Posted on September 25, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative
I’ve read that mourning doves are “strongly monogamous and often mate for life.”I’ve also read that, when one of the pair dies, “The survivor often sits in a nearby tree or roof and coos repeatedly, calling for a partner that will not answer.”
Lately, each afternoon, the mourning dove arrives to hold its vigil. It sits on the same wire in the same spot. Each day we watch for it and when it arrives, we hold vigil with it. We watch. We know that its partner will not appear. We wait for it to know. It is silent.
“It’s so sad,” Kerri whispers. I nod.
This dove reminds me of the last time I saw my great-aunt Dorothy. Del had died suddenly and she was heartbroken. It was the first and only time I saw this powerful mountain woman wearing a dress. Emerald green. I almost did not recognize her. As a boy I’d followed her up mountains, unable to keep up. In her grief she was barely standing. She passed a few months later; a broken heart.
I had my annual physical yesterday. The doctor asked me if I had a will. Then, she asked if there was someone who knew my wishes. I thought of Kerri waiting for me in the reception area. I answered easily, “Yes.” For a moment I was overcome with gratitude; I have not always been able to answer, “Yes,” so I repeated my answer, “Yes.”
Yes.
Sitting on the examination table, I shifted my weight, the paper crinkled. I thought of the mourning dove, the weight of grief sitting on the wire. Dorothy. Loneliness. Heart break. Gratitude. Kerri waiting for me. The paper crinkled. The doctor listened to my heart.
Today, the mourning dove did not return. We held our vigil for it none-the-less.
Posted on September 18, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative
Lessons from the garden, vol. 1, episode 11. Title: Every Plant Has It’s Place.
When you buy a plant the little tag stuck into the soil offers location advice and watering preferences. Sun part shade. Full sun. Keep soil damp. Water only when soil is dry. And, as helpful as the information is, it is generic at best. I’ve learned that plants are like people: thriving is based on individual preference. Not all sun-part-shade locations are the same.
For instance, we have a pot of Impatiens that was in the perfect spot according to its tag. 48 hours after coming home with us it was sad indeed. We moved it 3 feet to the left to a spot where it would have 6 more minutes of shade each day and a better view of the tomatoes and it boomed. It sings arias. It is a boastful Impatiens daily testing the limitations of its pot. Such a small change for such a mighty response.
I’ve already reported about moving of the very-depressed-sweet-potato-vine from the ladder to Barney-the-piano and how it perked up immediately. Last season the sweet potato vine adored the ladder but this sad character was not happy with its locale. The move to Barney was balm to its Gilead. The amount of sun-to-shade is the same, the amount of water has not changed. Only the view is different. And, I suppose, it sits on top of Barney’s lid as opposed to being suspended from a rung. Perhaps, like me, this sweet potato vine was afraid of heights? No matter. Now it is happy and wrapping Barney in vines of sweet potato love.
The sweet potato vine move left an empty space on the ladder. It was late in the season and we found an almost dying fern at the nursery. Half price. They wanted to sell it before it was in full demise. We brought it home, used shower curtain hooks to suspend it from the ladder. Attended to its obvious need and the next day it was radiant. It simply needed a new location called “home” and a bit of personal attention.
I learned the same lesson when I was working with the schools. Not all kids are desk-sitters. Kinesthetic kids need the freedom to move or to run a lesson through their fingers. For them, a desk is despair. Simply standing up and stretching their limbs transformed frustration into happy exploration.
I learned the same lesson in the theatre. The best stagemangers I worked with were previously unhappy actors. A simple move a few feet across an imaginary line made all the difference. Plus, they learned early in their new location/identity that the snacks are much better at the tech table.
Like their human counterparts, every plant has its place. The solution to the droop need not be dramatic or complicated. Thriving might be just a few feet away.
Posted on September 4, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative
Siddhartha finds illumination sitting by the river. He realizes that it never stops moving. No two moments are the same. Just like life.
Narcissus and Goldmund seek the same thing. Illumination. One studies from the confines of a monastery. The other goes into the world and makes a mess of things. Which one do you suppose finds what he seeks?
