See Her Hands

Posted on August 31, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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Alan issued me a challenge today. He asked me, for a few weeks, to write about something other than the events of my day. Perhaps to write about ideas or dreams or imaginings or something that happened in the past. His challenge to me is about moving beyond the role of witness – a role I play well – and to actually inhabit the moments of my life. He asked me to intentionally be a participant more than an observer. It’s a great idea and a worthy challenge. And, I will start tomorrow. Today I have to write about Kerri’s hands.

Kerri is a musician, a composer with many albums to her credit. When she plays the piano she drops into a deep root, she grounds into her music, and a river of sound flows from her. Life flows through her. So much life flows through her that she cannot sit at the piano. She stands and life flows through her hands as sound and vibration and heart. It is her music.

The first time I met her I asked her to play something for me. I stood at the side of the piano and I watched her reach into the earth. I watched life pour through her hands. They knew just what to do. When she grounded and gave herself over to the music, her hands merged with the keys and I wasn’t sure if the hands were playing the keys or the keys were moving her fingers.

This morning while I was talking with Alan she began to play a new composition. I left the call and stood by the piano. The lid to the piano was open so I could see her hands and the hammers touch the strings as she touched the keys. I know this sounds obvious but the piano is an extension of her hands. The piano is a channel for her soul.

Later we stood on the front stoop as a storm blew through. The thunder rolled and rolled without ceasing. It was magic, something I’ve never heard before. The same power I saw in her hands I also saw in voice of the sky. I took her hand and felt the life, the thunder and the power. I felt the music. It was breathtaking.

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Live The Metaphor

Posted on August 25, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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It’s 3am and I am wide awake.

I have been goading Horatio for years to write a screenplay called 3am Man. It’s about a man who can’t sleep. He is troubled about the events of his life and his insomnia drives him to the streets and he makes a pass through the culture of the night. After months of walking through the underbelly of the world he finds peace and sleep. I think the story is Greek in scope. It’s Orpheus descending into the underworld. He’s torn to bits and resurrected (put back together again). It is Osiris, the same story from an earlier mythology. It’s a universal cycle of life.

Mythologies are not dusty old stories. They are metaphors of our personal stories, the stories of our lives. If you know how to read them they can be enormously helpful during times of being lost or alone. They can help orient you when life is spinning you around. In this lifetime we will all be torn to bits and put back together again, more aware, and usually with a new assignment. This is the story of the year past for me. I’m like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. I lost my stuffing. Now, having been torn to bits and in the process of reassembly, I can help Horatio write his screenplay because I understand.

I used to work at this time of night. I found it peaceful to paint while the world slept. It’s almost as if the frenetic psychic energy of the daylight hours scrambled me. I found peace, clarity and an open channel in the quiet. Tonight, in this quiet, I am sitting in a house that is being pulled apart, the possessions of a lifetime pulled apart, put into boxes and divided among relatives. If I understand my mythology correctly, even this process of a life torn to bits will ultimately lead to reassembly somewhere down the road. New life will come of it. Energy will take another form.

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Follow Barney

Posted on August 15, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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It’s morning and I am sitting in the sun. I have coffee. There is a gentle breeze blowing off the water and rustling the leaves in the trees above me. The shadows are dancing. In the distance I hear a train, a mower, and some wind chimes. The birds are lively and playful. There is a pond to my left with a gentle fountain gurgling and adding to this morning’s symphony.

A few weeks ago I followed Barney up the hillside through the vineyard. Barney is jolly like Santa with roots, like Santa’s, that reach back to Odin. He is filled with laughter. On our way up the hill he plucked flowers, showed me roots, talked about soil and nutrients and cycles and seasons and energy and motion and force. He taught me about polarity and balance. Midway up the hill he stopped and said, “This is what people used to worship. It is life, concrete and tangible. Now we have this abstraction called spirituality.” The penny dropped for me. It’s sacred – all of it. That is no longer an ideal. It is tangible like soil and seeds.

Once in class, after leading a meditation, Alan and I talked with the class about the purpose of meditation. The purpose is not to take you away from reality but to bring you in to presence. Using meditation as an escape, to move away from the moment, is to protect yourself from presence.

Presence is word like paradigm: it is so overused, misused and abstracted that it has come to mean nothing. Be present. Be Quiet. Be. What does it mean to be present in an urban (urbane) world with clocks in every device, lists, lists, someplace else to be and something else to buy? How can presence be anything other than an abstraction when separate from the root? How can we understand presence when we do not experience it or ourselves as growing, changing, energy exchanging, vital, inhaling and exhaling, and full of life? It’s not an abstraction if you take your shoes off and stand in the dirt, feel the breezes, and listen.

