See The Box

Posted on March 2, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

‘The Box’ by Kerri Sherwood from her album Blueprint for My Soul Craig sent me a link and a challenge. The link was to his recent blog post, Break Down The Box. It’s about how people build boxes around themselves. “Instead of building a box that may later require extra work to remove,” he writes, “I suggest building a stage.” What a great image! His challenge to me was to apply it to my writing. He texted, “It’s relevant to your general topics.”

My question back to Craig was about the word “apply.” Is he challenging me to write about boxes and stages? Is he challenging me to build a stage and stand on it? Both? His challenge came on a day that I said aloud to myself and the universe, “I’m feeling boxed!” His timing was impeccable.

Self Cut outWe’ve not finished our correspondence so I don’t yet know what he means by applying it to my writing. To stall I will write what I know about boxes:

1) Everyone has one. Don Miguel Ruiz writes that we come into this earth as free, uninhibited spirits and then the adults around us begin impressing rules and random philosophy upon us. They teach us constraint and we comply. We are a pack animal, after all, and must operate within the greater needs of the community. That’s why there are traffic lights and a proper fork to use when eating a salad. Our greatest need is to belong; The GAP, Old Navy, or Abercrombie & Fitch could not exist otherwise. The need to belong is the driver behind box building. It’s a paradox. Somewhere amidst all of the compliance we begin to assume that we are no good or start making comparisons to others or create standards of perfection that are impossible to inhabit. So, we build a box called, “should be”. The paradox is that, in order to belong, our action is to hide.

2) Growth comes from constraints. No box is built without the need to deconstruct it. That is the opportunity of the box. Joseph Campbell would call box deconstruction The Heroes Journey. In the great mythologies of the world there is a tension between The Right Hand path (what society expects you to do) and The Left Hand path (following your bliss). Both are necessary and, in the end, we all must find the middle way between the two paths. The middle way is known in mythological terms as The Holy Grail. Bliss always needs the participation of others. We are pack animals and need the pack to know where we fit.

3) Constraint is necessary for creative fulfillment. School boards around the nation have the misguided notion that art is the absence of rule and/or discipline. It must be a requirement of school board participation to attend the symphony without recognizing that the musicians on stage have given their lives to discipline and constraint. It might come as a surprise to most people but artists outstrip the military in rule adherence and rigid discipline. The disconcerting aspect for the school board is that the rules and discipline of the artist are self-imposed. They are inner imperatives. Artists do not need a drill sergeant. They need constraints to push against, boundaries to overcome, rules to challenge, and patterns to disrupt. Watch a kid on a skateboard try to learn a new skill (oh, yes – they are artists, too). They might break their arm in the process but the break will just fuel the need to improve.

4) No one sees clearly their box. To return to a Don Miguel Ruiz-ism, we are the stars of our own movie and can never know the movie of another person (and they can never know our movie). The paradox is, of course, as the star of your movie you never get to see your life from any meaningful perspective until lots of time affords you some distance. Even then, you’ll interpret your movie through the lens of having lived it. If you have an inner monologue, you are center stage of your movie and your movie is your box.  Here’s the beautiful thing about movies/boxes: they all come with flaws and the flaws are almost always the location of the opportunities. As I recently learned, the Amish intentionally place a small flaw in every quilt because they believe that the flaw is what lets the spirit in. The same might be said of boxes.

I’ve been privileged in my life to work with and direct a bevy of actors and most had to learn to stand on a stage. In fact, the stage frightens most of the really good ones. They understand the power of being seen, the responsibility that comes with visibility. It is simply this: be present without the need to control the thoughts or emotions of another. Be present with them. Offer them a story without the self-protection of trying to control what they see. All stories are maps out of boxes. Or, more to the point, stories are maps out of one layer of box to a lesser layer of box. So:

5) Boxes are like onions. A stage is merely a layer.

