Open The Spigot

Posted on May 4, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

786. 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 hear this a lot: “I’m not very creative.” I learned a long time ago not to contradict that statement. It is provocative to contradict someone’s defenses.

Turning off the spigot of creative energy takes some serious control mechanisms. It is not easy to do. In fact, it is impossible so the control mechanisms are really justifications of “Why I’m not creative.” The justifications generally taste bad so to make them palatable we spin stories. Usually the stories that we spin are intended to make others responsible for how we feel. It is easier to assign blame for the bad taste in our mouth than it is to ask, “Why am I afraid of my creativity?” All of life is essentially creative, so the real question is, “Why am I afraid of living?”

As a reminder of many previous posts, no one can determine what we think or see or feel. That’s our job. We abandoned our center when we assign the responsibility for our feelings to someone else. We abandoned our center when we claim responsibility for how others think or see or feel. Taking responsibility for how others feel or think is essentially an attempt to inhabit a center that is not ours. If you are strangling your creative impulse because of what others might think you are essentially assigning the responsibility for your creative health to another person. That’s how the control mechanism works. “I can’t say it because they might think that I’m…(fill in the blank).” You can’t possibly know what others think. You can’t control what they think. So it is a losing proposition all the way around to snuff your light based on an illusion of control – an illusion that you create to prevent your full expression.

A deep sense of ownership and responsibility live at the center of every person who knows and experiences him or herself as a creative being. Your center is already yours – there is no need to go looking for it. Simply stop giving it away. What you seek is already within your grasp and it is waiting for you in your center. It’s your pure curiosity. It is your wild creativity. If you doubt me, think about this: the illusion/idea that you can control another person’s thoughts and feelings is a creative act. The idea that someone else is controlling your thoughts and feelings is an amazing story creation. Who else but you would whip up such an amazing superpower story and then live according to it?

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Invite Creativity

Posted on May 3, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

To invite creativity it is necessary to first coax curiosity to open the door. I know that is an odd statement. Why would curiosity close and lock the door?

It is impossible for a human being to not be creative. We are in our nature creative. Every moment of our lives we are creating.

However, it is possible a human being to experience him or her self as not creative. Many people above the age of 5 years old define themselves as not creative.

If you have defined yourself as “not creative” it is a good bet that at some point in your life you got slammed for being curious. Your endless stream of questions was not welcome, your scribbling outside of the lines was not appreciated, and opening doors to see what might happen was not convenient. You might have stuck your finger in a light socket and it hurt. Your great capacity to ask “what if…” was curbed. You got into trouble. You put a lock on it.

It is possible to shackle your curiosity. It is possible to bottle your imagination. It is possible to restrict your voice. It is possible to define yourself too small. We are free to reduce ourselves to the lowest common denominator and we do that from the fear of what might happen. “What if…” can cut both ways (note: either way is a process of imagination).

The story goes something like this: curiosity called us out to play and we answered the call! Answering the call exposed us, made us vulnerable, and when we were completely immersed in play and unprotected, singing loud or dancing without bounds, someone laughed at us or criticized us or shook us or told us in front of the whole class that we were no good. BAM! The curiosity door slammed closed. We installed locks and began looking at the world through a peephole.

We develop an overzealous control mechanism to reign in our curiosity and strangle our creative range. We begin this process by dulling our curiosity. We sit still. We color between the lines. We learn to raise our hands if we want to speak. We play a game called “search for the correct answer” and do not ask too many questions. We develop and profound commitment to finding a right way. We make profound control commitments called trying to be perfect. We show up but not too much. We decide we need to know BEFORE we step.

To have the full human experience of wild creativity, curiosity needs an open door. Curiosity needs to run free. Creativity follows. Creativity ensues.

Learning is creativity and creativity is learning. Mastery in any discipline requires unbridled experimentation and play. This is curiosity.

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Open The Door

Posted on May 2, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

…and since I wrote but never published THE OPEN STORY – and am now rediscovering it myself – I will publish it here in bits and dribbles. It begins like this:

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” Plato

Open the door called curiosity and creativity rushes in. Creativity requires no invitation. The door to open is curiosity. For most of us, curiosity has been minimized. Curiosity deals in questions, exploration and discovery. Adults want answers, goals and a plan so we pattern ourselves away from our greatest gift. Curiosity doesn’t have any answers. Curiosity deals in unknowns. The door may still open but the security chain (called, “I need to know”) prevents our creative spark from fully entering. Creativity will come home when we take the locks off the door.

