I've reverted to childhood.

How I learned to become a poem.

Dear Kula Diaries,

A few days ago, I was leading a session of The Dance Experiment. My mind began to wander and I started thinking about the ‘Pee Pod’ project that I launched last week. For anybody who missed my ‘announcement’ — basically, I was disproportionately excited about starting SMS ‘marketing’ with the exclusive purpose of … sending people poems.

You might not be familiar with the term SMS marketing, but that’s OK. Basically, it’s the type of text message that you usually receive from a company that is trying to sell you something. And guess what? I’m totally OK with it. I understand why a business would use it… but I had a different idea… an idea that went against traditional marketing practices. I had an idea to use SMS marketing to send out weekly poems and uplifting messages to my subscribers.

This is what a ‘normal’ SMS message looks like… (P.S. this is probably the only company I haven’t unsubscribed from… because I like their matcha!)

And this is the first message that you receive when you join The Pee Pod.

In case you are curious, it is not free for me to send out text messages or poems. In fact, it actually costs hundreds of dollars per month to do so (with my current level of SMS credits, my subscription is $540 per month, to be exact). Which begs the question: WHY? And, to be completely honest, I can’t tell you why. If my brain tried to think this idea through — I can tell you that it would come up with a lot of good reasons not to do it… but, what if I ask my heart? Well, I can tell you what my heart says: it feels like the right thing to do. It feels fun. It feels uplifting. It feels like it is needed.

Within 1 day of announcing The Pee Pod, I had over 500 subscribers… so that tells me that maybe, these bite-sized poems are more needed and appreciated than I thought they might be.

Over the past six years of Kula Cloth, I’ve always pursued the ideas that have inspired me — even when they didn’t ‘make sense’ logically. As I was trying to explain to my account rep that, no, I do not want to set up an abandoned cart flow and no, I do not want to set up a welcome flow that will send people an additional text message if they don’t make a purchase within one day of receiving the first text message … she was a bit confused.

“You want to do WHAT?”

“I just want to send people poems every week — that’s it, I promise.”

I could hear the confusion in her voice as she audibly shrugged, and guided me through setting up my first SMS campaign.

Ok — but back to the Dance Experiment. I was dancing to this song:

As I jumped around to the music, I started thinking about the fact that I now had the opportunity to send fun, whimsical little poems to people every single week… and, I just started crying. For most people, sending poems might not seem like a big deal… but when I tell you that I’ve had a dream of writing poems for a long time…well… I have proof.

A few months ago, I was going through some of my mementos from childhood, and I discovered a few worksheets that I had completed during 2nd grade. I went to 2nd grade at Saint Mary’s Catholic School in Wilmington, North Carolina. I was a rambunctious kid — the type of kid who refused to do most homework, in favor of writing stories. I didn’t play jump rope at recess — instead, I played kickball with ‘the boys’. And according to me, this is what I looked like (as a reminder, my nickname as a kid was Stacy, in case you are confused):

Next, I discovered a worksheet that included all of my likes and dislikes… which includes my favorite ‘dislike’ of all time: GOING TO LOWES. I mean, really… what kid wants to go to Lowe’s with their parents? I’ve never met a kid who enjoys wandering around a home improvement store.

Finally, it was time for the coup de grâce of the assignment: a vision for my future. I’ve cut and pasted the entire assignment below, for your viewing pleasure. For the official record, I’d like to point out that if I were actually to go back in time, I would decidedly not choose to go back to 1492, ‘because that’s when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue’. Honestly, I think that I really liked the fact that I had written a sentence that rhymed during an assignment.

As you can see from this important document, I also wanted to visit Salt Lake City, ‘because I have heard that the lake there is pretty’ … and that I want to ‘buy a porsh and a 4 story house’…. WHY? Well, obviously, ‘because I love porsh’s and I love 4 storied houses’.

My vision was a little blurry back in 2nd grade, because I don’t actually like Porches very much, and I live in a one story home, and the thought of having to go up and down the stairs in a 4-story house sounds exhausting and pointless — in fact, having a massive house just seems like a lot of space to clean. My husband and I live in a beautiful home, but it’s not very big (just two bedrooms). Our house is definitely more about the ‘yard’ than it is about the house.

Between the silly lines of this assignment however, I did notice something else: I mentioned that I wanted to write poems… not once, but twice.

I don’t know when I forgot that I could write poems for a living, because I very clearly knew that I could when I was in 2nd grade. The wisdom of second grade me is mind boggling — the dreaming without limits allowed me to cast a vision as far as I could see — and know that it was possible. As I sat down to write that little vision, I have absolutely no doubt that I knew and believed that I would one day be a Porche-driving, four story house living, poet who played the violin.

