I began sponsoring a child through World Vision this past year, Paballo Tsuoelle, a seven year old girl living with her parents in Lesotho. Bo sponsors a little boy also in Lesotho and someday we hope to travel there and meet them. Of all charities, World Vision has the highest percentage of your contribution going directly to relief. www.worldvision.org
Last October, TIME Magazine almost ran Bo’s 2005 portrait, Betsy Eby, on the cover of their special feature “The State of the American Woman: …Why they are more powerful but less happy.” It would have been fun to be the modern day Rosie the Riveter, albeit the “can-do” brawn is replaced with pensive psychology. It was laid out but in the end did not run.
One winter morning, typically Northwest in its blanket of dark fog and relentless drizzle, we awoke and decided to hit the road and drive to Utah and see the Spiral Jetty. I recommend this pilgrimage to all artists and lovers of nature. To call it art is to diminish the experience. It’s the whole thing: the silver salt flats, the bands of iridescent sage, lavender and gold at dawn. The jetty is a destination serving to get you out in that vast coliseum of light and a punctuation amidst the vast nothing that is everything.
It is the dawn of a new era and a new decade, and here is my campaign. Kindness Is Cool. You don’t need to be left or right, political or spiritual. It’s about reclaiming decorum, discernment, and kindness. It’s about reaching deep into yourself and making the world better than you found it. It’s about changing the world one smile at a time.

For a KINDNESS IS COOL bumper sticker, visit www.kindness-is-cool.com and spread the word.
SHOW AND TELL OF 2009

In addition to splitting time between Vashon Island Washington, and Wheaton Island, Maine, we also have a little place in Georgia. It is Bo’s childhood home in Columbus GA, a quiet small town on the Chattahoochee River, with abandoned brick cotton mills and a beautiful river walk. This year as I arrived for the holidays, Bo surprised me with my Christmas present: a new studio. He had been planning it for months. Bo spoils me regularly with these secret benevolent plots, masterminded without my knowing.