“FEED ME!”

Posted on October 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

There is a special place in my heart for momma seagulls. Each morning I see them stamping across the beach, their teenager close on their heels squawking for food. The teenager doesn’t squawk once or twice; their cry for food is incessant, unrelenting. Their squawk is high pitched and piercing. The momma gull looks as if she needs an aspirin. She looks like some momma humans I have seen in grocery stores: every fiber of her being resisting the urge to end the life that she birthed. I am undecided whether the momma gull is frantically looking for food to stop the squawk or racing to get away from their fledgling before committing a capital bird crime.

Yesterday I took a walk with Pete. He is a gifted artist though is convinced that he must know something or achieve something to be valid. He is wrestling with the artist-as-outcome demon. What must he do to allow that he is and always has been an artist? Pete is retired and has been pursued his entire life by an inner squawking that refuses to yield. It says, “FEED ME. FEED ME. FEED ME.” And, like the momma gull, he either runs to find food (art-as-product) or runs to get away from the voice.

His dilemma is common among people who finally listen to the inner voice and attempt to feed the artist that chases them. The mistake is to think that validity is something that others grant to you. This mistake will have Pete hunting for scraps to feed a bottomless pit of hunger; the squawking will never stop. There is a happy day in every seagull and artist’s life when the momma turns to the squawking teenager and roars, “FEED YOURSELF.” For the artist, the equivalent comes in the moment when they realize that the squawking will stop the moment they care more for what they think of their work than they care what others might think of their work; validity moves inside. For the artist, the squawk is to be heeded, it is literal: “FEED ME,” means to feed my ideas, my opinions, and stop giving away the worth of my artistry, the nutrient of my opinions to others.

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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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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.

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Step Toward Your Dream

Posted on September 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

564. 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 opportunity comes when the artist is ready. Horatio made a single pitch to fund his next film and the money came roaring in. “Oh God!” he wrote. “Green light! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear….” Tamara will perform her first public gig. She is an extraordinary musician, prolific, and as she stepped toward her dream, the pesky dream stepped toward her. “Oh!” she wrote, “I know I can do it, but….”

Step toward your dreams and your dreams will step toward you. And when you touch, for the first time, the thrill of contact, like meeting your true love, will always evoke trepidation and doubt. You will shake and say to your self, “I can’t believe it.”

Once, just after I signed a lease for a studio, a friend said, “Uh-oh, now you have to show up!” My great directing mentor, Jim, surprised me when he confessed that before every new rehearsal process, prior to the first read through, he would get sick to his stomach. He told me each time he was certain that he had nothing offer, that he had no idea how to direct a play. Jim directed hundreds of plays and each time was certain he knew nothing.

What impresses me most about artists and seekers of dreams is that they feel this fear and do not turn and run. They feel it and keep walking. Their dream opens its arms and despite their certainty that they will be a disappointing lover, they step into the embrace and offer the world their gifts. We fling around the word “transformation” like we used to toss about the word “paradigm;” it has come to mean something generic. Mark, and Tamara and transforming; they are feeling it, the dream, the step, the doubt, the embrace. Consequently, neither they, nor their dream, will ever be the same.

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Get Lost

Posted on September 5, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Pete is my neighbor and an excellent photographer. And, although he is retired, he is new to the idea that he is and always has been an artist. Last week he stopped me on the street and asked for my help. He said, “I’m stuck. I’m lost. I’m wearing slippery shoes and walking on ice.” We laughed at his analogy explosion. “Seriously,” he said, “You help artists and I need your help.” So, we made a date to talk.

Today was our talk. We sat on the balcony in the afternoon sun; I already knew what Pete was confronting (he was stuck, he was lost, he felt as if he was slipping and sliding on ice), and was not surprised when he said, “I’ve lost my way. I don’t know what I’m doing with my art anymore and the more I try to produce decent work, the worse it gets. I’m scared.” I could see the fear and frustration in his face. What do you do when you feel as if your muse has abandoned you?

I asked Pete if he’d ever in his life experienced any personal growth (what a set up!). “Of course. Too much!” was his reply. I asked him what the process of personal growth felt like; how did it begin? “I felt lost,” he said, smiling, understanding. “And then I felt really lost.” In order to grow, you must first get lost. There must be winter if there is to be spring. You must get lost before you find the new direction. It is natural process and is only made difficult when we resist it.