I did not grow up around great bodies of water. I know the mountains so they do not intimidate me. The-lake-that-looks-like-an-ocean, on the other hand, is daunting. Alien. Each day we walk the path by the lake and I am taken by the mystery. I admire the sailors who seem so at home, so at peace and in their element, sailing on the mystery-water. I wonder if the power of the mountain seems unforgiving to them.
My dear Endless Enigma texted. His daughter is getting married. His son has already married but I could tell from his note that, for a dad, this passage is different. A father does not give his son away. Why is that? In our tradition, a father walks his daughter down the aisle to join her hands with her soon-to-be-husband. It is a ritual. He gives her away. For the father, the marriage of a daughter is a letting go. Has it always been this way with sons and daughters?
This water runs deep.
I cannot help but ask questions of tradition. For me, questioning tradition seems to be a tradition. It is perhaps why in my past life I needed to stir the pot. I needed to run at the edges and jump.
Time keeps moving.
Sometimes I wonder: did really I have a plan for my life? How did the path I walked compare with the clean-penciled-plan I once scribbled in the notebook? Have I at long last let go of my plan or am I making it up as I go?
I have at the very least learned that I control almost nothing. The river is so much bigger than I am.
I now see that I spent an inordinate amount of time swimming against the river. That was exhausting. I have discovered that it is so much better to give over and let the river carry me. Saul-the-Tai-Chi-master used to say, “Let the energy move you.” Kerri says, “Gear down”.
I do not really understand Narcissus and a life of study in a monastery. Goldmund, on the other hand, I know like the back of my hand. One can study the river from a book or one can go to the river.
Posted on August 28, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative
One of the first things I noticed on the day I met Kerri, the day that I first stepped foot in the house, was the abundance of peace signs. There was a peace sign dangling from the rearview mirror of LittleBabyScion. There was a peace sign decal on the back of LBS. There were peace sign necklaces hanging from the bathroom mirror. Peace sign ornaments hung from doorknobs and in front of windows. Peace signs were integrated in the kitchen and the living room. She had surrounded herself with an aspiration, a dedication to peace. The house felt like a sanctuary.
We’ve added a few more since my arrival. Peace has found its way into the garden, prominent in winter while in the summer it peeks from behind the tall grasses.
The peace symbols that surround us in our sanctuary home have taken on new import lately. Actually, it is not new import, it is renewed import. An aspiration for peace is much more than quaint. During the Cold War, when a little version of me was crawling beneath my desk, people took to the streets to protest very real threats. Nuclear holocaust in the world and racist inequity at home. It is ironic that the man currently pretending to be president has willy-nilly tossed us into a war with the excuse of preventing Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon. A made-up boogeyman. A non-existent threat. And, the children in Iran who perished died at our hands and had no time to crawl beneath their desks.
Masked men who objectively answer only to the pretender-in-chief (not the law) roam the streets, shooting citizens while snapping up black and brown women, men, children and old people, whisking them away to concentration camps. Right here in the USA. Here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are in a war with ourselves, enacting horror on a daily basis to address problems that do not really exist but have been whipped up to divide us. To assault our peace.
Is there not an immediate need to reignite and rally behind the symbol of peace? “N” + “D”?
The elementary school children today practice a survival drill necessitated, not from a foreign enemy, but from an internal threat. A young man with a military grade weapon who has more protected rights than do the children and teachers he will kill. The desk, the door, the teacher will not protect the scrambling children from annihilation but at least their last moments on earth will be an attempt to live.
Not so long ago this nation prided itself as being a beacon of hope. We aspired to be “The shining city on the hill.” A place where people of all backgrounds might come to make a better life for themselves. A sanctuary. Although glacial, we’ve moved ever closer to the equality promised in our Declaration of Independence from a tyrant king.
Today, our national body hosts a fast-moving cancer, a tyrant-cult, that eats our guts from the inside. We have one remaining shot at survival and it is to use the only tool left to us, the primary tool of governance by the people: vote. Vote for the restoration of peace. Vote for the end of this corruption and abuse. Vote. Ducking beneath the desk and hoping that we will survive is, as it has always been, an illusion meant to distract the children, giving them something to occupy their minds before the end.
