August | 2014 | The Direction of Intention

Feel The Ripple

Posted on August 12, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

Baby Cat settles in

“The fabric of creation ripples when people love each other,” the leader prayed. I opened my ipad to capture the phrase. I liked the image of creation as a dynamic living fabric, a weave responsive to the heart.

Yesterday, Jim said with gratitude and love in his eyes, “Life can change in an instant.” His wife was in a brutal head-on collision a few days ago. She survived and will eventually recover. “The crash was 900 feet from our driveway,” he said, adding, “You never know.”

You never know.

Tripper Dog-Dog-Dog jumped onto the bed. He brought his bone and settled at our feet. We were having the first cup of coffee of the day and talking about things to come. Baby Cat leaped up to the window sill and settled in.

Creation ripples.

Go here for my latest book, The Seer

Or, go here for fine art prints of my paintings

Eve, by David Robinson

Filed under: Gratitude, Love, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: Gratitude, heart, life, love | Leave a comment »

Ask Them To Be Kind

Posted on August 11, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

A black cloud moving in.

While driving across South Dakota, the darkest cloud I’ve ever seen rolled across the sky and consumed the light. The cloud was dense and black. It was heavy, its belly hung over the car and seemed to press us to the earth. It seemed more than cloud. It was ominous, a presence.

When we started the day we’d intended to drive through the Badlands but a prodigious rain had slowed our progress. We saw the rains marching toward us across the open land. It was both beautiful and daunting and hit us with a wave of authority. This storm meant business. We crawled through Wyoming with other back road drivers, watching the barely visible white lines to keep on the road. Motorcyclists pulled off the road and stood next to their bikes; there was no shelter to be found.

Although we lost a few hours to the storm we thought we might still make it through the Badlands before nightfall. And then the black cloud appeared and ate the last light of the day. Once many years ago I did a night dive through the wreck of a sunken ship. In the dark of night, deep in the ocean, while swimming through the bowels of the ship, it’s decks between me and the surface, I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. This blackest of clouds enveloped us like the ocean at night and I felt that same sense of pressing suffocation.

The gods of nature are not to be ignored. Once, I sat with a Balinese man who told me that, according to their belief, it was with the dark forces of nature that people need alliance. There is no hell in their paradigm so dark and evil are not bedfellows. There are forces: creation and destruction in an eternal cycle of rejuvenation. Their rituals are about making peace with the black clouds, the gods of lightning and rain. “The forces of light are already with us,” he said. “We ask the dark forces to be kind.”

Looking through the windshield at the ominous pressing cloud I whispered, “Be kind.” It was. It let us go. We heeded the warnings and left the Badlands for another day. Later that night, sipping wine from plastic hotel cups, safe in our room, we sighed and laughed at how utterly small we felt on the open plain amidst the power of the storms. With that smallness came the gift of alertness. We were fully awake, alive with moment, stripped of the illusion that humans have dominion over anything. We savored our moment, temporary, passing, and perfect.

Go here for my latest book, The Seer.

Or here for all digital downloads of The Seer.

And, here you will find fine art prints of my paintings

Canopy by David Robinson

Filed under: Power, Random, Story | Tagged: black cloud, gods, nature, power | 1 Comment »

Revisit And Revise

Posted on August 9, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

Pidgeon Pier (Alan and David on the Sound) by David Robinson

I used this painting as the cover image for The Ground Truth. I call this painting Pigeon Pier.

With the success of my book, The Seer, I’ve been revisiting some previous manuscripts and ebooks. I have a lot of them, mostly unpublished and unseen. One of my favorites, and one that I am considering revising and releasing, is called the Ground Truth. The ground truth is a military term and denotes the difference between the truth as seen by the generals in the war room (an abstraction) and those actually doing the fighting on the ground (actuality). I gave the book the subtitle: Six Dynamic Relationships That Will Change Your Life. Marketing claims are usually brazen. The book is really about how to orient to personal truth.

As I’ve been revisiting the book, I’ve also been revisiting several of the concepts in it. One concept that has been much on my mind lately is the Hero and the Anti Hero. Here’s an excerpt from The Ground Truth defining the concept:

In a small notebook with a red cover I found a drawing. The image is horizontal on the page. On the far left I wrote the word “Hero” and scribbled a circle around it. On the far right I wrote, “Anti-Hero” and also scribbled a circle around it. The circle with the Hero and the other with the Anti-Hero are connected with a line. The drawing looks like a cartoon barbell. I must have been explaining this to someone; I can tell by how emphatically I scribbled the circles.

