August | 2013 | The Direction of Intention

Know Your Root

Posted on August 18, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

With Tom’s death yesterday I’ve been thinking about legacy. So many people called me today to make sure that I knew of his passing. I’ve had many wonderful and brief conversations with people who knew what Tom meant to me. All of them said, “His passing has left a hole….”

Tom taught me more about the theatre and teaching and story than any other person. He was my great mentor and later my friend. The irony is that I never saw him direct a play (I caught a rehearsal or two) or teach a class. I did, however, spend hours and hours listening to him tell stories. Tom was an amazing storyteller. I spent hours asking him questions. I carry forward his philosophy of working. All of my work in education is sourced in Tom. Every time I stand in front of an audience and tell a story I carry him forward.

He liked to tell this story: When he was a little boy the 90-year old Countess Valencia would visit the ranch each Sunday to have a chat with his grandmother. The Countess was a local girl who’d married a count. They lived on a vast ranch nearby and the count was long dead. Because the Countess was too old to get out of the car, Tom’s grandmother would sit with her in the backseat. They’d have tea and talk. One Sunday, the Countess opened the car door and called Tom over. She asked him to sit in her lap. Tom said she was a little bird and brittle and he was afraid that she would break but he crawled into her lap never-the-less. She said to him, “I want you always to remember what I am about to tell you. This might not seem important to you now but it will later when you are old enough to understand.” She paused and said, “Thomas, you are sitting in the lap of someone who sat in the lap of Abraham Lincoln. He smelled of lilac water and saddle soap.”

He had a lifelong fascination for Abraham Lincoln. He read every book. He even looked a bit like Mr. Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln is not so far in the past. Two long lives stand between him and me.

Tom impacted more people than any other person I’ve since met. If I ever have or will tell you a story, I’ll be introducing you to Tom.

Filed under: Love, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: legacy | Leave a comment »

Lift A Glass To Tom

Posted on August 17, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Tom died this morning. I heard the news while standing at lands end, literally. I was at the end of a pier looking across the water when my phone rang. He would of loved the moment, the dramatics of the scene. I sat on a bench and talked with Marcia, Tom’s wife, and we talked about the good angels that were with her through the long months of his dying. His amazing beautiful mind scrambled into dementia and then his body let go and throughout the right help came just when she needed it. Life is extraordinary that way.

Many years ago, late one night, Tom and I were drinking white wine, and he suddenly turned to me and said, “I need your help. I have an obligation to Isabel and I don’t know how to fulfill it.” Isabel was his great grandmother, a woman he never met. She died 30 years before Tom was born but she was present with him all of his adult life. His obligation was to tell the story of Johnny, the son that Isabel lost to typhoid fever. Tom found plastered into the walls of the old ranch house a trunk of Johnny’s possessions. Isabel packed the trunk after Johnny died. People believed that the fever could be passed through possessions so Isabel was instructed to burn all evidence that Johnny existed. She couldn’t do it. She wrote notes that she placed with artifacts in the trunk and knew that someday, one of her descendants would find the trunk and tell Johnny’s story. Tom found the trunk when he was 52 years old. And, although he’d shared the trunk and Johnny’s story with scores of school children, he never felt that he’d honored his obligation to Isabel.

For a few years, every couple of months, I flew to California and spent a week with Tom. He unpacked the trunk for me and told me the stories. He took me to the graveyards and introduced me to his ancestors. He told me a tale of lost boys and covered wagons and an epic search for spirit. He took me to the land were his people settled and toiled and prospered and squandered their inheritance. Tom was the rememberer of his clan and because there was no one to pass the stories to, he passed them to me. Over and over he asked, “What am I going to do with that trunk?” We wrote a play for him to perform but his mind started to go before we could produce it.

Sitting at lands end, I smiled at the irony. I am 52 years old and the rememberer of a clan’s story – a clan that is not mine by blood. I knew this day was coming. I stare out across the water and of this I am certain: I do not know what to do with the trunk, either. But the right help will come along when I need it. And I need it. In the meantime, I’m going to get a good bottle of white wine and toast Tom and all that he taught me about life and the power of story.

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

What Are You Saying?

Posted on August 16, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Here’s a funny collection of phrases from my box of funny collections. This set is about the word, “say.” Three little letters comprise a surprisingly powerful word. I imagine that we’ve each had these phrases used on us at least once. If you doubt the power of the word, “say,” sample the phrases below and remember the moment it was used with you:

If you don’t have anything to say, say nothing.