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Update Your Model

Posted on February 26, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

InfinityI laughed when I read this phrase on Skip’s Power Point presentation:

“All models are false. However, some are useful.” Alan Kay

I spent years of my life reading books built upon the thought models of thinkers, consultants, physicists, mathematicians, artists, business people and spiritual thinkers. None of the models was true. Many contradicted other models. Models are only useful if they help us make sense of our days on this planet.

Culture is a thought model. Travel to another culture and you’ll spend some time being disoriented because you will have entered a different model for sense making. For instance, some cultures/models place the accent on the individual and others place it on the group. I come from a culture that celebrates the individual and my world was rocked in a culture that celebrates the group; the model was so different that I could not sense make anything and fell head long into “not knowing.” While stumbling about unable to make sense of the world, I saw my own cultural model for what it is: a useful model – not truth.

Art, in most of Western culture, is considered important if it breaks or disturbs the model. In most Eastern cultures art is considered important if it supports the model.  Neither is truth. Neither is right. Both are useful for sense making if you understand the model.

Language is a model. It is very useful model, wouldn’t you agree? Wade Davis is sounding an important alarm that is going mostly unnoticed: we are losing languages faster than species are going extinct. Each language lost is more than a lost collection of words; a language lost is an entire world lost. It is a mythology lost. A language lost is a way of seeing and engaging with the mystery that is lost. What is useful and unknowable (un-see-able) to other languages/models is lost forever.

Religion is a model. Science creates and constantly revises its models. Religion could learn a thing or two from science (and vice versa). Maps are models. For a terrific book on mind models, get Charles Hampden-Turner’s, Maps Of The Mind.

A study of history is a study of models that served as sense makers for a time but collapsed under the weight of updates. For instance, no explorer ever sailed off the edge of the world despite the unassailable model of the day. It turns out that the sun does not rotate around the earth though many people were hushed and crushed for going against the model of their day. Newton showed us that space and time were fixed and Einstein showed us that space and time are not only fluid but connected.

We get into trouble when we confuse our models with truth. No model is true. No model is right. This applies especially to the models that we carry within us: the mind models that lead us to believe that, “I can’t do it…” are false. My favorite model that is mistaken for truth shows up like this: “I’m not creative.” That is a model that is both false and not very useful. What might you need to do to reconsider your model and accept an update?

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Get Out Of Your Head

Posted on February 23, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
from my comic, FLUB. Don't ask why I think it belongs with this post...

from my comic, FLUB. Don’t ask why I think it belongs with this post…

When I was in school I was constantly amused and disconcerted by the disjoint between the arts and the academic interpretation of the arts. For instance, pick up any literary critique on the play HAMLET and you will read a lot of well-meaning but clueless intellectualizing on the inaction of the character Hamlet. And then, go to a rehearsal. Plays are about action. Hamlet is one of the most active characters in the canon. The play is essentially a detective story with the main character, Hamlet, trying to determine whether the ghost of his father is from heaven or from hell. He needs proof. Every action that he takes is to uncover the truth of his father’s death.

Yesterday I was witness to the arts/academic disjoint in person. A fantastic Christopher Wool retrospective is opening at the Chicago Art Institute. Kerri and I took the train in to the city to see the exhibit and attend a lecture by the curator of the exhibit. In a surprise appearance, Christopher Wool, the artist, took the stage with the curator. The curator was unprepared. She didn’t want him to talk. Over and over again she told him what his work was about and then asked him to confirm it. He was gentle with her and kind and contradicted her analysis. Five times she told us that his work was about self-annihilation (he makes gestural lines on canvas and then wipes them off) and he would counter by saying something like, “Well, actually, I didn’t like the line so I wiped the canvas but then I liked what was happening with the wipe so I left it.”[a long silence would follow]

She needed his work to have deeper, darker meaning. He is an artist in a relationship with his material and works intuitively. There was no intellectual meeting ground between her need and his work. Had she asked him about the greater meaning of his paintings (she didn’t) he might have said, “Well, what do you see?” As Joseph Campbell once said, “If an artist doesn’t like you, he’ll tell you what his work means. If he likes you, he’ll let you have your own experience.”