The door is curiosity. The invitation is to creativity.

Here’s a bit of definition from the dictionary:

Curiosity: the desire to know (note: it is a desire, not to act of knowing…)
• Inquisitiveness.
• The tendency to pry.

Creativity: being creative. (What does that mean?)
• Originality (n.)
• Imagination (n.)
• Inspiration (n.)

Are you original? Are you filled with imagination? Do you inspire or are you inspired? The dictionary definition is not very helpful until you flip it. Creativity is not a place of arrival. It is not singular as in “the act of being creative.” Creativity is the action of a creative being. Here’s the inescapable truth and very good news: you are a creative being. You can’t help it and you can’t help it because the most natural impulse central to your being is your desire to know; what happens if…? Ask the question, open the door, and step into the unknown!

Consider these 3 tidbits:
1) You are unique in the universe so originality is not an option; it is a given.
2) It is virtually impossible for you to not imagine. Imagination is what you do. To feel into the future and to re-member the past is to imagine. To interpret your daily experiences is to imagine (interpretation is an act of imagination). It is how you know who you are. In fact, knowing yourself, learning about yourself is your greatest point of curiosity. Imagining yourself is your single greatest creative act.
3) To inspire means, among other things, to breathe in. To breathe is to exchange the stimulus of new life. It is to fill yourself with new energy so you can give new energy. Take a breath and pay attention. This is how you begin to know yourself.

These are not qualities that need to be achieved. These are qualities that come standard with every human being. You are a creative being. Curiosity is your driver. Do you know it? Is that your experience of yourself? Or have you closed the door to your creative identity?

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Choose Your Experience

Posted on April 15, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

767. 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 after 7:00pm and I just realized that it was Sunday. One of the privileges of wandering is that days of the week blend and become one. There are relatively few patterns so markers like workday and non-workday do not exist. This has been somewhat true most of my life. The line between work and play is indistinct. My play and my work have mostly been the same thing.

This afternoon Skip and I did a test run of experiences for our new start-up business. The audience is entrepreneurs. Some members of our team are young entrepreneurs so we gathered and talked through the content with them and then threw them into some experiences. Having been a data-basher most of my life it’s an interesting flip to do things to gather data and adjust my work based on audience responses. I learned a lot today!

What came clear to me was something that I’ve known for a while but did not fully grasp the magnitude until today. Human beings come into the world oriented to the unknown and strive to pretend that we are oriented to the known. We make meaning of chaos. And, what is chaos really? It’s a made up concept. It means, “I don’t know!” It has no use outside of the human need to make story and project order onto the world. It’s like the word, “wild.” Wild is only useful when there is an expectation of tame. Chaos is only meaningful relative to an expectation of order. Both are categories. One is generally comfortable because it provides the illusion of control and the other is uncomfortable because the illusion is of no control. Tame and wild follow the same general principle. I was in the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles and as the earth threw my house off of it’s foundation and hurtled me through the air, I learned that control was not mine to assign. I learned that wild is tame and tame is wild and chaos drives order and order collapses into chaos. It’s a dance.

It’s not the nouns that matter. It’s the verbs. It is the movement. Nothing is static. Nothing is fixed. The answers are not important. The questions matter, it is the conversation and the relationship that hold the real stuff of life. Questions and relationships are fluid. They move. Orient to the unknown and you orient to the questions. The questions will open you to discovery. Orient to the known and you orient to the answers. The answers will close you to rules and righteousness. This would seem obvious but it is not. The most potent revelation of all: how you orient is a choice. Choose to open or choose to close. Orient to the unknown or orient to the known. Orient to the infinite game or to the finite. Choose your experience.

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Learn The Space Between

Posted on April 11, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

763. 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 just read this phrase in an old notebook. I’m not sure who to attribute it to though it sounds as if it came from Ana-The-Wise: Between the inhale and the exhale there is an empty state. It is from this empty place that we create.

The “space between” has emerged as the theme this week.

A few days ago I had a conversation with a class about the space between actors on a stage. The play is never about the actors or the characters, the play happens in the space between them. It is the space of relationship. It is the place where the verbs express. If the actors are honest, the space between them opens and the audience joins the story. The audience participates. If the actors are pretending, if they are dishonest, the door closes and the audience can only witness the lie.

