Creativity | The Direction of Intention

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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Truly Powerful People (479)

Posted on July 1, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

479.
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 will come as no surprise to you that I have a twin. He is 9 years old, a toe-head blonde, sports a world-class smile, and he can easily out run me in our perpetual game of chase. He is a kind and gentle spirit so he loops back making it possible for his old-guy-twin to stay in the game. His name is Ian and he reminds me what is truly important in this world of too much busy work, worries and woe. He reminds me to play-to-play; he reminds me that the whole point of life is to become better and better at playing.

Recently our game took us to the river. He was already hiding when I arrived. He was concealed within a shallow pool; only his eyes above the surface, watching for the moment I might see him. It was such a clever hiding place that I passed him several times before catching a glimpse of my alligator twin. He popped from the pool and the chase was on. We dashed across sand bars, splashed through pools, leapt over sticky bushes, and finally collapsed in the shallows, buried our hands in the sand, anchors in the gentle current. That was the moment we transformed into water bears. No salmon was safe.

Ian reminds me of what it was to be young. He brims with delight. His cup is overflowing with hope and imagination. When we play our game there is nothing more important in the world; the concerns of the day vanish, the worry-attachments fall away. We run. We laugh (I wheeze). We imagine. We create.

We’ve played our game in the halls of a school, over and around a boardroom table, circling and circling his house, and now we’ve carried it into the Platte River (my favorite iteration). Our game can be played anywhere, anytime. If you happen to be standing where we are playing you will become a potential hiding post. Stand still. Imagine that you are a tree or a statue. We will. Better yet, spot your twin, and join the game.

Filed under: Creativity, Gratitude | Tagged: create, play | 2 Comments »

Truly Powerful People (478)

Posted on June 30, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

478.
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 is the day before I travel. I’ll be on the road for ten days and I’m excited to go; there is a bit of gypsy blood in my soul and it has been too long since my last adventure. I like these packing days because the usual patterns of my life suspend. I prepare; the abstractions fall away, my actions become concrete, there is a specific tangible achievement. That is a rare thing in my life. I generally live in the land of the ambiguous; transformational work is not for the engineer-minded. It is a life built upon discovery and clearing debris. No amount of math will solve for the equations. So, packing a bag for travel is nice. I know when I’m done.

Preparing to go is a combination of cleaning and reviewing. The work of planning the workshop is done. The notes and drawings that litter my desk and circle my chair are now “inactive” – so I can sort, file and throw. I’m an out-of-sight-out-of-mind guy so if I file things prematurely they disappear from my mind forever – thus the nest that rings my chair. The piles are necessary. They are living-thought-articles and although I recognize that it might look like a mess to some, it is never static clutter to me. It is a thing of beauty. It is a moving map of thought. My desk and the surrounding space are like a Jackson Pollock painting: a record of the motion of my work, a paper symphony of the inner workings of my heart and mind. Lovely chaos. Swirling patterns of possibility.

On packing day everything simplifies…. I will take it or I won’t. Do I need it or not. As I sort my piles and put them away I am aware that I am also cleaning the canvas. Not only am I preparing for travel I am preparing for the next “painting.” Making space for the next project. Inviting the next wild idea to come out of the cave and romp with me. Packing day is a perfect ritual of closure, necessary for opening to the new.

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Truly Powerful People (415)

Posted on April 28, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

415.
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 spent the afternoon with Paul Gauguin. He looks good for a guy that died well over a hundred years ago. Imagine leaving that lucrative career as a stockbroker and dedicating your life to painting! An especially ridiculous leap when you consider the man didn’t touch a brush until he was a responsible adult with a family and a mortgage. Imagine looking at your life and finding it meaningless and then imagine doing something about it. “People must of thought that you were nuts!” I said. He arched his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders, and spit a fleck of tobacco on the museum floor.

In the exhibition program I read, “…the key feature in his personal mythology is the constant yearning for an exotic paradise.” I looked at Paul. He rolled his eyes. “That’s what I thought,” I said. Imagine looking at your culture, your society and thinking, “We are off the rails.” Imagine knowing in your guts that somewhere on the planet people must still see through sacred eyes and then imagine doing something about it. Imagine wanting more from life or, better yet, imagine life wanting more from you and then imagine showing up with everything you’ve got!

He’d rolled a cigarette and looked to me for a light. I’m not a smoker so I couldn’t help him but I did indicate that there was no smoking in the museum. He didn’t say it but I could see disgust in his eyes at my need to follow the rules. “They’re trying to protect your paintings!” I said in my defense. He lit his cigarette and looked around a bit. I followed. “What does Gauguin think about his own work?” I wondered. He took a bit of charcoal from his pocket intending to correct something in one of his later works. “Paul!” I hissed with some indignation. He smiled and winked at me as if to say, “Gotcha!”

We stood together and looked at the last painting in the exhibit. It was shaky though the color was confident. He painted it not long before he died. He sighed. “You never got there, did you?” I asked. Through narrowed eyes he looked at me as if to say, “You know better.” “It’s the wrong question, I know,” I said. “But my god, look how hard you tried!”