I’m glad that my taste in cars adjusted a bit over time — but poetry is something that I’ve always done. From a young age, I would peck away at a manual type writer and sit and write poems by hand in notebooks. Somewhere along the way, I started to lose that unshakeable belief that I could do anything that I wanted to do, or be anything that I wanted to be. Somewhere along the way, I started to believe the things that people told me — I took their ideas and their thoughts, and I made them real in my own mind. I said things like:

I’m not good enough.

I can’t make a living doing this.

I need to be more responsible.

This isn’t possible.

Nobody does what they love for a living.

It’s foolish for me to pursue my silly dreams.

I said those things, not only to myself, but also to others. Not only did I believe the lie — I perpetuated it, disguised as responsibility. I had unlearned the process of visioning and dreaming — isn’t that what happens when you become an adult? You forget what it is like to be a kid? You forget what it is like to truly know that you can take a thought and twirl it around and make it real? I wish I could take back the times that I told somebody else that they couldn’t afford something… or that nobody would buy the thing they wanted to create… or that it was nearly impossible to make a living as an artist… or that all musicians have to struggle. Those things might be true for some folks, but they do not have to be. When you believe that another story is possible, you take the pen out of the hand of the stories you’ve been told — and you become the author.

Open to the infinite possibilities of life, you suddenly discover that you have so much more control than you thought you did. You are not at the mercy of everything around you — but rather, everything around you is created because of what you believe. This is the most bitter and most sweet pill to swallow — because it hurts to recognize our own role in suffering… and it is simultaneously freeing to know that we are the ones who hold the power to change the world that we see.

2nd grade me!

I listened to a piece by Alan Watts recently, where he was pondering the question of self-improvement. He was talking about how people want to, ‘get better’ all the time — but the paradox of ‘getting better’ is that YOU… the one who is not good enough… is the one that has to do ‘the fixing’. So, if you aren’t good enough… how can you fix anything? It is only when we recognize our absolute wholeness in every single moment… it is only when we can sit in silence and listen to something that is beyond the story we have created about ‘who we are’ — that we will allow ourselves to become an active part of creating the beautiful ideas that we yearn to paint. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with wanting to become better - but our methods are usually based on the incorrect premise that something is ‘wrong’ with us. Getting better does not mean fixing anything… getting better means being more connected with who we truly are. Being better means recognizing and seeing and knowing our own, true inner brilliance and infinite abundance, creativity and potential. Being better means learning how to see beyond the limiting stories that we’ve carried around for so long — and telling a new story… a story where everything is possible.

I’m 43 years old (I don’t know if I’ve ever shared that nugget of information here - ha!). When I was less than 10 years old, I knew that I wanted to become a poet. I knew that I wanted to play violin. I knew that I wanted to uplift people — I knew that I wanted to find a way to share the ‘bigness’ of the universe with others. I forgot that dream for a long time — because I told myself it wasn’t possible. But do you know what? I came back. The dream never left — because it’s just a part of who I am. Each of us was gifted with our own unique expression of life — and it doesn’t go away. It doesn’t go away because we have worked in a job that we hate… or because we reach a certain age… or because we’ve told ourselves that we aren’t good enough. It never goes away, because love will never ever give up on you. You cannot possibly break yourself apart from who you truly are.

At the end of my 2nd grade workbook, I had drawn a second self-portrait. This one was supposed to show how I thought I looked at the end of the year. I still remember my teacher looking at this one … and as she compared it to the one that I had drawn at the beginning of the year she remarked, “You grew a neck!”

I used to think that if I could go back in time and tell my child-self about what her grown up life would look like, that she’d be surprised… but I don’t think that’s true. I think she already knew. I think that when she wrote those words down… she knew that amidst the forgetting… amidst the chaos of life… she’d come back to them when she was ready. I’d like to think that if I saw her now… I could tell her that through a magical series of events… I finally did reach a day where I could write my ‘silly little poems’ — and that there were hundreds of people who wanted to read them. I can almost see her wearing her disheveled school uniform — her bangs, cut lopsided because she hacked them with a pair of scissors she found in a drawer. She pauses to think for a moment and then dashes off to play — looking back laughing as she runs towards the kick ball yard, “I told you so!”.

It’s been 35 years since I drew that self-portrait. It’s been 35 years since I took a pencil and wrote, I want to be a famous story writer and poem, in a little blue notebook. When I first read that line, I thought it was a cute typo — but now, I’m not so sure that it is. Whether my 2nd grade self was conscious of it or not — I think that she understood something that I did not know until a few years ago — life is the poem. We are the poem. It is up to each of us to determine what that poem will say.

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Friends — thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for reading my stories each week. As this post goes ‘live’, I will be returning home from a very invigorating weekend at PCT Days in Oregon — and I’m sure I’ll share more about that event very soon! It’s one of those events that consistently reminds me of the impact that Kula has on the lives of hikers — and it is so much fun to get to meet people in person.

I hope all of you have an absolutely amazing week — I’m sending you all so much love!