Stand In The Future

Posted on October 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

581. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

What is yours to do in this life? I ask this question a lot in my work. It is the cousin question to, “What do you bring to life?” Most people answer with a version of, “I want to help people.” Somehow, they want their work in this world to be in service to others. They want it to matter. They want to matter. What they bring is found in the specifics; they open hearts with music, they serve to bring comfort as a nurse, they inspire curiosity as a teacher. They want to lead, to make better, easier, fuller; they want their work to mean something to someone. Alan has an exercise that helps identify what is yours to do; he calls it the future self.

Many people at first roll their eyes when I suggest this exercise but then are surprised at how much they learn: take a moment, close your eyes and stand in your future. Stand in the place where you are most fulfilled. What’s there? What does it feel like and look like? What are you doing in the future that is absent here? It is important to note that, not once, has anyone ever entered their future self and reported on their stuff; no one notices what they own or what is in their garage in the future; their report is always about what they are doing. Their report is often about how they see things differently; how they see, how they forgive, how they own their lives. They report on how they have actively and specifically created the life that they desire. And, often the life they desire is closer than they think.

When you go looking for your future self, take a moment to look into their eyes. Take note of the difference that you see there. Take a moment to ask this future version of yourself how they got there, what was the path to their fulfillment; that’s your path. And then, switch places with them; become your future self and stop pretending that your fulfillment is somewhere out there in the distant future. Step into it now. Own it now. Look at yourself through the eyes of your future self; what do you see? Is every action, big and small, in service to “what is yours to do in this life?” Why not?

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Sneak A Peak

Posted on October 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

580. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

The sun is rising much later now than before I went on my travels. I was gone for two weeks and was shocked when I got up to take my walk this morning and it was still dark. It happens every year. There is always a day when I wake up and am surprised that the sun is rising two hours later than a few short months ago. It is magic and completely predictable and still I am surprised. If I watched the news each night I’d know the exact minute the sun was scheduled to rise the next morning. And, isn’t that a shame: we’ve somehow in our language reduced the sunrise to a schedule – as if we made the schedule. I imagine a celestial stationmaster working out the timetable, “Yep, I think 7:02 today, 7:13 tomorrow. We must have the illusion that we make the trains run on time.

I watched as the east began to glow, the clouds burst into orange fire, the dark sky dissolved into a turquoise blue and then put on my coat and walked to the end of the block. I am fortunate to be so close to the water’s edge. I was not prepared to see the moon so high in the sky. A harvest moon, full and vibrant was still hanging high in the sky.

This was not defiance. It was more of a greeting, a rendezvous. The sun peaked over the ridge and must have been just as surprised as I to see the moon, like a young lover waiting at the school lockers. We stood there, the sun, the moon, and I for several moments until I realized that I was a third wheel and should probably move on and let them have this rare and precious time together. They were both looking at me and I was slow to catch the hint. I turned and smiled and promised not to look back. I can only imagine that they reached across the sky, each touching the cheek of the other. I did sneak a peak and can report with confidence that all is right in the world.

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Commune

Posted on October 9, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

579. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.</em

Harry and I talked into the night about communion. Most cultures have their unique version of the communion meal. For the Makah, the whale is their god. To hunt and consume the whale is to take the body and blood of the god into their body. In return, they perform rituals to resurrect the god. For the Mayan, it is the corn that gives life; corn is a god. The people take it into their bodies and become god like; their commitment is to create the conditions for the gods return. They tend to the god. The god feeds them. It is a cycle of life. There is no end, no outcome. There is no rapture. There is a relationship. “This is my body. Take it and eat. This is my blood. Take it and drink.” The form is different; the ritual is the same.

Harry pointed out that regardless of the form the purpose is to commune – thus a communion meal. The people commune individually and collectively with their godhood. They take it in; they become the god. They, in return, perform the rituals and ceremonies; they live in such a way as to give rebirth to the godhead. It is a cycle of renewal. It is a participation sport: it is personal, intimate, an infinite game.

At its most potent, it is a way of living. It is not something confined to a single day of the week or an observance performed once in a while. It is not something you can leave behind when you leave the church. The whale chooses you because you are worthy, because you live each day an existence worthy of being chosen to consume the body, take in the god, and have proven yourself capable of performing the rites necessary to give rebirth to the god that feeds you. It is a mutual responsibility: I will feed you if you will attend to my re-creation.

