations by those standing in line in banks or post offices or grocery stores. People carrying crayons with them at all times and drawing pictures on any appropriate paper -- napkins, tabs for restaurant meals, what else? Flutes and harmonicas and bells being played in abundance on buses.

Begin to make some of these new ways happen.

Have fun and write it all down in your Jester Journal. The more you write, more your imagination will think of new whys and new ways.

And more you will grow in your jesterhood.

©Copyright 2002 Stephanie West Allen