Dearest Kula Diaries friends,
I didn’t have any thing specific planned for today, so I’m going to start it out with an ASK: Vote for Kula Cloth! We’ve been nominated for the Best Gift for Outdoor Adventure by USA Today, and you can vote every single day for the next month:
It’s pretty cool that our tiny brand is even on the radar of of USA Today, so we would truly appreciate your support.
I’m sitting here in my house, and right now it’s quiet. I just meal prepped for the work week ahead, and I’m feeling wonderful after a great hike yesterday with my employee Chizuko and a few other friends.
I’m writing this on Monday and Mondays are weird for me, because I don’t usually go into the office on Mondays — instead, I usually use the day to prep for the week ahead and to get done as much as I can get done without totally burning myself out. Things that I’ve done today in no particular order: woke up with a terrible migraine and tried to ignore it, went for a walk in the dark with my headlamp and then joined our daily dance experiment for a half hour of dancing, cooked quinoa + roasted veggies and chicken to prep for the week, coordinated with our rep for next year’s REI Kula order, responded to a few new potential wholesale customers for Kula Cloth, fixed somebody’s incorrect address in their order, posted a silly reel to Instagram about my latest invention (an UL Disco ball), talked to a 3D printer operator about a prototype for a piece of backpacking gear I’ve been working on for quite some time, spent time playing with my cats, purchased backpacking food for an upcoming backpacking trip with my mom, placed a heater near some asphalt patch that we want to use in a pothole on the road to our house (we need to warm up the patch material before we use it to fill the hole), tried to figure out the weight of the fleece that I originally used to make our Rapunzel Gaiters since that fleece is now out of stock and I need to replace it with a similar fleece, wrote back to a handful of text messages from my Pee Pod poem SMS that was sent out today to subscribers… and, honestly, I feel like there is probably a lot that I’m missing.
Sometimes it seems like there is just an endless stream of things that I have to do… because, well, there is. But I’ve learned to realize: I didn’t do all of those things at once. I did them one at a time. And I don’t need to do them all at once. I can just be present with each one of them as I do it — which means that I don’t need to attempt to comprehend the whole lot of them in the same instant.
After I be-bopped through my list of things to do, I realized something in utter horror and shock: I had not yet prepared a Kula Diaries post for Wednesday. I try to prepare my content well in advance, but sometimes the days sneak up on me. When I first decided to start writing The Kula Diaries, I wasn’t sure what to write about — or if anybody would even want to read what I had to say. But, at the heart of it, I wanted to keep it authentic: the real stories of a person who started a gear company from the ground up. And the realness of today has smacked me in the face a tiny bit.
Many years ago, I was working on a collaboration with a really huge outdoor gear brand, and we were working on a specific design, and I remember that they said to me, “Ok, this is great, but we need to go back and bring this to the team.” I had to stifle my giggling a little bit as I said, “Ok, I’ll do that too.” The team was literally me. I was the team who I needed to ‘discuss’ this collaboration with. In the very early days of Kula Cloth, I would get also messages that said, Can you direct me to your sales team? Can I speak with your marketing team? Can I talk with your Wholesale Accounts Manager? I’d scoot my desk chair over a little bit and I’d type back to them that, magically, they had reached the correct person on the first try… I always left out the bit about being the only person.
When I find myself feeling overwhelmed with a sense of being ‘busy’ — the number one thing that I do is take a step back. I have never gotten less busy by working more or harder — but if I can intentionally summon the feeling of gratitude and love amidst a seemingly impossible sea of ‘to-do’s … I’ve discovered that I can reconnect with what really matters and refocus my own efforts on not what I’m doing… but how I’m doing it.
I celebrated my own birthday on the 1st of October, but it was also the week of my grandmother’s birthday. My grandmother died in 2020 because the hospital would not treat a treatable condition due to COVID restrictions. As a result, her condition worsened dramatically. My grandfather died a few years prior to my grandmother, and I was very close to both of them. As a kid, I’d hop on a plane from our house in Pennsylvania and fly to Florida to spend a week with them — usually driving around Orlando, going to visit model homes (for fun) … and eating dinner at ‘Steak & Ale’ at 3pm in the afternoon.