In Transformational Presence coaching class we also worked with the space between. In this case, it was the gap between what we know and how we live. Alan calls this praxis and has defined praxis as integrating belief and behavior. He writes, “Praxis is closing the gap.” In exploring the gap we worked with the relationship between what we know and how we live. They are not separate concepts but a living relationship. The gap is a dynamic space. It is the space where you will find your fears and stories of limitation. Close your gap and you will discover and transform all the reasons you believed you couldn’t walk your talk. And, just as actors on a stage discover, bringing an honest intention to the space between (relationship) creates movement, openness and flow. Bring dishonesty to the space between and the door closes. Fear takes over. Limits flourish.

The space between is always a relationship. It is never and empty space in the sense that is a void. In meditation it is the door to stillness. Learn the space between your inhale and exhale and you will find a quiet mind; it turns out that your thoughts and breath are as integrated as the rhythms of your heart and lungs. Place your focus outside of yourself, put it on the space between you and the world, and you will find a fertile, vibrant, creative realm ripe with possibilities.

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Look Beyond The Word

Posted on April 6, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

According to my dictionary, an entrepreneur is a risk taking businessperson. This is not much of a definition. The word is French in origin and it meant to undertake. It was a verb. To get out of bed and undertake the tasks of the day makes us all entrepreneurs. Especially these days when risk, according to the dictionary, means that there is a chance something might go wrong. I’ve yet to live a day when everything went right. For instance, last night I opened a jar of curry powder with too much enthusiasm and curry exploded everywhere. I think there is a more appropriate definition of an entrepreneur: someone whose not invested in things going right. In fact, entrepreneurs look for things going wrong because that provides the opportunity necessary for new creation. Entrepreneurs see the world beyond right and wrong. They see opportunity. Risk has nothing to do with it.

An artist, as defined by the dictionary, is a creator of art, a performer, a person with skills or a cunning person. The origin of this word is either French or Latin. We are cautioned in the dictionary not to confuse artist with artisan. An artisan is engaged in a craft. An artist is engaged in a fine art though I can’t find any mention of what distinguishes a craft from a fine art. From the definition of artist, the phrase “cunning person” shouted to me so following the word chain I learned that cunning means crafty and deceitful, clever or cute. So, artisans, unlike artists, must not be deceitful, clever or cute though they are, by definition crafty. In the Venn diagram of artist and artisan, craftiness is the crossover. So, to sum up: artists are cute, crafty, clever and deceitful while creating something fine. Artisans are rough, dull and honest while also crafty. Can one be crafty and dull at the same time? I have a more appropriate definition for artist: someone who lives beyond the abstractions of thought. They engage with what is there, not what they think is there. In other words, someone who has made presence a priority in his or her life is an artist. Artists guide their community to presence.

Words like “risk” or “fine” blind us. They distance us from our potential because we think we need to take risks to be entrepreneurial; we think we need to do something fine to be and artist. Artists and entrepreneurs explore. They engage. They discover. They act first and then make meaning of their experiences. They master their “doing” because they are not invested in win/lose games. They step into the unknown without reservation. Artistry, like entrepreneurship, defines a way of being not something achieved.

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Make Space

Posted on April 2, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

754. 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 am cleaning out and clearing space. It is spring and spring-cleaning is normal at this time of year but my impulse to make space is deeper than the cycle of spring. I’m giving stuff away. I just threw away half of my clothes (they needed throwing away) and the other half will soon go to the thrift store.

I’m purging the studio. I installed paintings at Geraldine’s Counter yesterday and Gary, the owner, asked why I had not included prices on the labels. “They are old paintings,” I said, “and I’m in the mood to bargain.” I don’t want the paintings to come back. I need the space for the new creation. I need the space for ideas.

Possibilities require space. Sometimes life stories get over crowded with drama and details. Sometimes our days get too crowded with tasks. Possibilities will never shoulder their way into cramped courters. Why should they? Lack of space is a signal to the universe that you are doing what you want to do. Or, lack of space is a signal to the universe that you are afraid of doing what you want to do; existential hording leaves no room for possibilities to breathe.

Once, I ran a school and I encouraged my students to look out the window. Daydreaming is intensely important for healthy living and a vital creative life. Daydreaming is space creation. I encouraged my students to imagine. I encouraged them to breathe and make space and wander. I encouraged them to explore and discover and uncover. We were constantly cleaning out the building. We were constantly making space for the new. Those lessons are coming home to me again this spring. On my horizon a tsunami of potential is flowing toward me. I know it is coming because I am making space.

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Open The Door

Posted on March 27, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

748. 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 artist 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 (in the USA) suffering is central to the narrative. It is an expectation and seems to be a prerequisite. Why do artists think they need to suffer or believe that suffering unlocks the door to their artistry? It doesn’t.