The resistance we experience is rooted in the notion that we have to be productive all the time. To exclusively focus on the outcome comes at great expense: forfeit of healthy process and the eventual death of artistry. It is unnatural to be productive 24/7, 365 days a year. Feeling fallow is a necessary phase of rejuvenation. Mastery is never outcome focused because, like the cycle of seasons, there is no end: there is good natural process. Fallow time can be deeply satisfying and enormously revivifying when we understand that artistry has nothing to do with outcomes and everything to do with a way of being in the world. Being an artist is not about playing the piano or dancing or painting pictures. It is about presence; it is cultivating your natural capacity to step into the unknown. Of course, stepping into the unknown is simply another way of saying, “Learning to get lost.” Pete laughed hysterically when, at the beginning of our conversation he wrinkled his brow and said, “I’m lost.” And I said, “Oh, thank god! Now you are an artist!”

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Let Go Of “It”

Posted on August 22, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

531. 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’ve started drawing again. Each day, every day, I flip the elastic band off my moleskin sketchbook, open to a new page, and draw. Or scribble. I make marks and circles. I draw mostly from my imagination; sometimes I look at things and sketch what I see as a starting point and then rearrange the elements: I compose. I don’t see much difference between drawing from imagination and infusing my imagination into what I see. They are the same action; the direction is slightly different.

I am no longer interested in “capturing” reality – primarily because I don’t think there is a reality beyond what I perceive. In a sense there is nothing to capture. There is only interpretation. There is only imagination. To be clear: what I call reality is what I perceive; there is stuff out there (and you will waste a lot of breath trying to convince me that “it” is separate from me: I will giggle if you tell me that there is an objective reality) and I assign “it” meaning; simply by assigning a word to “it” I have abstracted “it.” If I describe “it” I have interpreted “it.” If I describe “it,” I no longer see “it;” I see the word that I’ve attached to “it.” So, when drawing “it” why not go with the flow – interpret, compose, imagine. Scribble, scribble, play. Sharpen the pencil and repeat.

The word “it” provides a perfect example: use these two little letters in the proper sequence and all the magnificent motion and moving beauty of the universe is frozen – “it” fixes flow in time: I can convince myself that a verb is a noun, a river is a thing, a person is knowable, all because I squeeze the miracle into two tiny symbols and think I know “it.”

Alan suggested that I do a self-portrait. It has been over a decade since my last serious attempt. He said, “Peer into those eyes for a while before starting and then ask yourself, ‘Who is this person?’” He asked me to draw with my heart and not my head. Alan is wily and that is why I love him so. He knows what I believe and why I draw. He caught me in a net of my own making. How can I now look in the mirror and possibly believe that I can “capture” what I see?

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Prepare For Surprise

Posted on August 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Serendipity and a project brought me back to Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. In rereading it I wonder why I do not read passages from this playful and profound book everyday. Here’s a snippet from passage 44:

“…Artistry can be found anywhere; indeed it can be only be found anywhere. One must be surprised by it. It cannot be looked for. We do not watch artists to see what they do, but watch what persons do and discover the artistry in it.

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.

Therefore, poets do not “fit” into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their “places” seriously. They openly see its role as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing as costumes, its rule as conventional, its crises as arranged, it’s conflicts performed, and its metaphysics ideological.”

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Find Yourself Whole

Posted on August 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

He asked me, with eyes downcast, “Yes, but when will I believe that I am whole?” We were sitting on the stage of an outdoor theatre. It was a hot summer night after a not-particularly-good-rehearsal. This young man, an actor, came dangerously close to being fully present, alive and available in his scene; he came very close to actually being seen without his armor. It scared him and he fled. I was secretly proud because he was brave and daring to come so close to his power. Now he was fully invested in pummeling himself. Had I a whip, a hair shirt, and a wee bit of salt to offer him he would have gladly added the torture to his self-abuse.

“You will believe that you are whole when you stop investing in the idea that you are broken.” Not a very useful response, but there it is.

