Kind Graffiti: the Art of Seeing (& Sharing) Beauty

Remember when I started The Secret Messages Project?

It was New Year’s Day and my heart was cold — almost frozen, in fact — but I knew that if I could fill my city with kind words I might be able to feel the warmth of that kindness.

(That’s how it works, you know.)

So I wrote kind words on small stones.  I wrote them on long strips of paper that I rolled up like scrolls, and I hid those words inside museums, under bridges, beneath rocks on mountaintops…  And I was warm.

Meanwhile, something special started to happen:  I started to see kind words all over the place.

I saw these messages inked onto the planking of a lookout tower in Miami, Florida:

I saw this almost-poem painted in the back room of a bookstore in Charleston, SC:

I even saw this little affirmation, scribbled in dry-erase marker on a restroom mirror in a North Carolina Starbucks, and it felt so familiar I couldn’t help but smile:

And all of this reveals a truth that keeps telling itself to me, over and over:  You try to do good, and you learn to see good — magic and mystery all around you, waiting to be plucked like low-hanging fruit.

That isn’t to say that the ugliness isn’t real, because it is.

But the beauty is real, too, and I’m determined to see it…

As always, I hope you’ll come with me. ❤