Where do I go from here?

Pondering the path unknown.

Dear Kula Diaries,

Last week marked the one year anniversary of The Kula Diaries — and I thought it would be a great opportunity to use this weekly post to share my hopes and dreams for this little space over the next year… and also give an update on some things that I’ve been enjoying a lot lately. In other words, this is a Kula Diaries State of The Union address, and I’m just going to see where it goes.

When I started The Kula Diaries, I really didn’t have a specific plan or outline mapped out — I always just figured that the ‘right’ words or ideas would come to me each week… and it really has felt like that. This week, it just feels right to share some fun… semi random items… with all of you — and to give you an update on a few happenings that I feel pretty excited about (and maybe some other things that I want to go more in depth about soon).

So… here goes.

Many of you might remember that in December of last year, a stray cat started visiting our home. Initially, I named this cat Sprinkles… but we later changed its name to Jasper (named after our doorbell, confusingly enough). We have now been feeding Jasper for the past six months… and he/she remains incredibly timid. Unfortunately, Jasper is now competing for food with an opossum, as well as another orange cat (that we named Fox) who has suddenly appeared in the neighborhood. In addition, our cat Cinder has decided that her life’s mission is to find Jasper and to banish him from the neighborhood. Because of all of these circumstances, we’ve decided that we want to trap Jasper and attempt to bring him into our home — in the hopes that familiarity will alleviate the hunting behavior being demonstrated by Cinder (we are worried about her running off into the woods and getting hurt). We’ve consulted with a woman who is an expert on trapping feral cats, and we’ve accumulated all of the appropriate items in order to make this happen in a safe way for Jasper (and us!). Our small trap arrived this week — and we will be attempting to lure Jasper into the trap with some wet food… and then likely beginning the (very slow) process of establishing some trust with him over the next few weeks (or possibly months). We aren’t sure if Jasper will end up staying with us — or if we will need to re-home him somewhere else, but Aaron and I are really looking forward to meeting this little cat and also for the chance to give him a life that allows him to experience love.

Current update: We have put the trap out for two nights in a row (as of the time that I’m writing this post)… no luck. Jasper walked 1/2 of the way into the trap, but then decided he wasn’t quite ready for it yet. Stay tuned for continuing updates on the Jasper Sprinkles situation.

A few weeks ago, I visited the West China Tea House in Austin, Texas. I’ve been a tea drinker my entire life, and if you know me… you know how much I adore tea. Well, the West China Tea House really invigorated my love and appreciation for tea. A few years ago, I purchased a gaiwan set from Monsoon Pottery and some pretty exquisite tea from Hugo Tea and Volition Tea. This weekend, Aaron and I took a two hour long tea appreciation class at Floating Leaves Tea in Seattle in order to become more familiar and acquainted with brewing methods and tasting practices. The class was remarkable (if you live in the Seattle area, their shop is in Ballard — and you should absolutely visit and attend a class if you are able to do so!).

The class focused on so much more than I was expecting about tea. In particular, I learned that for most of my life I had been focused on the flavor of tea, but had failed to notice the movement and the weight of the tea as I was experiencing it. During the class, drinking the tea was very meditative, and we tasted one particular tea that was practically an explosion of movement — an energy that could be felt moving across the tongue and through the entire experience of the mouth. The tea had a slightly bitter taste, but it finished with a delicious sweetness. The instructor remarked that tea often mimicked life: we sometimes must experience the bitterness in order to also experience the delicious sweetness. The joy is in the whole of the experience.

This tea that I purchased at Floating Leaves is a red oolong, and it was by far my favorite tea that we tasted. The teaware is a gaiwan.

Tea has always been a meditative practice for me — I’ve been drinking tea since I was very young. As a kid, I drank Red Rose Tea, because I liked to collect the tiny ceramic animals that came in the box. My grandmother served me Earl Grey Tea out of a teapot, and I remember that my parents were not allowed at tea time in the evenings when we were staying at her house, because it was a sacred time with my very eccentric Italian grandmother. She never monitored how many sugar cubes I used in my tea, which meant that I’d usually have tea that was probably more sugar than tea.

Every single evening, for the past few weeks, I’ve been drinking tea — brewing it using my gaiwan set and sipping it slowly out of a tiny tea cup.

Drinking tea makes me think of this meditation by Thich Nhat Hahn:

You must be completely awake in the present to enjoy the tea.
Only in the awareness of the present, can your hands feel the pleasant warmth of the cup.
Only in the present, can you savor the aroma, taste the sweetness, appreciate the delicacy.
If you are ruminating about the past, or worrying about the
future, you will completely miss the experience of enjoying the cup of
tea.
You will look down at the cup, and the tea will be gone.
The future is not even here yet. Plan for it, but do not waste your time worrying about it.
Worrying is worthless.
When you stop ruminating about what has already happened, when
you stop worrying about what might never happen, then you will be in the
present moment.
Then you will begin to experience joy in life.