And, at the heart of this relationship, is this thing we call art. The rituals, the dances, the music, the images are (were) meant to facilitate the communion; the coming together of human and muse to reaffirm the community's identity, to transform and transcend the everyday. Wear the mask and you become the god. Pete told me that he picked up a brush for the first time and froze; to make a mark carried an enormous responsibility. He put the brush back in the can and thought, “I am not yet ready for all that this will unleash and I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything.”

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Dance A Circle

Posted on October 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

578. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

We drove up Mount Lemmon to have a picnic and to scatter Margaret’s ashes. She loved the mountains of Tucson and there is no better leaping place for Margaret’s soul than the top of Mount Lemmon. We found a perfect spot, a view for miles, a place of utter beauty and inspiration. She would have clapped her hands together and said, “Perfect!”

Mary Ann made our picnic from the leftovers of Margaret’s celebration of life party the night before and we feasted and laughed. We told more stories. We waited for the right moment. Lora and her brother climbed down the rock face and discovered the place where they wanted to establish Margaret’s alter; it was an almost perfect circle of soil nested in this world of rock; it held a single hardy, sturdy tree. Her grandchildren built a simple altar: wild flowers, stones, crystals, roses, and a photograph of Margaret in her prime. We spoke words and read poems. And then, we took turns spreading some of her ashes. It was too solemn and Dante, the youngest of the grandchildren, somehow knew…. She took the sack of ashes and descended further down the rock face. We stood above and watched as she very slowly, at first very carefully, began to release Margaret with the wind. Dante’s gestures were large and soon took over; I do not think she noticed when her gesture became a dance of giving Margaret back: Dante danced Margaret. Margaret danced Dante. The circle of life peaked from behind the curtain for those few gorgeous moments. Time stood still.

Dante finish her dance. The curtain fell closed again. Ordinary time returned. We climbed back to our picnic spot with the simple inner quiet and satisfaction of completion. Margaret was free. Dante had showed us the circle. Mary Ann asked, “Does anyone want a brownie?” Life, once again, began to flow toward the ocean and with chocolate and friends and family we left the mountain transformed.

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Set Up Your World

Posted on October 7, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

577. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Megan-the-Brilliant said something to me that stopped me in my tracks, took my breath away, opened my eyes and made my wee heart flutter. She said, “Set up your world to feed you and you will feed the world.” It is such a simple thing. She was dope slapping me for attempting to set up my world to feed everyone but me – an old pattern. As Patti once wrote, put your oxygen mask on first. You are no good to anyone if you pass out or otherwise deplete yourself.

As I said, I used to be a master of depletion, serving the needs of others at great cost to myself. During those years I often wondered why I consistently gave the farm away, why I was always so tired, why I crashed and crashed again and had more and more trouble recuperating. Survival, I have learned, is not the same as thriving. I am much more capable of helping others find their creative potency when I first attend to my own. In fact, when I attend to my own I don’t have to try and help others; it just happens.

I’ve decided that there is no place in this world for martyrs or saviors. We need healthy vibrant creative dynamic souls who celebrate life and each other on a daily basis. We do not need more sacrifices. I know this runs counter to the canon but I now believe that life is sacred – all life – and that must include my own life. How would I act each day if I understood that I was sacred, too?

People run into burning buildings to save others, not out of some notion of sacrifice but because in such extreme circumstances we transcend our notion of separation. The otherness vanishes; the life in the burning building is my life. All life is my life. Joe used to say that, “the universe tends toward wholeness,” and this morning I would amend that statement to read, “the universe is wholeness,” and we can see it when we put down our martyr stories and get our savior complexes out of the way.

Filed under: Awakening, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Win Again

Posted on October 6, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

576. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“It’s all good,” is a statement that you might find printed on a shirt and it also serves as shorthand for a way of seeing; some days everything I hear seems like a philosophical paradigm. Harry had me howling with laughter when he told me that, each morning when he opens his eyes to a new day, he thinks, “I win again!” The mere fact that he gets another day of life makes him a winner. Of course, I laughed because he speculated what it must feel like to open your eyes each day and think, “I win again,” when you believe that you are a “born loser.” The best you can do is neutral. It’s all in the expectation.

“Why does this always happen to me?” is a statement of philosophy I often hear. On planes I encounter statements like, “There’s never enough bag space,” and, “I hope this thing gets off the ground.” Lately, my personal favorite statement of philosophy is, “This is the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had.” Every single cup is the best. I just heard, “Buckle up, cowboy. It’s going to be a rough ride!” Now how’s that for a great statement!