A wise old mentor once told me that you can only give an actor one significant note a day. Give them too many things to incorporate and nothing will move forward. Give them the note to chew on and leave them alone to chew. So these are the things I did not say: When you deem that it is alright to be afraid, when you consider it useful to feel what you feel without a need to alter it to service the opinions of others, when you stop beating yourself for trying, when you stop abusing yourself for making strong offers and reward yourself instead, then you might feel whole. Wholeness is not something you attain. It is something you are. Feel it. Broken is a learned behavior, it is the hallmark of a people that reject nature, particularly their own nature; it is a story guaranteed to keep you hiding and, that is the point of the, “I am broken and need fixing” story. The “I am broken” story is a central and necessary in the maintenance of a culture of control. And, above all, I did not tell him that it is a useful thing to struggle with; finding yourself is the whole point of being alive – or perhaps better said: finding yourself whole is the point of being alive. Wrestling with it makes for a good story and great life.

[I’m be on the road and taking a break so I’m dipping into the archives and reworking and reposting some of your favorites. I’ll be back at it in the middle of August]

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Doodle On The Walls

Posted on August 7, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

516. 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 dear Sam, poet, photographer and lover of life, is working on a presentation for coaches entitled The Art of Coaching. In preparation he asked a few lovely questions of his artist friends. He asked us not to think but to respond with our first thoughts. His questions were:
• Under what conditions does an artist flourish?
• What do you notice about the environment around you and in you when you are at your best artist self?

Here was my no-thought response:

It is perhaps too simple but this is what I know and experience: the artist in me becomes present (it is all about presence; artistry is not something you do as much as something you are)- there is no past or future, just what is before me (and in me) in that moment and we are not separate: the poem or the painting or the story and I are one fluid thing. The world (my seeing) moves from nouns to verbs, from object focused to process focused. When I am present the environment, my seeing of my environment, comes “alive;” the colors are more intense, the sounds and textures of my space richer and clearer. I guess, in my artist self, there ceases to be a separation between me and my environment, I am not moving through a day, I am in the day. All concepts of “time” disappear. I am the creator, the creating, and the created.

Artists flourish when the emphasis in life is moved from “answer seeking” and placed on “question engagement” – the capacity to explore, engage,…to sit solidly in uncertainty: that is the environment (and I think it is an internal environment) necessary for humans to flourish and fulfill their creative impulse.

Like me, Sam believes that all humans are infinitely creative. He’s dedicated his life to helping people reacquaint themselves with the inner artist that they sent packing too many years ago to remember.
The coaches attending his session are lucky. I’ve encouraged Sam to place boxes of crayons in the hotel as his session might inspire all of those over-serious adults to sit on the floor and doodle on the walls.

[I’m be on the road and taking a break so I’m dipping into the archives and reworking and reposting some of your favorites. I’ll be back at it in the middle of August]

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Give Robert A Hand

Posted on July 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Robert is like a circus. When he comes to town I find myself following him around and doing the most unusual and extraordinary things. If you went to his house and asked for a cup of tea you could be certain that he grew the tea, made the cups and saucers, wove the table mats and probably built the table, too. If he didn’t design and build the chair in which you were sitting then he certainly restored it.

Robert reads the rulings written by the Supreme Court, the plays of the great poets, he knows more history, more literature, and more social science than any person I have known. He sews, he constructs, he plumbs, he paints and he does electrics. He is an actor by profession, a jack-of-all-trades by birth. His curiosity is insatiable and he’s consciously nurtured his capacity to follow his questions. To me, Robert is the master of possibility, the muse of “what if….” He turns over rocks to see what’s beneath, he acts before he knows; he designs projects based on what he might learn not upon what he already understands.

He was in town this week preparing for The British American Youth Theatre Festival, an organization he founded and has run for over 20 years. This year, they will perform with giant puppets and he needed help constructing the hands. “How about giving me a hand with puppet hands?” he said when I answered the phone. “Of course!” I said. Robert knows I jump at every chance to play in his field of projects.

“Do you know anything about making puppet hands?” he sang.

“No. Nothing.” I replied.

“Perfect! I’ll see you at 10!” he said, hanging up the phone.

Robert reminds me that this upside-down, fear-crazed, you-have-to-know-before-you-act world is unnatural. The most extraordinary thing about Robert is that he is ordinary. He simply does not invest in the idea of limitations.

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