What do you have to say for yourself?

If you had a voice, what would you say?

Say what you think!

What do you want to say?

I wouldn’t say it if I were you.

Enough said! (past tense;-)

That goes without saying.

Say when!

Say It! Just say it!

What are you not saying?

Just for grins, look up the word “say” in the dictionary. To speak. To reveal. To express an opinion. To give voice. To influence. According to the data, most people would rather die than stand before a group of people and say what they think. How many times a day do you ask someone, “What are you thinking?” How often do you get a response other than, “Nothing.”

This year, each morning, I have asked myself a series of questions: What do you need to say? What are you not saying? What are your actions saying? What are you saying with your life? Do you need your life to say anything at all?

Filed under: Language, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

Follow Barney

Posted on August 15, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

876. 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 morning and I am sitting in the sun. I have coffee. There is a gentle breeze blowing off the water and rustling the leaves in the trees above me. The shadows are dancing. In the distance I hear a train, a mower, and some wind chimes. The birds are lively and playful. There is a pond to my left with a gentle fountain gurgling and adding to this morning’s symphony.

A few weeks ago I followed Barney up the hillside through the vineyard. Barney is jolly like Santa with roots, like Santa’s, that reach back to Odin. He is filled with laughter. On our way up the hill he plucked flowers, showed me roots, talked about soil and nutrients and cycles and seasons and energy and motion and force. He taught me about polarity and balance. Midway up the hill he stopped and said, “This is what people used to worship. It is life, concrete and tangible. Now we have this abstraction called spirituality.” The penny dropped for me. It’s sacred – all of it. That is no longer an ideal. It is tangible like soil and seeds.

Once in class, after leading a meditation, Alan and I talked with the class about the purpose of meditation. The purpose is not to take you away from reality but to bring you in to presence. Using meditation as an escape, to move away from the moment, is to protect yourself from presence.

Presence is word like paradigm: it is so overused, misused and abstracted that it has come to mean nothing. Be present. Be Quiet. Be. What does it mean to be present in an urban (urbane) world with clocks in every device, lists, lists, someplace else to be and something else to buy? How can presence be anything other than an abstraction when separate from the root? How can we understand presence when we do not experience it or ourselves as growing, changing, energy exchanging, vital, inhaling and exhaling, and full of life? It’s not an abstraction if you take your shoes off and stand in the dirt, feel the breezes, and listen.

Filed under: Awakening, Energy, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: presence | Leave a comment »

Invite The New

Posted on August 14, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

This morning I caught my first whiff of fall in the air. It was subtle yet distinct. There was a chill in the breeze, the scent of falling leaves, harvest and melancholy. People are running to the beaches or into the parks “for the last time” this season. What seemed boundless just a few weeks ago is now limited. I’m counting the number of times I hear, “I only have a few more days!” It is the limit that makes life precious.

For me the fall is the time of renewal. It is a time of new beginnings just as a new school year represents a new beginning. For the past week or so I’ve been meditating on what I want to invite into this new beginning. What energy am I bringing into the world and what energy do I wish to allow into my life? Last year at this time I was pulling things apart, melting down the known, stepping off the edge; I was inviting in chaos. I was opening the door to fire and hot transformation, to forge and anvil.

I am quieter now. I have no room for crazy-makers or backward looking. I have no room for my self-inflicted crazy-making. Once in a workshop a woman asked, “Why did it happen?” I responded, “The question ‘Why?’ doesn’t matter. It happened. What will you do going forward?” Sometimes to ask “Why?” keeps alive the pain-loop – it’s a great strategy for not taking the next step. The question “Why?” can be a swamp. Who knows why?

I have lived too many years of my life with my eyes in the rearview mirror asking “why?” The last year of my life makes no sense and I have spent an inordinate amount of time either looking for sense or trying to make sense of it. I can explain it fifteen different ways and many of the explanations are contradictory. None are true. All are true. In the end it will have the sense that I give it. It will have the energy that I assign to it. It will carry the sense that I invite into my life. Sense making is energy creation. It is a lens. So, I ask myself, “What is the energy that I want to bring into the world and what is the energy that I want to invite into my world?” I’ve had enough of fire. Now it is the time for breathing. Now is the time for inviting new breath and clean air.

