Please pardon the mess…
My name is Dakota Adan and after one too many self-help books and several too many Rumi quotes we ended up here.
I have a published book of poetry that is both a bestseller and the recipient of a scathing review that still makes me giggle. I love to dance, have performed on a world tour, and was once a part of a disastrous performance at the Grammys. Around visiting my 30th country I met my husband who insists I am actually more beautiful when I cry (which is lucky for him because I truly cannot seem to help myself). I love language, and words like kintsugi where the cracks of an object get filled in with gold. The possums in my yard are my favorite creatures (we rescued four of them as babies) because what could be more beautiful than taking the scraps of what could have been trash and making a life out of the mess.
These are my love letters to the world. I hope you feel nosy enough to read them.
Why Love Letters From the Gutter?
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
-Oscar Wilde
There’s a story about Winston Churchill where someone asked if he would cut spending on the humanities and the arts to help fund the war effort. In response he said, “Then what would we be fighting for?”
We need spaces like this, to remind us even in the dark, terrible and messy times there is beauty, love and meaning if we are brave enough to look. Like the voyager project, where a space capsule was filled with all our little treasures and goodies from the gutter (whale songs, photos of the Taj Mahal, and the brainwaves of a human falling in love), and then launched into the cosmos. We sense that all of this has to mean something. Even if we don’t have the words.
This little corner of the inter-web is my small attempt. My attempt to find those words, wrap them in ribbons and send them winking out into the twilight. They are here for whoever needs them (but honestly they might just be reminders for myself). But this is where I hope you’ll come from time to time to drink your fill of starlight. From one trashy little possum to another, I hope they fill your soul to the brim.
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