We cannot act like children. Vote. Protect your vote rather than hide beneath your desk. Is there not an immediate need to reignite and rally behind the symbol of peace? Are we not standing on deck waving our flags over and over again: “N” + “D”? Is there not an imperative to remember what we stand for, what ideals populate our founding documents? Isn’t it time to reclaim who we aspire to be?
Posted on August 21, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative
Kerri snapped this morning. “How can they support this…cruelty!” she cried. “They” are among those we call family who adamantly embrace the inhumanity of the current administration; those who vote for the cowardice of the republican congress, the enablers of the ruthlessness and corruption. Those who consider themselves righteous.
“Clocks, for some reason or other, always seem to be marching, and armies never march to anything but doom.” ~ Alan Watts via The Marginalian
This was the sentence I was reading when she snapped. I admit that I grew irritated. This is a conversation we’ve now had a thousand times and I was not ready to have it yet again. It is a conversation that only marches to doom. Loss. I suppose it’s like grieving a death; it’s not one-and-done. We lose people in pieces, again and again and again. Sometimes the grief jumps out of the forest. An ambush. Kerri was waylaid this morning.
Every story needs an antagonist. How painful and confusing is it when the antagonist captures the heart and mind of someone you love? “How can they support this…cruelty!” she cried. In the previous nine hundred loops through this despair I’ve found flimsy justifications: “They are in the Fox News bubble,” I say, or, “They don’t really know what they are supporting because they are being told that you and I are the enemy.” I gave that up a hundred loops ago. I have no more excuses to make or rationales to offer. Those are the tools of the third child, the peacekeeper-at-all-cost.
There is no excuse. There is no rationale. There is no common ground here. The word “family” has crumbled. We distance ourselves because we want nothing to do with this level of depravity, this dedicated ignorance.
When I was in my twenties I placed the Rocky Mountains between me and my family. I had to know who I was separate from them. My mental, physical and spiritual health required distance and disconnection from dysfunction as the only route to know myself as healthy. My Rocky Mountain Rule was life-saving but required a great deal of grief. I spent hours staring into the ocean. I spent years walking the shores of The Puget Sound.
“I think this is why I love the ocean. It’s the most difficult part of nature to mess up with emblems and symptoms of man’s dissociated consciousness. It’s an environment in which the awareness of our roots can awaken, in which space (so real because of the light and color) can be seen to be joining things instead of separating them.” ~ Alan Watts
Kerri is experiencing her version of The Rocky Mountain Rule, as are many, many, many people across this nation. In separating themselves out, they are finding themselves, joining themselves. In distancing herself from this level of depravity, in placing a metaphoric mountain range between her and those who share ancestral blood, she is finding and affirming the very essence of what she believes.
In arriving unequivocally at, “I am not that,” one steps solidly onto unambiguous ground of self-actualization, “This is what I believe.” And there is no going back over the mountain. The cry, “How can they support this cruelty!” is not about “them” at all. It is a cry of love as a north star, a rejection of institutionalized hate. It is a cry of humanity refusing to enable the selfish inhumane. It is a cry filled with the grief of loss, and the utterly profound recognition of the inseparable nature of moral conscience. It is empathy that cannot ignore the pain currently being gleefully inflicted upon others. Their pain is her pain. Her pain is their pain. A joining, “…the awareness of our roots.”
Posted on August 14, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative
“An aspen root system is a massive, interconnected underground network that links entire groves into a single living organism. Individual trees (called ramets) act as above-ground shoots, sharing identical genetics, water, and nutrients across roots that can endure for thousands of years.” ~ National Forest Foundation
Our aspen tree, Breck, has just revealed a baby Breck, a tiny tender shoot reaching through the soil at the edge of our pond. We couldn’t be more thrilled.
Knowing how aspen trees propagate, we’ve been keeping a careful eye in the backyard. We didn’t want to inadvertently step on or accidentally mow any new additions. This delicate shoot makes an appearance at the time, in the same summer, that Breck has broken all records for growth in a single season. Our little aspen tree easily added three feet to its height and now we know that the underground growth is as healthy as the visible tree above ground.