The curator needed the body of work to be sourced in the artists suffering. The artist did not suffer and, in fact, told us that his art was a form of play. In play, we assemble meaning (and the curator missed this fine point).

It finally came to this simple statement: Christopher Wool, the artist, stopped the curator in the middle of a lengthy pedagogical rant and said, “All this talk of process and technique! No one needs to know any of it.” He looked at the audience and continued, “I hope that when you see the work, that it engages you. I hope you have a relationship with the work.”

Artists know that the audience recreates the work. A work of art is never complete without the other, the viewer, who is not passive but becomes an artist in the moment of engaging. The viewer recreates the work anew, unique, and special to their eyes.

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Take The One Action

Posted on February 19, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
a work in progress. I'll call it "Salutation"

a work in progress. I’ll call it “Salutation”

It is true that, at the end of the day, we are our own best obstacle. Nothing is better at blocking meaningful action toward a dream than our personal story of doubt and fear. It comes in many forms, like, “Who am I to think that…,” or “If I only had some time I’d…,” or “If I only knew how to start, I’d….”

Lately, I’m fascinated with a specific form of the best-personal-obstacle canon: why do we take any action EXCEPT the one action that matters. For instance, I hear often statements like this: “I want to be a writer, but….” Anything following the statement of desire is a self-generated obstacle. There’s not enough time. No one will like what I write. Fill in the blank. The single action that matters is to write. Sit down and write. That is how one becomes a writer. And, if the writing happens everyday, one will become a better and better writer. Anything else is a well-placed, self-generated obstacle.

The question is, “Why do we need our obstacles?” What does placing a boulder in the road do for us? There is an obvious answer: it keeps us from the scary prospect of fulfilling our dreams. Fulfilling a dream requires showing up and expressing a personal truth. Personal truth is, well, personal, and will always meet resistance because there are billions of personal truths walking around out there.

The refusal to take the single-action-that-matters applies to the everyday. How many times have you swam in a pool of overwhelm rather than pick up the phone and make the call that you know you need to make? Once, when I ran a theatre company, I knew I needed to fire an employee but I didn’t want to do it. She was a nice person. She wasn’t doing her job. We had countless meetings discussing why she wasn’t taking the one single action that mattered (doing her job). And, so, I didn’t take the one single action that mattered (letting her go). When I finally mustered the courage to fire her, she thanked me. She wanted to do something else with her life but didn’t have the courage. When I fired her, I pushed her out of the nest. I became the circumstance that pushed her into the one action that mattered.

I think that’s the point of not taking the one action that will actually matter. We allow circumstance to decide for us. We delay until the bill collector comes or until the boss fires us or until we are sitting in a rocking chair telling the story of why we never had time to write. If only….

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Meet The Shadow

Posted on February 13, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

SHADOW[I bumbled into an old bit of writing and reworked it a bit; an old post becomes new]

“The artist’s vocation is to send light into the human heart.” George Sand

The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is that all of life is suffering. In this context the predicament of the artist is no different than that of a plumber or a president though I’ve yet to find a plumber who considers suffering necessary to his or her vocation. With artists, suffering seems to be a prerequisite. Why do artists think they need to suffer or believe that suffering unlocks the door to their artistry?

The healers in Bali are mostly artists and they believe their healing powers come after a wound. Suffering, they believe, the wound, opens them to a greater perception; it opens them to new powers. Suffering helps them walk into and get comfortable with their shadow. They learn to cease resisting their shadow and to make peace with it.

As a nation we do not easily walk into our shadow. One of the roles of “artist” is to go where others choose not to go. A walk into the shadow may be uncomfortable but it is equally as liberating. An artist is supposed to see what others cannot and sometimes that is painful. An artist may act as a bridge between worlds of perception, living on the edge of the village, traveling into the netherworlds to retrieve a truth or a lost soul. This at times may be solitary or scary but it is always transforming. An artist rarely “fits” the social norms – and sometimes that is disconcerting – but always serves the health and growth of the pack.