I’ve cut myself off from listening to any personal development material for awhile. I was just feeling really burned out from it and I decided that it was not helping me. This doesn’t mean that I won’t continue my daily practices that are important to me (like meditation or gratitude)… but it does mean that I won’t be overwhelming myself with guidance from people who are telling me that I need to be different than how I am.

I realized a few weeks ago that I had become too analytical… trying to monitor my thoughts and trying to be better than how I was — which, oddly enough, goes against everything that I believe. I got ‘sucked’ into this… because, it was, that sneaky habit of ‘trying too hard’ attempting to disguise itself in another form. What’s my gauge for whether or not something is helpful? If I can say that I’m doing something because I genuinely love it or because I want to do it — then it stays. If I say that I’m doing something because I think it’ll fix something that’s ‘wrong’ with me — it goes.

An example:

Meditation: I love it. It grounds me. It brings me into the present moment. It makes me feel good. It stays.

Dancing: Amazing. I feel like I am floating and happy and in love with life. I love jumping and spinning and listening to music. I feel free and open to life’s possibilities.

Listening to inspirational entrepreneurial speakers obsessively and attempting to determine what I need to be doing differently in order to be more successful: It makes me feel like I’m not doing enough and that I’m so far behind and have no clue what I’m doing and that I’m a total failure… and it makes me think that I have really dropped the ball and that there are so many things I should have done that I didn’t do. Yah….. in case you couldn’t tell… this one goes.

Do I believe that there is anything wrong with trying to become a better person? No, absolutely I do not. However, to approach how I am right now from a place of needing to be different in order to be better… is a very short-sighted and lackful approach. It negates the journey that I have been on in order to reach this very point in my life, and it disallows me to experience the things that I am needing to experience in this moment… which are, indeed, very important to help me continue to grow and expand.

The idea of wholeness has always appealed to me — because the idea that we are whole doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to grow or expand. Instead, it just accepts us as how we are right now — with anything that we might be experiencing. It recognizes the experience of life, and the multitude of things that it contains, and it creates a space for all of those things to be OK together.

I can be a really successful business owner, and I can also be worried sometimes or fearful. I can be really happy, and also sometimes really frustrated. I can be very peaceful, and sometimes I can have a really shitty day. I can be profoundly grateful, and also unbelievably disappointed. I can be somebody who has an amazing marriage, and also be somebody who had a divorce. I can be all of those things in a giant, tangled ball of string — and yet, it is in the recognition that I am the space in which life happens — that I can allow those things to be a part of the whole, rather than like unwanted spiders that I need to chase away into a dark corner.

And so, this is why I have cut myself off from the idea that I need to be better than how I am. I realized a few weeks ago that the best version of me is just living life to the fullest — which includes things like rescuing a stray cat and drinking a lot of tea. It includes not needing to be anywhere different than where I am. It includes a deep trust that if I can continue to focus my heart on love and on kindness and gratitude for others — that the universe will continue to provide for me with its endlessly benevolent and infinitely abundant nature. It includes being present for this moment — not the one that hasn’t happened yet. The best version of me is — in fact — who I am right now. Why do I need to push her off into the future? Why does she need to be somebody different than who I am? I know in my heart that she doesn’t. I know that I can embody all of who she is in this exact moment in time, without needing to fix anything about myself — because nothing about who I am (or who you are) is wrong. Wrong is a thing that I have told myself… and, well… ironically, it’s wrong.

Let me quote Thich Nhat Hahn again in this new context:

I have arrived.
I am home.
In the here,
In the now.
I am solid. – I am free.
In the ultimate
I dwell.

I started The Kula Diaries because I wanted to re-connect with my love of writing… but I also started it for you, because I wanted to share things that were meaningful to people. I thought that as a former park ranger… backpacking instructor… violinist… mountaineer… and founder of an outdoor gear company… I might have some insight into life that other folks would find helpful. Most importantly — I felt like (and still feel like) I had walked in the shoes of somebody who had no clue how to do what they wanted to do… but, somehow, managed to figure it all out. When I was first getting started with creating my own trail, I had no clue how to start or what to do… and I had so many unconscious limiting beliefs that I didn’t know I had. When I started The Kula Diaries, it was my hope that my words might be able to provide some inspiration or guidance to other humans who were similarly looking for ‘something’ — even if they didn’t quite know what that was.