Literal interconnection. Even though the aspen groves appear as individual trees, they “endure” thanks to their underground network, the reality of many individual expressions growing as a single living organism.
Are we really so different from an aspen grove?
I have read that in indigenous communities banishment is a punishment worse than death. They are closer to the realities of nature and are not so lost in abstraction. Survival is a function of interconnection, of community. To be made separate, to be rendered individual, is a death sentence.
Are we really so different from indigenous communities?
Here is my revelation of the past week. It is actually a simple thought that arose amidst all the religious fundamentalism currently run amok in the sad politics of the USA: Hate is selective. Love is all inclusive. The worship of a god of love is a very different thing than the worship of a god that selects.
Democracy is by definition inclusive. Autocracy is by definition selective.
My hope: the truth of our democratic interconnection overwhelms this sad chapter, this invasive weed – and banishes it; that our literal interconnection chokes out and summarily removes the fascist invader. And then the grove can return to the business of sharing nutrients across our roots so we might endure in health for thousands of years.
We generally keep a few sweet potatoes in the basket so we have the necessary ingredients for a spontaneous batch of our fave sweet potato black bean chili. Last summer one of our sweet potatoes sprouted so rather than toss it we planted it. The resulting vine was gorgeous and threatened to wrap the deck. We loved it so much that this summer we purposefully let one of the sweet potatoes send out alien tendrils. “It’s ready!” we exclaimed and then we dashed outside and planted it.
Someday we will start earlier in the season, planting a sweet potato or two so that we might grow sweet potatoes. There isn’t enough time between now and snowfall for a harvest. This year, like last year, the effort is purely aesthetic. It gives us yet another reason to rush outside in the morning and exclaim, “Lookit!” It is an intentional spirit-lift.
More so than any other time in my life I am aware of how responsible I am for the care and tending of my own spirit uplift. We planted the sweet potato with the express purpose of giving ourselves a reason to marvel. The more I claim my capacity to cultivate joy, the more opportunities I see. The opportunities are never grand. They are, in fact, the formerly mundane, the easily missed. We grow rosemary so we can crush the leaves between our fingers, for the pure delight of the scent. I tend the birdbath for the giggle it gives me when I spy a robin or sparrow splashing around, a kiddie in a kiddie pool. We literally take time to smell the coffee; every day.
For us, the road to fulfillment does not run through a palace or a yacht – a thing. It is the taste of mint-from-the-garden and lemon slices in the sun tea, a warm baguette and sip of wine, the orange line of day lilies, a long slow walk at sunset. Paying attention. Understanding that no day is ever the same, no moment is ever unremarkable. A sprouted sweet potato can be a source of happiness, if only we give it a chance.
It is tempting in times like these to just-try-and-get-through-it. I daily remind myself to not throw away my limited time on this earth. Rather than just-get-through I want to be fully-in-it.
No matter what devastation, what havoc and chaos the current administration wreaks on the nation, the ugliness of ICE, the incessant assault on our rights, the sunrise is not to be missed. Dogga wakes us each morning at first light. We hear his gentle clackity-clack, paws on the hardwood floor when he is awake and ready for his old-dog breakfast.
The smell of coffee brewing. The sun on my face. The taste of a tomato plucked from our vine. Fresh cut basil leaves. An evening walk through the marina. A day that I will never ever live again. I do not want to get through it. I want to immerse in it, all of it.
I want to feel enraged at the corruption and abuse. I want to feel shocked at the hypocrisy. I do not want to delude myself that it cannot touch me. Other people’s pain.
I want to fully appreciate the person who reached the top shelf in the grocery store for the elderly woman in the scooter. I want to savor the music in the park and my community that gathers to enjoy it. The extraordinary in the ordinary. The message, a reminder, chalked on the path adjacent to a bench, “Sit down and enjoy the view.” Don’t fall into the trap of just getting through. Sit down. Feel the cool breeze coming off the lake. Allow yourself to marvel at the color of the sails glowing orange and pink in the sunset.
