A Simple Poem Explained Everything

Dearest Sovereigns:

I read the poem, “Instructions for Visiting Earth” by James McCrae for the first time on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, at my kitchen table, with no warning that it was about to unravel me.

By the third line I was crying. Not the polite kind of crying you can blink away and keep reading through. The kind that comes from somewhere older than the moment. Deep sobs rose from my chest already fully formed, as if they had been waiting behind a locked door for years and I finally opened the door.

It took me several minutes to understand what happened. I wasn’t crying because the poem was sad. I was crying because it was true, and no one had ever said the truth to me quite that plainly before. Here it was, this poem, describing exactly why I am here, in this body, at this time in history, carrying both my humanness and my spirituality at the same time. Believing they were separate and being told they are both necessary to a well-lived life.

That’s what broke me open.

The Instructions I Never Received

McCrae’s poem reads like a set of onboarding notes handed to a soul about to drop into a body. I imagine a gentle presence waiting for me, just before I leaped into this life. The Instructions were given to remind me not to panic, because I was chosen for this. To remember that the body is only the vessel, not the passenger. My heartbreaks and losses are real and should be experienced fully, while knowing that none of them touch who I am.

I teach women that they have sacred powers and that sovereignty is not something you earn, it is something you remember. I have walked labyrinths in France and came out the other side having given away grief I carried for decades. I have sat in meditation and contemplation every morning since 2017, listening to the quiet voice underneath my noisy one. And still, somehow, this poem said the thing I have been circling for years in language so simple it stopped me cold.

We forget. That’s the design, not a flaw in the system. The design itself.

We arrive, we forget, and the whole of a human life becomes the slow work of remembering.

That’s why I couldn’t stop crying. Because I recognized the forgetting. I have lived entire seasons of my life fully convinced that the losses were my identity, that fear defined my options, and that I was only what I experienced.

I felt my soul open and sign a song of liberation and recognition. It was a moment I will always remember, because the poem pointed to my re-membering.

The Part That Undid Me Completely

There’s a line in the poem about the heart. About keeping it locked away in something like a glass cage, protected from wear and tear, and never actually living from it.

I know that cage. I built one myself, brick by careful brick, out of every disappointment I decided I couldn’t survive twice. I know what it costs to keep something soft locked away where nothing can reach it.

It costs you the very thing you were trying to protect.

Divine Love does not ask you to armor yourself against the world in order to be safe.

Love is what remains untouched no matter what the world does to you.

That is not a metaphor. It is the single most important instruction any of us were given before we got here, and then we forgot it.

Why This Matters Right Now

We are living through a moment that makes the glass cage feel reasonable. The world is loud and combustible and it is asking each of us to decide, over and over, whether we will lead from fear or from the constant flow of Love that lies underneath it.

The poem doesn’t pretend the losses won’t come. It says plainly that you will fall in love and you will lose people you cannot imagine living without, and that none of it is permanent, and that this impermanence is not a cruelty. It is the nature of a place you are only visiting.

The point is not to become numb to the losses. Instead, be brave enough to love anyway, fully, without the glass cage, because the soul underneath the losses was never actually in danger.

What I’m Taking From This

The original article introducing the poem to the world is here: Instructions Before Visiting Earth. Since it’s publication on December 26, 2025, it has been shared on Substack 408 times, has gone viral on social media, and has been used in multiple video simulations.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, James McCrae is an artistic genius.

I created an info-graphic of the poem because I wanted to sit with each instruction slowly, the way you’d read a letter from someone who loved you enough to warn you what was coming and comfort you about it in the same breath.

I’m sharing it because this poem will find the person who needs it exactly the way it found me.

You are not broken for forgetting. You are not behind for grieving. You are not failing at this life because it has asked more of you than you expected to give.

You are a Sovereign Self, wearing a body, walking a path you agreed to before you got here, and you are going to make it out with battle scars and good stories to tell, and none of the wear and tear was ever going to touch who you actually are.

Enjoy the adventure. You are loved. You always were.

To your remembering,

Kathryn

“Instructions for Visiting Earth” is a poem by James McCrae. Please follow him and support his work.

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