Over the past year or so, I’ve written about so many things — so many unexpected things (that I’ve loved deeply). But, I really do want to give you the opportunity to tell me what you’d love to see… or hear… or know. What do you want from me? I am committed to sharing information to the best of my abilities — and I would love to know what you would want. I’m open to any and all ideas:

• videos of me yammering about random topics (with captions!)

• random violin solos

• blondie recipes

• backpacking tips and tricks

• entrepreneurial stuff (let me know if there is anything specific)

• guest posts (open to ideas!)

• poetry

• random weekly challenges or experiments

• day-to-day life stuff

• random-whateverness

• dance playlists

I’ve created this handy-dandy google form here, where you can submit your suggestions (anonymously) or leave me a comment (note: this is different than the Kula Diaries Vault for my weekly AMAs, just so I can keep the answers separate from each other).

Random whateverness… like this ridiculously oversized chair - ha!

When I think about what I want for The Kula Diaries, it is this: I want you to show up to The Kula Diaries every single week and feel refreshed and energized and inspired and uplifted. I want you to feel like you belong. I want to make you laugh and do surprising things. I want to try new, creative ideas and see what happens. I want to follow the ideas and see where they go. I want to get to know some of you and have the opportunity to chat with you at our live events. I want to feel excited about writing every single week — and eager about the ideas that continuously pour out of the idea factory of the universe into my finger tips as I sit down to write.

I’m sitting in my car writing this week’s post, and this is the first time I’ve ever written a post sitting in a car. My husband is at the dentist right now, and the only place that I get WiFi is by using my personal cell phone hot spot in my vehicle.

Many years ago, in the early days of Kula Cloth, my house did not have high speed internet… and we were using a satellite internet service called Hughes Net, which was not fast. In fact, my cellular internet was faster… and so one holiday season amidst packing Kula orders, I actually went into my car (which had cellular WiFi) with my laptop and my label printer and I printed out all of my shipping labels while sitting in the front seat of my car.

Over the past six years, I’ve been scrappy about running a business sometimes — and that’s the most fun part about it for me. I don’t have investors, and never have. I’ve bumbled my way through things, and I’ve always managed to figure it out — and, it’s weird, but stuff just happens. A few weeks ago, I was a little stressed out because I realized that Google had disconnected from my Shopify store for Kula Cloth — which is not good, because all of the Amazon Knock Off Kulas were showing up in search results… and actual Kula Cloths were not. OOPS. I have no idea how this happened, but I also do not have a tech department — and I’ve been stumbling my way through anything and everything having to do with websites for about 6 years now. I’ve even learned now to cut and paste lines of code and I know how to change DNS settings in a website and I even updated our DMARC records for some new requirements that I literally do not even understand. If you don’t know what that means, consider yourself lucky.

Well, the Google story goes like this: I was struggling, and feeling frustrated. I ended up finding a guy who could help me and I hired him to help me get my Google account re-connected and working again… and then I went into the back end of my Google ads account and I slapped together some sort of a Google ad, without having any idea whatsoever what I was doing. I have literally zero training in Google ads, but I somehow managed to create an ad called a ‘Performance Max’ ad — and according to Google’s ad health checker, the strength of my ad was ‘poor’ — which, isn’t surprising, considering the aforementioned lack of knowledge about how to do any of this.

When I get frustrated or feel like spinning my wheels, I have learned to translate that feeling as: “BACK OFF, Anastasia. Quit meddling in things, because you’re making it worse. Go do something that feels better for a little while. You don’t need to fix this.” So, taking my own hint… I dropped it. I let go of trying to figure it out… and I went back to focusing on the things that felt good: meditating… dancing… making watches… pondering a little painting project that I’ve been contemplating… going on walks… and drinking tea. I was really trusting that all of this was going to work out in some way, even though it felt a little bit hopeless. I tried to allow myself to find that sweet feeling of the universal jello nudging me around and I tried to sink into the moment and trust that things were working out.. and then… do you know what happened? I can’t even begin to make this up: GOOGLE CALLED ME. And not a scam company pretending to be Google.. but actual Google. A woman from Google, who I would later learn is a Google Unicorn in her own right, called me and told me that I had been selected for special program that Google was trying and that she would become my Google assistant to help me set up everything having to do with Google. This woman — again, a saint — spent over an hour on the phone with me for our first call… and then transferred me to another amazing woman who specialized in coding, who walked me through some unbelievably technical things on my website that I probably would have had to pay somebody thousands of dollars to do. Then, the Google Unicorn informed me that she’d work on writing my next ad campaign for me and that she would personally be working with me for the next 6-9 months to help me grow my business using Google. Did I mention that all of this was happening FOR FREE?! And yes, I understand that Google will benefit from my ads — but so will Kula, and so will Kula’s employees. To be in a position like me — with absolutely zero ability to allocate resources towards this very specialized knowledge… and then to be gifted with this incredible human in my life… I felt overwhelmed and grateful in a way that seemed disproportionate to what I was receiving. Because it wasn’t about the dumb Google ads. It was about the love that I felt from the whole universe in that moment. A little whisper that said, You haven’t been forgotten. Everything is good. You can trust yourself. Help is on the way.