“The “Lost Cause” is a revisionist narrative that emerged in the American South after the Civil War to romanticize the Confederacy and justify secession. It falsely claims the war was fought over “states’ rights” rather than slavery, portrays slavery as a benign institution, and asserts that Confederate defeat was caused solely by Union advantages in resources and manpower.” ~ EBSCO
In 2023 I wrote a play entitled DIORAMA that explores our nation’s inability to deal honestly with our history. Even after all of my research and immersion into the topic, I have been agog at the lengths the current administration has gone in the past 18 months to whitewash our history in order to reinvigorate The Lost Cause narrative. White supremacy cannot face the mirror of history so must selectively distort, assault and/or eliminate fact and truth.
Last week Stephen Miller labeled progressives – or anyone who does not agree with his white nationalism – as less than human. We were witness to the president of the United States call the democrats and progressives “a danger to our democracy” and dust off the tired-old-chicken-little-cry: liberals are communists! It would be sad and laughable if history had not taught us of the dangers of desperate dictators and their nationalist sycophants.
As we have previously written, a storm recently broke our mighty maple tree. Kerri’s relationship with this guardian reaches back nearly 40 years. She has a long and precious history with this gentle giant. I have only had a fragment of that time but felt deeply the loss of this near-century old spirit. It is part of our history. As I watched the crew quickly take it down, I couldn’t help but think about how long it took to grow. It seemed unfair how rapidly it was removed.
Destruction is easy. Growth takes time, nurturing, patience. Perseverance.
A healthy history – a healthy nation – relies on the strength of its roots – all of its roots. The rings preserve and tell the story of the good, the bad and the ugly. To attempt to cut out the bad and the ugliness of manifest destiny, slavery, the trail of tears…to eliminate the rings of diversity, suffrage, the struggle for civil rights…is to badly weaken the tree. Kill the history and you kill the root. Kill the root and the democracy will not survive. And that is precisely why they attack our history. To be successful, an authoritarian regime needs to weaken and then cut down the tree of democracy. Systematically. Efficiently. And the fastest route to dismemberment of democracy is to amputate its history, eliminate entirely the struggle for equality.
Of course, like our tree, they can remove the exhibits from the institutions, they can fire women and people of color, they can vilify DEI, they can ban books and force universities to suspend programs of study…but that will never cancel the truth of the history of our nation. It lives in us as powerfully as the history of our tree lives in Kerri.
The Nazis made the same mistake as did the Daughters of the Confederacy when they concocted their Lost Cause narrative. Whitewash only temporarily covers the substance; it is not the substance. We the people hold the history, not a made-up curriculum. History is lived.
We-the-people are the “burning point of our ancestral ship”and history teaches us that sooner or later, given enough time, these scrubbers of history, these fearmongers, will eventually scrub themselves. They will become a single ring in our tree, a marker of a bad time, a forest fire that we survived and transcended. A moment in time that ultimately made our democracy stronger and, hopefully, a ring that marks the time when we finally faced – without fear – the complete story of our nation’s history.
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
It used to really bother me that the squirrels ate all the birdseed, that they lapped up all the grape jelly meant for the orioles. And while I was sitting in my Adirondack chair twisting in my bother, Kerri would be laughing. “They are so cute!” she’d exclaim. One day it occurred to me that it probably felt better to laugh rather than to be bothered so I gave it a try.
It not only felt better but it also exposed the folly of my vexation. Imagine! I was putting food into feeders and exasperated that a critter was eating it. Oh, spare me from the desire to control all things!
In laughter I can see with amazement the acrobatics of these furry little ninjas. Every obstacle I erect is a challenge they accept. In case, like me, you find yourself lost in a frustrated bother, I can attest that delight is a much better use of your life than is irritation. Every obstacle they overcome is a challenge I accept. It is a dance. In delight, I have become symbiotic with my squirrels.
I can also attest that underneath all of that angst and aggravation is an attempt (a fantasy) to control the uncontrollable. It’s a fool’s errand. The squirrels will behave like squirrels. Naturally.
Humans will behave like humans. I have a choice! I can delight in the impossible or clench my fists until I am red in the face. As it turns out, an open hand feels much better than a tight fist. Naturally.
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young
*****
Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes or streaming on Pandora