Artists walk into the shadow of their tribe and return with greater vision, insight, and guidance.

I love shadows – literally and metaphorically. Most stories are about people walking into their fears and fears always lurk in the shadows. Shadow work leads to an inevitable realization: you create the fear because you are the teller of the story. Recognizing that you are the teller of your own story, the interpreter of your experience, is great for releasing shadows. The walk through the shadow lands always leads to the heart and, at the end of it all, isn’t that what artistry (or life) is all about?

Go here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, title_pageSeeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

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Sit With Sadness

Posted on February 7, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
Demeter by David Robinson

Demeter by David Robinson

I awoke this morning deeply, profoundly sad. It is unusual for me to emerge from sleep with sadness; I’m generally a happy person. It was the brand of sadness that has no attachment to a reason. I was earth-sad. I’ve learned that when I come into possession of a sacred sadness, I need to pay careful attention to it rather than struggle to find a way out. It will inevitably illuminate something important if I sit with it, feel it to my bones, honor it, and listen.

I brought sadness with me when swam out of my dreams and broke the surface of consciousness. It was as if I was pulling a drowning man from the ocean floor to the surface; he was heavy and I was exhausted by the effort. I gasped for breath when I broke the surface and I can only imagine that my companion, sadness, gasped, too. I lay in bed. He sat with me. Our breathing calmed. Both of us were quiet. I wanted to say, “What?” but I know better than to force the conversation. Sadness talks when sadness is ready.

Khalil Gibran wrote that, “Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.” In his Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke advises, “Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write: find out whether it is spreading its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied to you to write. This above all – ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write?” If the answer is yes, Rilke advises the young poet to build his life according to this necessity.

I believe everyone has an inner imperative. For some it looks like having a family. For some it is tending a garden. Some need to travel. Some people need to seek spirit. It’s hard to explain a drive that must either be satisfied or kill you – especially when that drive looks like an art form. What must you do or die? What inner necessity transcends physical comfort or safety or security or measures of success? Twice in my life I denied myself my artistry in an attempt to have a normal “career” and twice I nearly died (not metaphorically). Of course, on the up side, following an inner imperative makes you bullet proof. Social norms wad like wet tissue paper in the face of do-or-die necessity. Fear has no footing when the alternative to acting on the imperative is to die.

I’ve known since I was a small child my answer to Rilke’s question. After a long silence, Sadness looked at me this morning and said, “Well?  Are you ready to redesign your garden?”

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Take The Train

Posted on February 5, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

Screen Shot 2014-02-04 at 4.47.26 PMIt’s Friday night and we’re on the train from Chicago. We’ve just spent a great day wandering through the Art Institute with my brother, the professor. He’s in town doing portfolio reviews for potential graduate design students. There’s nothing better than going through an art museum with a man who’s spent his career teaching aspiring artists. I admire him and treasure the rare days that we get to spend together. I learn something new each time we have the opportunity wander and talk.

Our train car is slowly populated by people carrying musical instrument cases. There are guitars and banjos and penny whistles and contraptions that I do not recognize. They get on the train at various stops but it seems our car is the rendezvous spot. A woman named Kate joins them. She sits across the aisle and tells us that she is the singer of the group. They gather once a month and head north to Kenosha (our town) to play Irish music at a place called Pete’s. “Best fish fry in town,” Kate says as she offers us chocolate. We are now part of the family.

Just then, the man sitting in the seat adjacent to us opens his case and pulls out a banjo. A man sitting next to him asks, “Is it time?”  Banjo man nods and others pull their guitars and harmonicas and whistles from cases and pockets. A man with a penny whistle starts to play and banjo man picks up the tune. The guitars join. They know Kerri is a musician and Kate says to her, “We take requests.” They want Kerri to sing with them.