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Let Go Of Zero

Posted on August 13, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Last week while I was in Colorado at my father’s 80th birthday celebration, knowing I would not have enough time to write, I reposted pieces from over a year ago. I selected them at random so it was an accident that many of the posts were about zero. Since rereading those reposts I’ve decided that I no longer believe in zero. Don’t get me wrong. I see the value of zero as a mathematical construct. I remember hearing in my middle school math class that the invention of zero revolutionized reckoning.

It was an invention, a representation of nothing. It was a starting point with no point. I don’t believe in zero because I’m hard pressed to imagine anything in this vast universe that is empty. This vast universe is alive. It’s energy. It’s vibration. There is nothing that is truly nothing. There is no such thing as less than one. It’s all one.

I saw a tweet from Kevin Honeycutt (I am a huge fan of Kevin. He is my brother from another mother) a day or so ago imploring teachers to see their students on day one of the new school year as the writers and artists and astronauts that they really are. Every single child is magic. Every single teacher is magic. It is our investment in zero that lets us see the amazing children and dedicated teachers as less than one (to think that they are in school to pass tests is to see them as less than one). They are the one. Each and every one of them is the one. There is no zero. There is no less than one…. So, join Kevin in seeing the one, the gifts as they walk through the door and return this fall to this thing we call school.

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Use All Of Your Colors

Posted on August 12, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

I’m tired today and getting ready for travel. Actually, the last time I truly got ready for travel was in December when I left my last apartment. To travel one requires a stable place to leave. I’ve been traveling all winter so in truth I’m not getting ready for travel I’m preparing to shift locations. I am my only constant and isn’t that a great lesson to learn!

Over these months I’ve unloaded most of my possessions. I have my paintings and my books. I have a few treasures from friends. I’ve eliminated most of my clothes. I am light in the world and it feels good. For me, times of great change have always come with layers of stuff (literal and metaphoric) dropping off. It has happened so many times now that I recognize it like an old threshold guardian. “Ah,” I say, “time again to let go.”

In these times I am always reminded of what’s important and most real. I spent the day with friends. I talked to people I love. There is nothing better. I’ve been thinking about the last chapter of the book Siddhartha: an old man in a shack by a river. Metaphors upon metaphors upon metaphors – nothing is permanent. What matters is this moment and this is no longer and abstraction to me. It is not a cliché. Walk out of your door for a year and after a few months you will know what it is the live in the moment and recognize that all you have is a moment. Even if life looks like the same thing day after day it is not but it takes old eyes to see the impermanence in everything.

I have had the gorgeous opportunity this past year to have no patterns. Life today bears no resemblance to life yesterday or tomorrow or last year or next week. I work. I draw cartoons. I listen. I consider where to stay tonight. I eat when I am hungry. There is no day-to-day rhythm to even the most basic of my needs. I’ve never been happier. I’ve never felt so much terror, laughter, grief, joy…, all the colors of life are on my palette and I have a big brush and nothing but canvas in front of me.

Filed under: Metaphor, Power, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

Become Life

Posted on August 11, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

I learned a lesson again in tai chi today: stop trying to force action or push forms into being. Instead, drop into center and listen. It is in the deep listening that the path will become clear. It is in the deep listening that the clarity of action, the simplicity of impulse will be apparent.

In class we are practicing push hands, a partner exercise in which the object is to knock your partner off center. It is deceptive because the way to successfully knock your partner off center is to NOT push. It is to listen. It is to feel when they are moving off center and simply help them go in the direction that they are already moving. As Saul says, they give you their center so you merely take it. The moment you push, the moment you try to force an outcome, is the moment you will offer your center (abandon your center) and be helped off balance.

At only 2 years into my practice, I am a novice. The more experienced students say that if I continue I will in 7 – 10 years have developed a sufficient capacity to listen. I delight in this practice that acknowledges that there is no end. There is no path to expertise. There is a greater and greater capacity to move the chi and root the energy. I believe my life is changing because of this practice and the reorientation it requires.

In the past several months I have repeatedly learned that life opens for me when I stop trying to force outcomes. Life flows when I stop pushing and pulling and fretting and worrying. When I listen, feel and respond to what’s there, when I release all impulse to control, I participate. I become a “part of…” instead of a resistor or governor. Instead of blocking the movement I enter the relationship. Instead of forcing life I become life force.

There is a vast difference between the consciousness of a controller and the consciousness of a participant. A controller withholds and resists. A controller judges him or her self and, therefore, the world (good enough and not good enough are judgments and epicenters of control). A controller separates. A participant joins. A participant becomes. Life is always found in the direction participation.