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Truly Powerful People (411)

Posted on April 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

411.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

At the beginning of her one-woman show Amy sings an invocation from Homer. It is a song to the muses. She tells us that we cannot understand poetry in the same way that the Greek’s understood it. The poem, she reminds us, was calling forth the gods. The poem was literally re-creating the world through the telling. The story was living tissue that connected the community to its root, it’s ancestry, its descendants, its identity. The people present with the poet were the burning point, a link in a chain that stretched back beyond memory. Listening was recreating. Listening was embodying. The poets were the rememberers; they were the vessels that held the communal story and to tell it was sacred rejuvenation.

Amy’s play is beautiful in that it begins with a question many of us ask, “Who am I?” This is a question about meaning: how do I give context and meaning to this world and where do I fit into it? Her search takes her through memory and emergence and leads inevitably to the present moment. Past. Future. Present. She winds a path through great thinkers, re-members her intuition, and at last steps toward confusion and words of body and fire, words like ‘ecstasy?’ “Where are my ecstasies?” she asks. Not just one ecstasy, many. The Greeks were not Puritans.

Her question directs her to the sea. In a dream she stands in the surf, looks out and witnesses the old gods, the Titans, rising from the water and coming toward her. And then it hits her. “Now I understand,” she gasps. “We call the gods. They don’t call us.” The Titans arise because she needs them in her “forward moving feast of the self.” We call them with our infinite capacity to create, with the exercise and expansion of our creative spirits, with our appreciation of the beauty and debt to the natural world that sustains us. For a moment, a brief moment, Amy was the priestess/poet singing her song of invocation, her song reaching back to the Greeks and beyond, her song stretching forward to another woman in the distant future who realizes that the Titans are waiting for her call.

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Truly Powerful People (410)

Posted on April 23, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

410.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Andrew and Andre led us in a workshop about innovation and the brain. Andrew (the right brain artist) led us through a variety of improvisation exercises helping us identify different ways of knowing and responding. Andre (the left brain professor) would step in at intervals and explain what was happening in our brains. The upshot: take the pressure off and follow your gut (it’s your brain talking).

I liked the idea that the different hemispheres of my brain might be two different personalities and appreciated even more that they might be named Andrew and Andre. In my brain, Andrew and Andre are circus performers. They work well together because they are vastly different; they illuminate each other because they see the world from different perspectives. The real Andrew is quite tall while Andre is much shorter so, of course, my circus performer right brain is the tall clown while the circus performer left brain fits easily into the tiniest clown car. Clown Andrew is happy; clown Andre is much more serious (they are eastern European clowns, not the white face Ringling Brother types). Clown Andrew is innocent and playful and adventurous and has no notion of failure. Clown Andre is prone to stepping into obvious holes so consumed is he with thought. He looks as if his girlfriend just left him or as if he is always on the edge of a migraine headache. Clown Andrew’s clothes are too small. Clown Andre’s are way too big. There. No need to dissect my brain, I’ve already done it for you!

Andre (the real one) told us that the prefrontal cortex of the brain was like a stage; sometimes it gets blocked and needs to be cleared or reset. He taught us an exercise for clearing the stage: set a timer for 5 minutes and during that time do something else, something physical: do the dishes, run up and down the stairs, clean the windows, take a nice walk and think about anything other than what you were trying to do before the reset. When the timer goes off, catch the first thought that comes to mind. He said, “Often it will be a very good one.”

“This is not a new technique,” he said. “Thomas Edison used to sit in a chair and hold a large ball bearing in each hand. With his arms dangling by his sides, he’d have placed a metal plate or bucket on the floor beneath each hand. He’d close his eyes and relax, allowing his mind to drift. Soon he’d be on the edge of sleep and one of the ball bearings would slip from his hand and clang in to the dish, waking him. The first idea that popped into his mind would be the path of his pursuit.”

The brain science is catching up with classrooms and cubicles. High performance is produced in states of relaxation, strong offers are intuitive as much or more than they are intellectual: remove failure from the equation and excellence is possible. Intuition is finding a way back onto the mountaintop with Intellect and isn’t it poetic that brain science is the path that she is taking?

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Truly Powerful People (391)

Posted on April 4, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

391.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Today, during my walk, I was taken by how many people had stacked stones on the beach; little mini-cairns sprang up overnight! The seawall was festooned with seashells laid in patterns. Someone gathered feathers from the seagulls and crows and ducks and geese and create a small maze in the sand – an installation of black, white and blue. The driftwood was upended and rearranged. The design brought to mind Easter Island or Stonehenge.

It reminded me of an email from Horatio. Recently, without coordinating, Horatio and I watched the same movie, The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet cave paintings. I was so moved by the paintings, what we know and don’t know about how they were made, that I wrote a blog entry. Horatio, excited by the serendipity of having been similarly impacted by the same film on the same night, wrote me an email that I adore. Here is an excerpt:

“….What struck me was the obvious wonder of creation, that elemental thing you and I and every other artist feels when the work is genuine, that clearly burst in a relative blink of an eye into human life.. …The raw power of that creative act obviously made the cave a kind of holy place, and the fact that over millennia (millennia!) other Picassos emerged and picked up the torch (literally and figuratively) and added their images is maybe the most profound of all the facts the movie told. The power of representation, mirroring the world, telling a story, and passing it on. Boom. Suddenly you have power, as a man, as a woman, as a tribe! Wonder. Awe. The Mysteries!