The train car is transformed into an Irish music jam session. Commuters tap their feet and applaud. A backpack filled with beer appears in the aisle. The conductor walks in and smiles. He was hoping the musicians would be on the train tonight. He accepts a chocolate, refuses a beer (“I’m on duty!”), and banters with banjo man. They seem like old friends though their entire relationship transpires on Friday night train rides to Kenosha. Banjo man invites the conductor to Pete’s and the conductor asks if they’ll still be playing at 1am when he’s off work. This is a ritual that they perform each trip. “Someday!” they both agree, knowing that it is not likely to happen. It would spoil the magic of their once monthly encounters.

By the time we reach our stop, the end of the line, perfect strangers are laughing together, sharing stories, clapping with Kate and the boys, sharing chocolate and beer, and feeling that their random choice of train car was not so random after all. The week of toil and work is transformed. I hear a man say to his seatmate, “It was a good week, I think,” and I wonder what he might have said had the musicians not opened their cases. I wonder if he’d have acknowledged the presence of his seatmate had the musicians chosen another car. Sometimes we miss the simple miracles, the seemingly small moments in which huge events occur. When was the last time in the harsh anonymity of an urban world that you put down your smart phone, turned to a perfect stranger, shared a chocolate, smiled and told them about your week? It seems so small but is in truth profound for a stranger to reach a hand across the chasm and say, “It’s nice to meet you.”

This is the power of the arts and our general inability to recognize the profound in the small moment is one reason why we misunderstand the purpose of the arts. People go to war because they cannot find a way to reach across the chasm and touch the humanity of their earth-mate. A car full of commuters went home less lonely on Friday night and a few were swept by the music into a place called Pete’s where they ate some fish fry, drank some dark beer, and celebrated nothing more than being fully alive.

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Take The Time

Posted on February 4, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
Marc Chagall 'America Windows'

Marc Chagall ‘America Windows’

I finally saw Marc Chagall’s ‘America Window.’ It’s at the Art Institute of Chicago and has long been on my must-experience list. It’s a long list! Unlike most bucket lists, my list cannot be contained in a bucket and I have no illusion that I will experience everything on the list before I die. It’s not possible to experience everything on my list in a single lifetime. I keep my list to remind myself that my life is both finite and that this life holds more miracles than any single life-bucket can contain. Finite lifespan nests within the infinite awe.

The Window provided me with an extraordinary perspective flip. When first approaching it I thought, “How spare!” It was breathtaking in color but seemed narratively sparse, like a Mark Rothko instead of a Marc Chagall. And then I stepped closer and the story of the Window began to emerge. An entire world opened for me. The longer I looked the more I saw. The more I saw the more I wanted to look. It was as if I was at first hypnotized and then drawn into the world of the Window. When I finally decided to leave, I walked several paces away and turned back for one more look. The world that had at first seemed spare was now too full to comprehend. I was seeing beyond my thinking.

What a great metaphor for the process of stepping into presence! It’s a process of moving from the conceptual to an experience. Our thinking, our relationship with language, requires us to generalize and a generality is always an abstraction. It is made up. For instance, right now, looking out my window, I see many “trees” and, in truth, I’m not seeing them at all. I’m seeing the abstract concept “tree” that I attach to many, many unique forms. I’m seeing what I expect to see. If I take the time to go outside and touch, smell and feel them, I see that each “tree” is vastly different than all the others. No two forms are ever the same. They are vastly different than my expectation. It is not until we take the time to move beyond our words that we regain our capacity to see.

Chagall, like all great artists, knew this. He knew that people need help seeing and that seeing is vastly different than looking. Vital life, dare I say the rich meaning of life, is available when we learn to see beyond our abstractions. Vital life (the infinite) dances in front of us all of the time. It is the role of the artist to help us move beyond our expectation and engage with the dance. The Window reminded me that sometimes we need only take the time to open our eyes and see.

