How cool is this? In 2004, there will be a USPS stamp honoring Buckminster Fuller. The picture is the Boris Artzybasheff painting of Bucky with a geodesic dome for a skull from the 60’s or 70’s. This is our government doing something I can get behind! I’m going to buy sheets and sheets of them and use them for years.
I grew fascinated with his work as a child, reading Pilot for Spaceship Earth at age ten or so. My early years were full of visions of sleek Dymaxion cars, cylindrical Dymaxion houses of central masts with suspended quarters hanging off it that are delivered to their destination by zeppelin, of cars with optional wings, of triangles and geodesic structures. “Build with tension, not compression” was a rule of his that I still remember. Reading his biography at such an impressionable age started me on a path that includes always questioning accepted wisdom, never believing in impossibilities, a willingness to try and fail; to try and fail; to try and ultimately succeed. My biggest accomplishment is eclipsed by his smallest, but still reading of his life and reading his writings ignited sparks of intellectual curiousity and a love of learning that will remain burning as long as I do. Rest in peace, captain. What a joy that something as mundane as posting a letter will remind me how much your example has meant to my life.