Before she died, my grandmother was a huge fan of The Musical Mountaineers, and I used to call her and put my phone on speaker so that I could perform music for her. My relatives in Florida used to pull up our mountain-top concerts on YouTube so that my grandmother could watch them, and whenever I’d talk to her on the phone, she’d call me by my family nickname and say, “Oh Stacy… that thing you do on the mountains is so so incredible!”
When I was a toddler, my mom was in the process of getting her Master’s Degree and simultaneously working. She would drop me off at a daycare in the mornings… but (apparently) I had severe separation anxiety, and according to the folks at the daycare place — all I would do was cry. My grandparents would drive to the daycare center and pick me up… and then bring me back home. Up until the day she died, my grandmother repeated the same story about this daycare center… she’d recall how we would drive by the building and I’d immediately start to pout as I said (in a very sad baby voice), “Dat where I go!”.
My grandparents — committed to preventing me from going to dat place, they would heroically stop by to pick me up and then bring me back to their house. On one occasion, my mom stopped at her parent’s house because she forgot a book for school… and she walked in the front door and discovered that my grandparents were feeding me a giant bowl of ice cream for breakfast. My mom — a new parent who was doing her best to limit my consumption of 10,000 grams of sugar per day — told my grandparents that she didn’t want me eating ice cream for breakfast. Reluctantly, they agreed … but a few weeks later, my mom forgot something else… stopped at my grandparents house… and, again, discovered me sitting with a large bowl of ice cream for breakfast. To this day, I love ice cream — not only because it’s delicious… but because it always makes me think of my grandparents and the joy (and sugar) that they brought into my life.
This video was filmed to accompany a slide show at my grandmother’s memorial service… it’s worth watching just to see the cat antics.
Over the past few years, my grandparents have continued to be a profoundly important part of my life — even though all but my step-grandmother have passed away. I often sit on the rocky ledge above our house and do my morning meditations, and in those moments — I can, in some way, feel the presence of my grandparents arriving. I think I’ve shared this story before — but sometime during last year, I was really struggling and as I sat on that ledge with my eyes closed, I felt the energy of all of my grandparents surround me. From somewhere deep within me, I felt some words arise that did not feel like they were mine, You’re doing great and we are so proud of you. I sat on the ledge, and wept — in part for their absence, but also because the love that I felt from them was so real. In the time that they’ve been gone, it hasn’t disappeared — it has just changed.
It’s funny, because when I started writing this today… I didn’t know where it would go, and yet here I am. I start with a silly ask about voting for something that, in the big scheme of things … really doesn’t matter at all. And I’m ending with something that does matter — because it’s about the love that connects all of us together, and the love that persists beyond our human comprehension … and the love that we must place at the center of everything that we do. Life is just this endless sea of stuff that we do, and the thread that ties it all together is the love that we often miss in the spaces between. I don’t want to miss it — and when I think about the things that matter to me the most, I’m reminded that this love is always within me. It never leaves — and, indeed, even though it has felt that way at times — I am not alone.
I’ll end with one of my favorite passages by Thicht Nhat Hanh:
This body is not me. I am not limited by this body. I am life without boundaries. I have never been born, and I have never died. Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars, manifestations from my wondrous true mind. Since before time, I have been free. Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, sacred thresholds on our journey. Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek. So laugh with me, hold my hand, let us say good-bye, say good-bye, to meet again soon. We meet today. We will meet again tomorrow. We will meet at the source every moment. We meet each other in all forms of life. Tomorrow, I will continue to be. But you will have to be very attentive to see me. I will be a flower, or a leaf. I will be in these forms and I will say hello to you. If you are attentive enough, you will recognize me, and you may greet me. I will be very happy.
Friends — I’m sending you all so much love. No matter what you do today, find some time to connect with the things that matter. You will bring that love into every single thing you do. Take each item one at a time, and savor it. It is a moment in your, precious life. It isn’t just a means to an end… and your life is not happening at some point in the distant future… it’s right now, and the goodness that you radiate to all beings does matter very much.
Here’s a big virtual <HUG> from me to you.
Sending you love, my friend.
Listening to this while driving was not a good idea! While the crying was the , “good,” kind it still made visibility a challenge. Thank you for such a sweet reminder about appreciation for the people in our lives and the little moments that make life special.