The movie made all the work of the last millennium or so seem a bit smaller in a way, with our classes and our Photoshop and our internet and Shakespeare’s royal patrons and The Globe and those Italians and their papal audience and the camera obscura and fancy paints that those Dutch guys used in their well-tailored clothing. But it also made it much, much more grand as we see how we involuntarily continue to seek and represent our subjects and images and the stories that they drive as we continue to live on the earth. The movie laid the elemental creative act bare, with its mysterious but clearly profound repercussions to the tribe. We can’t help it. We keep picking up the torch.”

Horatio is exactly right: we can’t help it. We stack stones. We face the driftwood to the sea to stand guard. We see the feathers and must arrange them for no other reason than we must arrange them. We draw in caves for reasons beyond reason. We can’t help it.

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Truly Powerful People (362)

Posted on March 6, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

362.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

As I move toward the center I find a most profound stillness and a very special part of me: pure curiosity. It’s pure because it wants to experience simply for the sake of experiencing. It is at one moment the most human part of me and the most transcendent. Experiences powered by a pure curiosity need no translation. It is life as poetry.

As I occupy my center I also recognize that there are very few things I know with certainty. One of my certainties is this:

All humans are creative; it is what defines us. It is neither our opposable thumbs nor our walking legs that make us human. It is our insatiable curiosity and desire to see what will happen if…. Curiosity is the center.

Curiosity is the essential element that excites and ignites creativity. “What if…” is at the heart of every love story and every story of fear. It is at the center of every human story including the inner narrative: the story-you-tell-yourself-about-yourself. Curiosity is elemental to happiness: a curiosity satisfied, that savory sweet moment of understanding, the space between inhale and exhale, the perfect rest before the next “What if….”

It is impossible for you not to be creative but it is very possible to experience yourself as not creative. If you have labeled yourself as “not creative” it is a good bet that at some point in your life your curiosity got you into trouble: you went where you weren’t supposed to go, said what others would not say, sang for the joy of it and got slapped: it’s a good bet your curiosity got blanketed with sticky shame and you learned to put a lock on it. You developed an especially critical judge to make sure curiosity stays in the shadows.
The path to full expression and the recovery of your creative experience lies through curiosity. It is waiting for you at the center. All you need do is ask, “What if…” and follow curiosity’s lead.

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Truly Powerful People (270)

Posted on December 6, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

270.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

In every vital creative process the first creation is safety.

In the theatre there is a mantra: control your control-ables and let the rest go. Most people with creative blocks are trying to control what they cannot control, like other people’s opinions, and not controlling what they can control, like their own thoughts and opinions. Another uncontrollable that people always try to control is the quality of an outcome; they will sacrifice their health and happiness for the product or the appearance. Mastery comes when the focus is placed on the only thing that truly can be controlled: the quality of the process. Great process will always lead to expansive creativity. So, the two things you CAN control:

• Your thoughts, opinions and perceptions.

• The creation of a quality process.

The two things you CAN’T control:

• Other people’s thoughts, opinions, and perceptions.

• An outcome or result.

Creating safe space begins with controlling your control-ables and letting the rest go. Ultimately this is a process of 1) drawing boundaries and learning to hold them, and 2) choosing where to place your focus and energy. Valuing your opinion over the opinions of others and learning to create a process as opposed to push for a result is core to a generative creative process and how you establish safety within yourself.

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Truly Powerful People (269)

Posted on December 5, 2011 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Once you recognize that you have the capacity to choose your story, once you realize that you have choice in where you place your focus, you can begin to unlearn some of the limiting patterns that come with an outcome focus and hyper-investments in control.

We live in a culture that generally values intellect and shuns intuition. We’ve buried our dreaming beneath the safety of data. Play this game: place your focus on outcomes and witness what happens to the voices in head. Shift your focus to the “space between” (the relationships), focus on creating a quality process and witness what happens within your body and your inner monologue.

Your intellect feeds on the illusion of control. The intellect likes the idea of outcomes, the satisfaction and safety of the delusion that the train will pull into the station and you will live happily forever after. No mess. Check the box and move on to the next thing on the list. Your intellect will have you believe that you are one thing, a single identity. Stray from the safety of the prescription and the inner judge will pound you back into the box and have you coloring between the lines.

The intuition does not think its way into limitation; it feels its way into freedom. Intuition likes to wander over the next hill to see what is there. Intuition engages with what is there, not what you think is there. In a healthy creative process, when your focus is on the process, the intellect is in service to intuition. Focusing an impulse is a radically different action than controlling an impulse. Intellect wants to control, intuition wants to create. Learn to distinguish between focus and control and you will be on the road to becoming truly powerful.

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