Here are some conditions central to unlocking the door to artistry: curiosity, experimentation, exploration, discovery, passion, investigation, play, “What if…?”

We do not easily walk into our shadows. 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 often acts as a bridge between worlds of perception, living on the edge of the village, translating the signs. As the god of transitions and boundaries, Hermes was of this ilk. He was also the protector of poets. Sometimes it is the role of the artist to travel into the netherworlds to retrieve a truth or a lost soul. Orpheus descended into the underworld to reclaim Eurydice. He did not trust so he lost what he most desired. His artistry was a gift of the gods. His suffering was from distrust of the gods’ gift.

At times artistry may be solitary or scary but it is always transforming. Always. An artist rarely “fits” the social norms but continually serves the health and growth of the community. Artists are transformational.

The coaching work I do with artists (myself included) often requires a stroll into this misguided ideal or expectation of suffering. What are the underlying assumptions that make suffering or madness an erroneous precondition for artistry? This is what I know: suffering is what happens when we ignore our innate artistry or smother our essential creative spark. Suffering is not a prerequisite to anything. Suffering is a sign that the artistic door is closed.

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Learn To Fly

Posted on March 3, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

724. 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 have a song in my heart and I’m not flying!” He was waving his arms up and down like a bird like all of the other children, his eyebrows knit, with a pout on his face. The other children were flying. Their eyes were closed, faces to the sky, arms riding the imaginary thermals. By the look on their faces they were flying high above the trees and soaring to the clouds.

We were having a storytelling. In our story a little girl (she’s a princess but doesn’t know it) must move from the country to the city with the kind old man and old woman she believes to be her parents. She is terribly sad because in the country she spends her days singing with the birds. In the city, she no longer sings. In the city she pines for the birds. She sits in her bedroom looking out of the window. Concerned for her, the old man and woman buy the girl a yellow bird.

The girl soon realizes that, just like her, the yellow bird never sings. She asks the bird, “Why don’t you sing?” and to her surprise, the bird answers her, “I’m not supposed to be in a cage. Why don’t you sing?” Together the little girl and the bird help each other learn to sing again. The bird finds her song when the little girl sets her free. The girl finds her song when the bird teaches her to fly with a song in her heart.

All the children in the classroom, save one, were flying like the little girl and the bird. “I have a song in my heart,” he insisted, “and I’m not flying!”

“Close your eyes!” someone suggested. “Then you’ll hear your song better. Then you’ll be flying!”

He closed his eyes, arms flapping, and a smile replaced his pout. “I can fly!” he exclaimed and swooped above the treetops and soared into the clouds. A little girl soared over to where I was sitting, perched and whispered to me, “Flying is easy with a song in your heart.”

Yes. Yes, it is.

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Allow The Silence

Posted on February 5, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Aldous Huxley

There are few things more satisfying to me than closing the studio door, picking up a large brush, turning the up the volume on the music, and giving over to the forces that want to find expression through me. The night before my latest trip, without really meaning to do it, I turned from my computer, saw the canvas stapled on the wall, and the next thing I knew several hours had passed, the music was rattling the windows, and both the canvas and I were covered in paint (it’s why I stopped buying new clothes…). It had been too long since I gave myself over to the call.

I used to draw everyday. It was my practice, my imperative. In recent years I’ve moved on to other practices. I write. I facilitate. I walk. I find the quiet. And then, like a starving man who stumbles into a feast, I disappear without warning into a painting gluttony. It is a different kind of quiet, ferocious, vibrant, and necessary. There is no thought; my body takes over and the painting comes through: silence in the center of a hurricane of movement and sound. When finally I step away from the canvas and come back into my body, I discover an image in front of me. It is less correct to say, “I did that,” and more correct to ask, “What just happened?” I’ve spent hours of my life standing in front of paintings that I just painted, thinking, “Whoa. Look at that!”

Once, many years ago, Jim looked through all of my recent work and asked, “What is the significance of the three balls in your paintings?” I had no idea what he was talking about so he pulled out of the rack ten paintings, lined them up, and showed me that each had three balls as if some unseen figure was juggling them. I was gob-smacked. I studied the paintings for a few minutes and said, “Whoa. Look at that!” Jim laughed.

The silence is not empty; it is full. It is rich and vibrant. The silence is what happens when we get out of our own way, open to the forces, and let them come through. Words like “art” or “transformation” or “perspective” or any other word can’t contain all the meaning that becomes available when we learn to step out of the way and allow the silence.

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