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Become Life

Posted on August 11, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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I learned a lesson again in tai chi today: stop trying to force action or push forms into being. Instead, drop into center and listen. It is in the deep listening that the path will become clear. It is in the deep listening that the clarity of action, the simplicity of impulse will be apparent.

In class we are practicing push hands, a partner exercise in which the object is to knock your partner off center. It is deceptive because the way to successfully knock your partner off center is to NOT push. It is to listen. It is to feel when they are moving off center and simply help them go in the direction that they are already moving. As Saul says, they give you their center so you merely take it. The moment you push, the moment you try to force an outcome, is the moment you will offer your center (abandon your center) and be helped off balance.

At only 2 years into my practice, I am a novice. The more experienced students say that if I continue I will in 7 – 10 years have developed a sufficient capacity to listen. I delight in this practice that acknowledges that there is no end. There is no path to expertise. There is a greater and greater capacity to move the chi and root the energy. I believe my life is changing because of this practice and the reorientation it requires.

In the past several months I have repeatedly learned that life opens for me when I stop trying to force outcomes. Life flows when I stop pushing and pulling and fretting and worrying. When I listen, feel and respond to what’s there, when I release all impulse to control, I participate. I become a “part of…” instead of a resistor or governor. Instead of blocking the movement I enter the relationship. Instead of forcing life I become life force.

There is a vast difference between the consciousness of a controller and the consciousness of a participant. A controller withholds and resists. A controller judges him or her self and, therefore, the world (good enough and not good enough are judgments and epicenters of control). A controller separates. A participant joins. A participant becomes. Life is always found in the direction participation.

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Feel The Music

Posted on July 22, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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I stood with my face to the sun on the patio outside of the training room. Barney came up to me and asked, “Why did you choose to stand here?” It felt good. There was sun and quiet. He called my attention to the tree behind me. It was ancient and I was standing just on the boundary – at the circumference of the tree’s limbs. He said, “This is about right, the perfect spot. This is how you address something sacred – never face to it but open the chakras in your back and feel it. You are feeling it.” And I was…and I could.

I wasn’t doing it consciously. The grand old tree was humming and I was drinking it in. It felt like a good back massage. I stood in that spot because it felt good. A few times in my life I have performed – telling a story with a symphony – and stood facing the audience with my back to the orchestra. The sound from the symphony vibrated my bones. It warmed me. It was a musical massage. Standing with my back to the tree was similar. The vibration was as potent but not as explosive as the symphony. It was even, deep base. It quieted my mind.

Over the next few days Barney called my attention to how I orient myself to and feel power places. This is not a trick or magic or voodoo. It is not a special skill. Anyone can feel the music of the world. It requires standing still. It requires paying attention – not with your mind but with your body. It requires openness to joining rather than the dedicated separation that we practice in our very busy urban world. It requires being in life rather than moving through it.

Stand in the river. Close your eyes. Stop listening to the “hurry up” story running through your mind. Beyond the story you just might feel the exchange, the dance of giving and receiving. As Barney said, ”Nature balances. It is all a matter of polarities and you have to know what poles you are working with.” Balance is not a state of achievement but a constant dance of giving and receiving. It is movement, pulse and vibration. It is the tide.

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Kiss The Cosmos

Posted on June 26, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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I just wrote the word “cosmos” because I wanted to use it in a cartoon and needed to check the thesaurus for alternative meanings. It turns out the cosmos is pretty much everything. For instance, as I walked across town this morning I heard someone declare, “It’s always a good time for a cookie!” Cookie. Time. Always. Good. A perfect expression of the cosmos in contemporary small talk!

Later in the afternoon as I passed the bus tunnel I was approached by two older men from somewhere in the world that I do no know. They were Sikh and trying to find bus number 150 to Renton. It took us a while to establish that it was a bus that they were seeking. I took them down into the bus tunnel and that was a great revelation to the two men. They were seeking the bus on the street! It never occurred to them that buses run under the street in tunnels. They looked with wide eyes at the tunnel traffic and were at first dubious to get on a bus in a tunnel. In a communication that was more dance than word I helped them see that the tunnel was temporary. We found the 150 bus and before boarding they blessed me. I was an angel sent to them by god. A perfect expression of the cosmos in contemporary urban kindness.

Later Alan called. He’d sent emails that never showed up in my inbox. The emails are lost in space (the cosmos). Mostly, he could feel that I needed a connection so he reached out to find me. I told him that I had become a ghost and was delighted that he found me. We talked for ten minutes or so and our conversation brought me closer to substance. Great friendship is magic that way – it pulls us from the insubstantial ethers and gives us form, shape, and identity. When we ended our call I was more human than ghost. The cosmos is energy that takes many forms and a simple phone call is, too, a perfect expression of the cosmos.

