Taste Experience Daily: Feed Your Soul with Kacie Kocher

Life is all about perspective. Positive or negative, perspective is a powerful tool in measuring just how far a person can either advance or retreat towards something meaningful. For Kacie Kocher, civic technologist, programs designer, and self-taught artist her unique and ever-growing perspectives on letter writing and everything else for that matter have the power to change the way the world goes ‘round. “I want to keep growing and learning, so part of that means adapting my views and reevaluating.” Kacie’s daily practices of designing postcards, writing and cooking are her ways of feeding her soul. Every morning, Kacie designs a postcard, whether with an illustration, a print, calligraphy…whatever it is that she is feeling creative about at that moment, and later posts them to her site. As a person seeking silence and calm in the hustle and bustle of New York City, this process has become a highly meditative art for Kacie, although she herself does not actually meditate. Art and cooking fuel Kacie’s need to get into the zone, express herself, and really find that internal quiet. “It’s small but has been meaningful. I realized that I learn by doing. I don’t have to have a name or diploma behind me to be able to have the work that I do make me happy and fulfill a creative need but then also evoke that emotion out of other people, too.”

Like all curious independents, Kacie is inspired by what she does not know. Her cravings to consistently learn new things are what drives her to create and begin new projects, however challenging they may be. For example, Kacie has made it a point to attempt to bake a pie each week, despite for the first few weeks only using a bottle of wine as a rolling pin. Smart! “I wanted it to be similar to the postcard routine…to have a routine based relationship with it where I can learn something new every week and go back and forth with techniques and change it up. A lot of this is just learning through cooking which is a really cool experience.” This Jill-of-all-trades, if you will, has traveled the world in search of new meanings and new experiences, and succeeded quite well if you ask us. Kacie has journeyed through Morocco, Boston, Istanbul and London, collecting fresh perspectives to bring back to her day-to-day life in Brooklyn. Her travels have influenced what she eats and the way she eats, due to the fact that abroad she only had raw ingredients and had to learn how to make her own food. “Traveling through food and making community through food has become important.” Her journeys abroad have also trained her to be more open-mined, more reflective on the way she goes about life. “It has made me more aware of the values and the culture I have. I try to evolve through experience how other people live and what they think is normal. Its great to keep growing and not feel stalled or stale in whom you are as a person.” How cool is it how much Kacie is able to gain from her experiences…giving us extreme wanderlust over here! She shares her insights on new foods and those weekly pies on her Tumblr page, Kacie and Community, K + C: her page dedicated to her loves of food and sustainability.

Combining her desires to build communities and love for design, Kacie wants to create a letter exchange in which people all around the world can participate in: a monthly prompt to take a picture of something or say thank you to someone and then submit it online, that way everyone in the exchange can see how differently people reacted to that month’s prompt. One parts a prompt, the other, a letter of encouragement to be more active and engaged with the people around you. This idea builds an online community within the letter exchange as well. “It’s something about receiving mail that creates this sense of home and safety and security and comfort in one’s self.” I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t WAIT until this is idea is put into action! People from all over the world sharing their various perspectives on the same idea. “On one hand, it’s about home and healing connection and another to write something is completely cathartic and a way to get in touch with yourself. It’s this idea of how letters and mail can connect people and transform their days, and then how can we build communities around that.” Kacie Kocher is still in the learning process of her own life, contributing to those processes each and every day. Kacie has a powerful lesson to teach us all: every single moment or activity or postcard or pie has the power to teach us something that we may not have realized before. So go out there and take a page from Kacie’s book: keep on experiencing.

Check out Kacie's projects! www.kacielynkocher.com and purchase her art on Etsy.

Connect with Kacie on social media: Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr. 

Written by Katie Girouard.