Filed under: Energy, Power, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Pass It On

Posted on August 10, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

871. 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 locus of my family has shifted from my generation to my nieces and nephews. They are now having children of their own and I delight in watching them assume the role of parents. They are the generation of becoming and are hungry to learn the family narrative. My brothers, sister and I are the story-bridge generation. We are now grandparents and grand uncles. We are the channel between the elders, my parents, and the youth.

As the channel I am more acutely aware that not all stories are created equal. There are the day-to-day stories. These pass through. Then there are stories that belong in the cabinet of curiosity. These are life event stories like the day my sister brought her future husband home to meet the family. We tortured poor J.T. on that first meeting and he laughs heartily at the retelling. The story is legend in my clan. The subject for debate is whether or not my dad carried a shotgun on that first meeting (he doesn’t own a gun and never has but he’s also remarkably resourceful when an opportunity for mischief presents itself)? I know the answer but won’t tell (I was there and wore a Little-Bo-Peep costume). I like the debate and the gales of laughter that it brings my sister’s children.

And then there are the campfire stories, the narratives that define us. These are foundational identity stories. Every family has them though in our modern era it is common for a family to not recognize them. These are the root stories and from these stories the family vine grows. The answers to the three great questions (who am I, where do I belong, what is mine to do) are blossoms of these tales. No one truly knows who he or she is separate from his or her foundation narrative. Vines cannot grow without a root. People cannot grow without a meaningful connection to their root story.

Stories form layers of personal and family identity. Stories serve as both root and nutrient. The next time my clan gathers in such numbers I will be the elder, my nieces and nephews will be the channel to their children who will have become parents. And the cycle continues. We recreate ourselves in the telling. We nurture the soil in the sharing. We make visible the web of our connection. Stories are so much more than recounting the past. Stories are how we re-member ourselves, affirm our belonging, and reach from the past through this day into the distant future.

Filed under: Identity, Story, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

See Your Reflection

Posted on August 9, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

My desk is littered with pencils and pens. They are escapees from the coffee mugs scattered across my desk where the pencils usually stand like toy soldiers jammed in a kiddie pool. I have multiple lists going. They are scrawled on standard notebook paper and they provide a crisscrossed tablecloth of sorts. My lists are not contained in the lines. They spill out in every direction. I tend to write at any angle and I bend the words, as the moment requires. I have 3 notebooks: a journal, a work journal and a cartoon idea book. All three are open and stacked in no particular order. They are well worn and loved and filled with scribbles and ideas. No one could make sense of them so I feel that my state secrets are safe. No code breaker would willingly take on my handwriting.

I have a sun of blown glass. Tamara made it for me because she knows that I suffer from the absence of light in the Seattle winter. Her gift of the sun has brought to me great light when I most needed it. Next to the sun is a clay vase that Tom made for me many years ago. I’ve cherished it these many years because it was his very first clay project and he wanted me to have it. The vase is wabi sabi, it is a leaning tower; in it I keep incense from Bali and from special people. Both the sun and vase are sacred to me.

Two empty Altoids tins, a sandwich bag with cords to charge my phone, a binder clip, a pocket flashlight, a pencil sharpener, little post it notes and a spattering of business cards for accent. Overseeing it all is a sculpture I made of wood, wire, clamps and paper: a crow cawing at the world. Next to the crow is a set of Unblockers. They are a gift from David and are “writer’s inspiration dice.” Each die has a word from Hamlet on each face. There are five dice and I throw them every once in a while for kicks. Right now they say, “Mercy sword, soldiers, weakness. Farewell.” David feeds my creative soul and sends me music treats and periodic whimsy to stoke the fire. Once, he and I did a collaborative painting on several panels spread across my kitchen floor. I have saved it all these years. Someday I will have a proper space to hang our painting (or I will surprise him with it!).

My desk is a snapshot of my life. Multiple projects in motion, chaos rolling on top of attempted order, talismans from friends and cherished loved ones. It is warm and whimsical and sometimes maddening so I restore order only to achieve swirling motion and chaos once again. The pencils and pens look like leisurely sunbathers scattered here and there and I will give them a reprieve for another day. Besides, like me, they are more productive when rested. Order looms on the horizon and I will invite it in soon but not too soon. Premature order will limit my choices.

Filed under: Creativity, Random, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

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