Go here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, title_pageSeeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

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Learn To Play

Posted on January 21, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
Illustration from Play-to-Play by David Robinson

Illustration from Play-to-Play by David Robinson

This is from a yet-to-be-published children’s book I wrote and illustrated based on concepts from James Carse’s book, Finite And Infinite Games. The girl wants to play but the gorilla is reticent to start a game until he knows what she means by the word, “play.” Are they playing to win or playing to play? The gorilla helps the young girl make the distinction and set an intention to play to play.

At first glance this might seem like a ridiculous distinction until considering that one definition of play (playing to play) leads to mastery and the other definition (playing to win) leads to an outcome that might include a temporary sense of gratification (or despair if you lose). Do you remember the school lesson about angles? At the inception of the angle, a single point, vector variance seems minute but the further the vectors travel from their source the greater the paths diverge. Artists that play to win inevitably stop making art: losing is a painful business. Artists that play to play master their technique; mastery, in James Carse’s terminology, is an infinite game. There is no such thing as losing if mastery is the aim. If mastery is the aim, how an artist creates is as important as what they create. A life of mastery is a simple matter of where the focus is placed at the beginning of the journey.

This distinction is at the core of what ails many organizations. When the focus drops to the bottom line and stays there, organizations play to win and lose their reason for being. In fact, in today’s world, the rules of the game modify every few months amidst the rapid pace of change; playing to win is a great strategy for losing everything. Playing to play makes an organization nimble enough to survive and thrive amidst ever changing circumstances. Business, like learning, like art, is primarily centered on relationship and gets lost at sea when the focus becomes achievement. Relationship is an infinite game.

The power is in a choice made before the game begins. Are you going to play to win? Or, will you walk a mastery path and play to become a better and better player?

Go here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, title_pageSeeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

 

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Wake Up

Posted on January 12, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
ELDERS

The Elders by David Robinson

Many years ago I took a class called Art and Transformation. Over several months we studied the art of different culturals, specifically cultures that understand art as central to their health and wellbeing. It is not correct to say we studied: we made art. We drummed our way into trance and drew what came to us in the trance. We participated in a sweatlodge to find the symbols necessary to make medicine shields. We meditated and made sandpaintings. We sat still in nature, drew with our nondominant hand, gathered dream symbols, made mandalas and explored what it means to be connected through art to “something bigger.”

In the weeks following a class session, we painted work inspired by the class experience and then gathered to share our new work. It was amazing to see the change in my own work when I was rooted in the deeper rivers of life. When I was working from the actual experience of connectivity – and not a mental abstraction or a concept – my paintings startled me.

We worked for months – consciously –  with transformation as the central impulse driving our visual forms. I learned through the class that “transformation” and “connection” were the same thing. Growing in consciousness is almost always a recognition of unity. As Joe said, “The universe tends toward wholeness.” Becoming more aware, opening the doors to greater consciousness, is how that tendency toward wholeness shows up. We see.

I also realized during the course that “story” was central to transformation. Art in its purest form is meant to be the keeper and transformer of the identity of a community. Identity is a story based on certain agreements a community makes about nature and time and god. Story needs context to make sense. I know this sounds like a loop and it is. Transformation is usually a movement toward wholeness (unity) and the movement is made visible through a change of story. I used to say, “Change your story, change your world,” but stopped because the phrase generally invoked wrinkled brows, protests and confusion. Most folks see their story as “reality” and will do anything to defend their reality. Initally a change of story can feel like an assault on reality.

I was once called on the carpet by a superintendent because a play I did with students challenged the reality of the teachers and parents. The superintendent shouted, “Art is supposed to entertain.” Well, yes. Art can entertain. Art is supposed to challenge, to shake the tree of assumptions, to help the community see itself. Art is supposed to help a community ask, “Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? Is this what we believe?” I sighed and asked  the red-faced superintendent, “Why are you so upset?” Her response: “The play made me uncomfortable.” Yes. Powerful art will always make us uncomfortable. Growth is always in the direction of discomfort. When the universe within us tends toward wholeness we will inevitably walk into vast fields of discomfort. It is how we wake up and see.

Go here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, title_pageVisionary, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

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