My pandemic experience inspired a visual journaling series I like to call “Covid Kindnesses,” an ongoing documentation of items I received from my community. Creating small works of these “gifts” was a multi-purpose exercise in painting more frequently and imperfectly, launching a new project during the stress of Covid’s onset, and identifying the multiplicity of ways I experience love and support from those around me. It’s been an ongoing practice in noticing, seeing the ways love can be small but mighty, and generously present in the rhythms (and chaos) of my days.
A number of questions arose out of the project: What “counts” as a gift? Can a gift only be for an occasion? Can a gift be accidental? How thought out does the gift have to be for it to matter? Does the giver and the receiver need to know it’s a gift for it to be a gift? Depending on the answers to some of these questions, most of us are receiving an overwhelming amount of gifts on a daily basis. Covid Kindnesses uncovered quite a bit of richness in meaning to the simple gestures of my community.
It’s likely I won’t always paint every single gift I ever receive, but I’ve felt a little more whole in practicing sought out attentiveness to kindness. I wonder what it looks like to be a person that holds these observations all the time, or often enough to take less things for granted, to be more thankful, to be a more reliably-kind human for the people that know me now and at some point in the future, to be a starting point for love.
