We all have a poi story--where we encountered poi and why it became a part of our lives. This is mine:

I first saw poi spinning when I went to my first Burning Man back in 2006.

My first major introduction was at a Wednesday night fire jam at Hookahdome. Sitting in the audience I was enraptured by all the artists spinning fire, regardless of tool or skill level. I remember one woman in particular spinning fire hoop that could do little more than keep it around her waist.

She was my favorite of the night.

Not because she was doing anything hard or because I was drawn to the tool, but because of the simple and unmistakable joy that she expressed as she spun the hoop. Regardless of what she could do with it, she was just happy to be spinning it. And it was utterly magnetic.

Several days later when the Man burned, I watched my first fire conclave. There are few moments that you can point to that really truly change your life, but this was one of them. I remember seeing people spinning massive sets of poi as they stood on stilts, martial artists dueling with flaming swords, a sea of dancing fire twirling around the man as tens of thousands of onlookers cheered.

The experience was pure magic. And it made me want to spin fire. It made me want to do something different, something that I thought was beautiful.

So when I came home I started asking around to see if anyone knew anything about fire spinning. I honestly didn’t even know the words to ask about--I think I recall asking my Burner friends if they knew anybody who could teach me about “that fire thing.”

At one point a friend responded to this question with the answer that charted the course of the next ten years of my life and counting: “What? You mean poi?”

I had no idea what any of the tools were called. I didn’t even know what fire spinners referred to their art as, but the word "poi" matched my internal perception of the exoticism of this hobby, so I immediately responded that yes I wanted to know more about poi!

As it turned out, there was a gentleman who went by the name Salty in our circle of friends who’d recently moved to Boulder from Seattle who did indeed know the basics of poi spinning. So I asked him for lessons and he happily agreed. He let me borrow a set of his poi and he set about trying to teach me how to do a basic reel turn.

And it was an absolute disaster.

For the life of me I couldn’t wrap my hands around the mechanics of performing this turn. I kept winding up with one hand wrapped behind me. Every time I tried to puzzle out the riddle of where the poi were meant to go during this turn, my brain would seize up and allow me to go no further.

I was a failure as a student and a failure as a poi spinner. That was my only lesson with Salty.

This would have been the end of my poi story were it not for my roommate. He went for holiday in Thailand over Christmas of 2006 and he returned with a set of the poi that they sell in the street markets there as a present for me.

I now had a set to use whenever I wanted to, so I began practicing by myself. And that’s when things changed for me.

I decoded reel turns and began working on simple weaves. I discovered a regular spin jam that happened just down the street from me in Denver at Confluence Park and showed up every Sunday both to marvel at the other fire spinners as well as try to learn new things.

And then I committed myself to crossing every threshold. To learning the multitude of tricks. To practicing as often as I could.

I’d never done anything creative with my body. I was never a dancer. I was always awkward and gangly. I’d never done anything beautiful like this. I’d never worked to turn my movements and my body into a work of art.

But I have a competitive streak and I ate up every new challenge, wanting to make myself the equal of the other spinners I saw at Confluence Park. The first time I discovered a combo of tricks that flowed together I felt as though I’d just unlocked some kind of secret and esoteric knowledge and been initiated into a secret brotherhood.

In the midst of this, I discovered YouTube. Nick Woolsey had just begun to post the tutorial videos that would eventually be compiled together into his Adventures in Poi DVD. Every new video gave me weeks worth of drills to work on in pursuit of new tricks. I loved the fact that he taught by giving people foundational skills to practice that would eventually lead them to the tricks they wanted to learn.

Later when I moved to the East Coast I started making my own videos. I wanted to track my progress and video blogging was a brand new format. I endeavored to make a video a week, showing off what I was learning. I never dreamed there was an audience for what I was doing.

I was wrong.

I spent my first few videos working through some variations on 1.5s and suddenly discovered the view counts on those videos had jumped from a dozen to nearly 100. What had happened?

As it turned out, another celebrity of the poi world had given me a shout out. A tech poi spinner by the name of Alien Jon had mentioned me in a thread on the Home of Poi forums about 1.5s and urged people to check out the work that I was doing.

And now I suddenly had an audience.

At first I loved it simply because I had people watching and liking the stuff that I was doing. I was also terrified as I frequently am when I am the center of attention. What if I got something wrong? What if my tricks weren’t good enough? What if my tricks were sloppy? What if I just wasn’t enough? What if Jon had set me up as something interesting and I just wasn’t that?

I still wrestle with these questions to this day.

But people kept watching. They kept commenting. And I kept making the videos. It was fun! I enjoyed the attention, and I enjoyed getting to connect with other like-minded people. 

Then something happened in Tech Blog #42 that changed the game for me.

It was definitely not my most viewed video. It was definitely not my best video. The month before I’d been traveling through Spain for the regional Burn called NoWhere and randomly ran into Alien Jon right after the European Juggling Convention.

There was a spin jam happening in the center of the old city in Barcelona and of course as luck would have it we both wound up there. He showed me many of the things that he’d seen other spinners doing at EJC--the biggest one being the use of diagonal planes. I marveled at the new tricks and couldn’t wait to get home and shoot video on them.

After the video went live I had a sudden realization: I was doing a service. This was still in an era when digital video cameras were comparatively rare and social media as we understand it now didn't exist.

So when I posted video of these tricks, I was giving my audience something they didn’t have easy access to. There were many poi innovators all over the world and my travels were allowing me to connect with them and learn their tricks. I would bring those tricks home and post them to the wider world and allow the transmission of those ideas much faster.

I could help people innovate and explore the poi world more rapidly. People who couldn’t travel due to work or other circumstances could still learn the latest and most innovative tricks by watching my YouTube channel. People learning poi in comparative isolation could learn that there was a wider community out there to learn from and connect by proxy to it.

I started posting my videos for me. I kept doing it for everyone else.

When I published that video, it clicked for me that my videos could be an act of service to a broader community. And it made me feel really good. It made me feel good to be doing something to help other people rather than just myself.

And over 1,000 videos later, it’s still the reason that I do it.

What is your poi story? How did you first discover poi? What drew you in to it? Why do you keep doing it to this day? I’d love to hear how and why poi entered your life!