I was recently allowed to work with a group of young teachers-in-training (side note: who in their right mind allowed me near a group of teachers in training?); they are constantly reinforced in the notion that they must “manage the classroom.” This is shorthand for the philosophy that “kids need to be controlled” which is itself shorthand for the philosophy that “kids are incapable of controlling themselves.” I asked the group if they liked being controlled when they were kids and you will not be surprised to learn that they did not like being controlled. What is the sense, I asked them, of learning how to control others if what they want as teachers is to empower others? Isn’t that what we want? To develop the most empowered, dynamic, pursuers of life possible? Powerful people are powerful because they are capable of controlling the only thing that they can control: themselves. Powerful people are not powerful because they are attempting to control others (that is by definition not power, that is control). Here’s a great ancient philosophy for teachers: “Teach them to fish,” or, said another way, “Curiosity may have killed the cat but it set the child free.” It is all in the expectation and the expectation reveals itself in the stuff we print on shirts.

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Take Your Seat

Posted on October 5, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

575. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Avery was upset. He plays clarinet in the middle school band. There is a hierarchy of placement when you play in a band: musicians occupy chairs according to a ranking, so, for instance, the first violin occupies the first chair and all other violinists compete to get to the first chair. Avery moved from fourth chair to the third; the person he displaced challenged him in an attempt to regain the third chair. It is a competition system – or, in the words of James Carse, a finite game. In a finite game someone must win and someone must lose. Finite games are worse than useless for an artist. Artistry is about mastery, not about winning.

Competition can support mastery and it takes an excellent teacher to facilitate this process. Avery was upset because he didn’t know why he was moved forward. After the challenge, when he was moved again to the fourth seat, he had no idea why. There was a challenge, they competed, someone won and someone lost. The band director offered no feedback. It seemed arbitrary and Avery was left wondering what he could “do” to “win” the next challenge. His focus was not on being a better player. His energy was not dedicated to learning his instrument or to making music with others. His band teacher was reinforcing separation through competition and not artistic collaboration through mastery. The arts are about joining and communal experience; artistic fulfillment cannot be reached through separation.

I shared with Avery a piece of advice that a great theatre teacher once shared with me. He told me that I had to master my craft so that I could be “director-proof.” What he meant by that was that there were many directors and teachers in the world who would work to pit me against my fellows as a way of getting a result. I might attain the result but it would cost me my artistry because I would now be focused on an outcome and not on a relationship. My teacher knew that to keep an artistic fire burning the artist must know within him or herself whether their work was good or not; any external measure was useless.

Great actors audition every day and only seldom get cast. Their artistry dies if they are playing a finite game, if they are playing to win or afraid of losing. Mastery is an infinite game that is meant to make the artist a better and better artist. A great community of artists knows how to push and support each other in mastery; there is no such thing as losing if your intention is to become better and better at playing.

Filed under: Art, Education, Truly Powerful People | 3 Comments »

What’s At The End Of The Tube?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

574. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Louise was my seatmate on the flight from Lincoln to Denver. She was on her way to meet friends in Santa Fe and I was making the trek back home from working with my beloved Hastings friends. The plane was still at the gate when she looked at her watch and said, “We’ve only been talking for two minutes and we’re already into the deep stuff.” We laughed because we both knew our conversation would go deeper and deeper throughout our flight.

She was a nurse. During the first half of her career she worked at burn units and trauma centers. She told me it was time to move on when she began to feel more like a mechanic than a nurse. “One day,” she said, “I realized that I was adjusting heart monitors and manipulating multiple gadgets with nine tubes that just happened to have a human attached. It was all about assessment and paperwork.” She was quiet for a moment and then added, “Of course it was all about monitoring the person but over time our focus became more and more about the machines. I missed the eye contact, the human touch.”

I told her that teachers are experiencing the same thing. We have gone so assessment crazy and are so test driven that we’ve lost the center; the purpose is no longer to support the health, wellbeing and growth of our children: we routinely toss out the health and wellbeing part for a higher score. And, as hard as they try, our teachers are more and more required to monitor the machine which means they have less and less capacity to actually teach. It’s worth noting that teaching and learning are fundamentally relational. Assessment is mechanical. Our children are like the patient with hundreds of tubes attached; we’ve lost the essential human contact in our mania for monitoring and will be in an educational death spiral until we return to the human center.