The Hero and The Anti Hero was a revelation that Harald shared with me a few years ago. Harald’s first language is German so he used the term Anti-Hero instead of villain or devil or “big dog yapping in my brain.” I like Anti-Hero because it is actually more appropriate than any term I might have used.

He told me that he’d spent much of his life trying to rid himself of his inner Anti-Hero. It had consumed much of his life, this powerful inner voice of self-criticism and judgment. It plagued him and the more he resisted the Anti-Hero the stronger it became. One day, exhausted by his inner turmoil he had an epiphany. He realized that the way to rid himself of this Anti-Hero was to stop expecting to be a Hero. In fact, his expectation of being a savior, being perfect, being everything to everybody was the very thing that fueled the Anti-Hero. Letting go of the Hero dissipated the power of the Anti-Hero and what was left was…human. Beautiful, flawed, funny and messy, Harald was a human no longer at war with himself.

Internal warfare causes split intentions, split intentions create internal warfare. It’s a feedback loop. As Harald discovered, trying to be the Hero in the eyes of everyone else split him into two pieces: the unreal expectation (Hero) and an ever-vigilant judge (Anti-Hero). Harald was attempting to control what he could not control: the expectations and responses of other people. His happiness was contingent upon the responses of others so he was constantly measuring his worth against others responses: The actor (Hero) and the measurer (Anti-Hero). The internal warfare was inevitable.

In the next few days I’ll write more on The Hero and the Anti Hero, and what a few years and new eyes have brought.

Go here for my latest book

Go here for fine art prints of my paintings

Filed under: Power, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: Hero, intention, personal truth, power, truth | Leave a comment »

Welcome The Bump

Posted on August 8, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

With Kerri on the top of a mountain in Colorado.

Just beyond Vail, Colorado there is a tiny two street town called Minturn. It began as a mining town when people were rushing for gold but these days it survives as a place for tourists. It is radically different than its founding fathers intended. We stayed there for a few days of rest and recuperation after our two-week double loop through Middle America.

The double loop through America was nowhere in the plan a month ago. Things just seemed to pop up. A death. Kerri’s daughter stumbled into a new job that necessitated an immediate move. Plans changed. Our intentions for the month went out the window. All of the artistry went on hold. We quickly packed the car and hit the road.

Just as plans change it is also true that change is rarely planned. I’ve yet to meet a person who doesn’t resist change (despite their rhetoric). Change requires a step into the unknown and that’s precisely the point: real change comes when we simply don’t know. Most of us like to know where we are going before we step. Change finds its way through the cracks that happen when patterns are disrupted, when things just seem to pop up, when we have no idea what the next step is. Change happens when we are making it up as we go. Change is a creative act, a tap dance on the event horizon.

Last week we drove to Colorado from Wisconsin through Iowa and Nebraska to attend my grandfather’s funeral. After the service we drove to Columbia, Missouri, crossing the full expanse of Kansas, to deliver some treasures from Beaky (Kerri’s mom) to Wendy (Kerri’s niece). Since we were driving to Denver, why not go home via Missouri? We returned home long enough to wash our clothes, pet the dog, and repack the car and head to Minneapolis. We packed up Kerri’s daughter and moved her to Vail via South Dakota with a sharp turn through Nebraska before arriving again in Colorado. After a rest in Minturn, a few hikes, some time with wine sitting on a porch, and a few precious nights with my parents, yesterday we returned to Wisconsin through Wyoming, South Dakota, and Minnesota.

It was a tap dance. Change found its way in as our patterns disappeared in the spontaneity of the double loop. We arrived home exhausted and exhilarated, with renewed eyes, a riches of profound and varied experiences, and much clearer intentions. What seemed initially like an interruption in our path was, in fact, a crack in the pattern, a necessary bump into the unknown.

Go here for my latest book

Filed under: Art, Creativity, Edges, Family, Gratitude, Pattern, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: artistry, change, creativity, family, spontenaity, travel | Leave a comment »