One of the magical things about social media is that it sometimes fosters connections in the real world. Even if these real-world threads are as tenuous as spider silk, there’s something about the tangibility of them that still enriches.

As an example, I’ve been participating in a postcard poetry exchange this month. Initiated on Facebook, it’s a group of friends of friends who are writing and mailing postcards with a (necessarily) short poem on them. Men and women, all ages, all over the place. Most of them I’ve never met, but as I’ve opened my mailbox this month and found handwritten messages on cards that were chosen, stamped, and mailed by hands on the other end of the thread, I’ve felt a friendly warmth that doesn’t usually appear in online media. It’s the handwriting, especially, that humanizes the exchange–sometimes messy, sometimes cramped, sometimes beautiful. No filters.

It’s been so fun that I noodled around online and found a postcard exchange site where you can sign up to send and receive postcards from people all over the world. I sent my first postcard yesterday to Russia, to a woman who teaches organic chemistry and likes to watch “Breaking Bad.” She will send one back to me, and I’ll add it to the bundle started this month of new friends whose writing rests in the drawer next to my bed rather than in my laptop.

I spent some time last month organizing a box of letters I have from my first two years of college. Pre-email, it was the way my high school friends stayed in touch after graduation. There were also a few notes from my parents and siblings. Some made me laugh. Some made me sad. I stacked them away with mixed feelings, not unlike reading old journals, but with the added complication that the person who sent the letter likely has no memory of what they wrote, and might wish the words weren’t permanent.

It’s easy for me to be nostalgic about things like letters and postcards–nostalgic enough to join a group involved in sending them. But reading my old letters has also been a good exercise in recognizing the vulnerability inherent in sending your words in ink to an unknown destination. Because even if you know who you are writing to, you don’t know who they will be in twenty years when they revisit your words.

Ultimately, I think it’s still worth breaking out the paper and stamps every once in a while.

Do you enjoy sending mail? Do you think the pros outweigh the cons?