The theme is so common that I can only believe that this assessment frenzy is an expression of culture. What is it that drives us to toss away a vital beating heart so we can put the communal body on life support? Marketers know my buying patterns. Google assesses and optimizes my searches, my preferences are logged, tracked and utilized; we are the most polled populace that has ever walked the earth. We know so much about ourselves and at the same time we know almost nothing. Do you know your neighbors? Is the world as divided and dangerous as the news would have us believe (according to the numbers, it is safer. Do you feel it?)? We are standing in a blizzard of information and as in all blizzards we’ve lost sight of what’s immediately in front of us.

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Give Thanks To The Bunny

Posted on October 3, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

573. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Yesterday we went to Elsa’s Adult Care foster home to collect Margaret’s belongings. It was a simple box with several framed photographs, her wedding announcement, a large yellowing photo album made long ago by her daughter-in-law, and an oversized pink stuffed bunny.

When Margaret was early in her disease she volunteered at a hospital gift shop. One day she fell in love with a giant pink stuffed bunny and bought it for herself. She brought it home and for the rest of her life, as the Alzheimer’s slowly took more and more of her, she slept soundly wrapped in the embrace of the very large kindly bunny.

A few years ago, Lora did a photo essay of her mom and one of my favorite photos from the shoot was Margaret tucked into bed, ready for her nap. She is staring into the camera, secure in the embrace was her loving pink bedfellow.

Life is odd. As Lora clutched her mother’s favorite sweater and cried with Elsa, I could not help but stare at that pink stuffed bunny; I was overwhelmed with a deep sense of gratitude for it. It was as if the bunny was the guardian angel that supported Margaret through this final phase of her life. Elsa was certainly the living presence, the loving caregiver. But the bunny heard Margaret’s secrets. The bunny was with her deep into the night. She held onto that bunny like she held onto her life. She loved that bunny into tatters.

I’m certain my personification of this stuffed toy reveals more about me than it does Margaret or the bunny. I was surprised at my affection for the rabbit wedged in the box between photos in frames. I was even more surprised that it was not grief or loss evoked by the pink velveteen rabbit peaking from the box but a profound sense of appreciation that one day, many years ago, Margaret looked at the shelf and said, ‘Oh! I love that bunny.” And this amazing 75 year-old warrior-woman bought herself a stuffed animal that stood almost as tall as she did, and at the end of her day as a hospital volunteer, she carried it home. And, at the end of the day, it was a large pink stuffed bunny that carried Margaret home.

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Help Marisol

Posted on October 2, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

572. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

We just cleared through security at the airport and were putting on our shoes, and belts, and rings; we were zipping computers back in their cases. Several feet away stood a small woman. Later, I would learn that her name was Marisol. She was from the Virgin Islands. She was lost. She was punching the button for an elevator that would not come. She looked straight at me, smiled and said in her broken English, “Help me.”

I stood with her for several minutes at the elevator-that-would-never-come and when we finally gave up, I took her bag and we approached the escalator. Marisol approached the escalator as I might approach a pond of crocodiles. She closed her eyes and stepped boldly, leaving one foot firmly planted on the landing while the other foot landed squarely on the line soon to separate into two different treads. She would have fallen, she expected to fall, but I clutched her as she clutched me and we rode the demon stairs to the bottom and leapt to safety. In addition to a train, we had two more escalators to navigate, each as fearful for her as the first, each a near accident, the result of a fearless closed-eye stepping, clutching and rescue, a ride on modern terror, and a leap to safety.

When we at last arrived at her gate, we left her in the good hands of the gate attendants (how’s that for a metaphor) and walked on to find our flight. As we left Marisol I was struck by her ease – even in the midst of being lost, she easily reached out for help, easily extended to me her trust, easily stepped into something that terrified her, again and again, easily knew that she would arrive where she needed to go. She closed her eyes and stepped.

During our adventure I learned that she was on vacation. This tiny adventurous soul came to Seattle because it was a place that she’d always wanted to see. She made no plan and followed the adventure of the day – I can only imagine she looked at strangers all along the way and said, “Help me.” And, like me, they helped. She was so generous in her request that I would have missed my flight to get her on time to hers. I am certain she altered the course of the day for every stranger that she met.

Marisol expects the world to be generous and so it is. She expects people to be caring, careful, and supportive – and so they are. Marisol sees a world that begs her to come for a visit. And so she does. Easily.

Filed under: Possibility, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

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