The sun was out today so on my way back to the studio after talking with Alan I found a warm brick wall in the sun, leaned against it, closed my eyes and drank in the heat. I had not a single thought in my head, just immense appreciation for the light that seeped into my body and warmed me to the core. You might say that I was touched by the sun and isn’t that a perfect expression of the cosmos. Everything is everything all at the same time – it only seems to be separate.

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Lean And Rest

Posted on June 17, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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[continued from 811, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19]

Bali Journal Excerpt #10
At lunch, Rai told me that he also had no religion and then he corrected himself. “My religion is goodness,” he said. “Dharma,” he added. “In my religion you only need do your action and god will determine the result.”

In Bali, it is common to see a woman making an offering in the middle of a busy intersection, motorbikes flying by her. Her offering is normal to them. Each morning a new flower appears in my room. I never see who places it there. In a crowded temple, a man I have never before seen leans on me to rest. It has been a long night and he is very tired. I am filled with warm gratitude for what he teaches me.

This is the final excerpt from the journals. It is the one that touched me the most almost 13 years after writing the words. I realized that I am still filled with warm gratitude. I realized that my religion to be goodness. I am learning to do my action and let go of trying to determine the result. This, especially, has been my lesson during this long winter of wandering.

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Listen To The Symphony

Posted on June 14, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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[continued from 811, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]

Bali Journal Excerpt #7
Letting go is happening in degrees: a moment of tai chi in the pavilion with Stewart, a comment from Budhi, conversations with people in the market, allowing myself to ‘not know,’ laughter with Lora – this are opening me to be present, opening me to direct experience without judgment. It is allowing me to celebrate the symphony of serendipity playing all the time in my life. Engaging with people who are supportive and not fearful or needing to stake claims is teaching me to relax. It is teaching me to let go of my need to stake claims. When I first entered the temple I was wary of imposing in the people and their right to worship. I didn’t want to trespass. The Balinese people welcome me over and over again (not just me but all of us) with not thought of trespass. I had to allow myself to be welcome. I had to let go of my assumptions of imposition.

There are two phrases I adore in this excerpt: 1) A symphony of serendipity. I am in one of those vibrant phases in which the symphony of serendipity is playing loud and with great mischief. Serendipity is a’poppin’. 2) Allow myself to be welcome. The older I get the more I recognize that the vast majority of my limitations are self-imposed.

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Walk Between The Hands

Posted on June 10, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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[continued from 811, 812]

Bali Journal Excerpt #3
Budhi told us that the split gate is like two hands praying. We stood before an ancient split gate and Gunung Kawi. He said, “One side of the gate might represent good while the other side represented evil. Or, perhaps one side was male and the other side female.” It’s a duality, I thought, assuming that I knew where Budhi was going with his description. We walked between the two gates into a courtyard. Once inside, he stopped and turned again to look at the gate. “Which side is good and which side is evil?” he asked. None of us ventured a guess. “It all depends upon your point of view,” Budhi offered. “Maybe on the outside evil is on the left and good is on the right. On this side, which gate is right? Which is left? Both sides represent each aspect. It all depends upon where you stand.” Budhi moved to the gate and pointed to the opposing faces of the gate. “Look,” he said, “these sides are smooth, like two palms praying.” He wanted us to understand that, not only was there no duality, but there was also a third aspect, the space between. This space between represented one-ness. “When you pass through the gates,” Budhi explained, “your mind should also become focused on the one-ness, on the space between. This is god.”

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Let It Flow

Posted on April 30, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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Skip and I are talking a lot about the motion of ideas and movement of information. Ideas are not fixed. In fact, collapse an idea into form too soon and it dies. Valuation in a market is a dynamic movement. It is not a fixed in time. It is motion driven by a variety of forces. Hanging out with financial folk, I learned that money grows when it moves. Impede the flow, park the money and the growth is stunted.

The same principles apply to relationship. A healthy relationship is distinct in the flow of communication and transparency of feeling. Hide, block, edit, withhold and the relationship suffers. What is the quality of movement in your life?

Many years ago I trained to be a massage therapist and I learned that health in the body’s systems is the result of unimpeded flow: anywhere there is blockage there is disease. Health is movement.

When I began doing organizational work I learned the same lesson: a healthy corporate body is the result of unimpeded flow of communication; where there is blockage there is dis-ease. Power games often take the form of communication disruption. Withholding information is a control game and weakens the organizational body.

When I began working with artists I learned the lesson again: dynamic art in all its forms is the unimpeded flow of expression; where there is blockage there is dis-ease. Kink the garden hose and pressure builds. Block the artery and heart will seize. Stilt the communication and dysfunction and power games erupt.

Inhibit your expression and you become just like the garden hose: pressure builds and the inner life jams.

Vitality in body, mind or spirit is nothing more than unimpeded flow.

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