Unsolicited fact about Google ads: in order to make an ad that is considered ‘excellent’ in strength, you must include 5 different videos — one of them must be square, one must be vertical and one must be horizontal. I had never filmed a Google ad before, nor did I have any idea what to include… so I asked Aaron to film me putting a Kula on a backpack… added a corny royalty-free soundtrack… and poof! Google ad! Here’s my first attempt:

Sure, if you look at the situation at face value — Google is making money on Kula from ads. But this had nothing to do with that… and everything to do with the fact that I had needed help… and that I had let go of the fear and frustration around this particular subject and I had allowed myself to find a feeling of love and wholeness, without needing any answers at all. I had allowed myself to drink tea and slow down. I hadn’t spent time trying to figure it out — instead, I trusted that it would figure itself out… and then, in a seemingly impossible way — it did. I probably seemed like the most ridiculous client that they had ever worked with because I couldn’t stop profusely thanking them… I felt so in awe of their knowledge and expertise that I was humbled in their presence and felt deeply appreciative of their time, assistance and care. I left the phone call feeling not like I had been on a phone call with a Google ad employee… but, rather, like the universe itself had called me. Maybe I’m weird — but isn’t it fun to love moments like that? Isn’t it fun to find the beauty in the things that seem like they could just be ‘normal’ moments? Isn’t it fun to witness the unfolding of things that — at one moment — seemed so far out of reach?

I love expansion. I love watching ideas arrive and I love watching them grow and flourish and bloom. I want to share all of that with all of you — and I want to see how things progress and I want to watch as ideas form and build off each other. I want to continue to hear about your ideas and dreams and I want to find ways to uplift and encourage you on your own path — whatever that looks like for you. Instead of telling you all of the things that you need to do differently… I want to uplift you from a place of recognizing your own wholeness, exactly as you are right now. There is absolutely nothing about you that you need to fix. You aren’t wrong how you are because the everythingness of who you are right now must exist in order to allow all that is coming to continually evolve and change and flow. There is no end to who you are and who you will become — and all of it is wrapped up into the infinite goodness that you radiate in each and every moment of time.

I don’t need to know how all of this will continue to unfold — but I trust that it will, and I am looking forward to seeing all that happens. I listened to something a few years ago that talked about the idea that the past, present and future were all happening at the same time — because in each moment we embody the everythingness of who we have been… the everythingness of who we are… and the everythingness of who we will become. I like knowing that. I like knowing that it’s all here right now, and that there isn’t anything I need to do to fix anything about myself. I can step off the self-improvement hamster wheel and be OK where I am. I like knowing that I can sip on tea and make watches and dance in the rain… and that it doesn’t make me less of anything — because nothing can make me less of something that I simply am. I hope you can find that feeling today too — and I hope that it gives you a sense of goodness about not only where you are… but who you are.

As I was writing this weekly post, I remembered that a few years ago, I had hosted a ‘virtual tea party’ for Kula Cloth — some of you might have even participated in it. I hadn’t thought about this in so long, but I thought it would be sweet to share it with you now… so that today, or any time that it works best for you, you can join me in a little tea party from wherever you are. I don’t have the Kulas mentioned on that page anymore (since it was from a few years ago), but the tea party itself is still cute and fun… and I hope you enjoy it… and I’d still love to hear your tea stories!

Sip on some tea today… do something that brings a little bit of a feeling of love into your heart… and trust that things are working out exactly as they are supposed to. Allow the bitterness to bloom into sweetness and watch as your own leaves unfurl and soften to all of life.

You are loved, friends!

Ok… a few more quick notes, because I’d love to invite ALL of you to some really special events that I’m attending in the next few weeks…

P.S. If you live in WA (or even if you don’t… but end up travelling to this area in the next few weeks), The Musical Mountaineers are hosting a concert to benefit the NW Stream Center — and I’d absolutely love to see some of you there. This will be an evening of wonderful music and connection and all proceeds are being donated to the Stream Center’s new Sustainable Ecolab project. You can find details about the concert by clicking on the image below.

P.S.S. Also, we are hosting a movie screening of 500 Days in the Wild at Seattle REI on June 18th (just a few days after the concert!). This is the ONLY screening of this Canadian Film that’s available in the USA right now and it chronicles a woman’s 15,000 mile journey across Canada — it’s a remarkable film and it will be a really special evening. I’d love to say hello to some of you there too!