Metaphor | The Direction of Intention

Try It And See [David’s blog on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on August 5, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

If, like me, your were born without a green thumb and are adept at withering even the hardiest of plants, I offer this handy solution: grow basil and mint. Basil and mint are intrepid and prolific. They will grow beyond their borders even in the bumbling care of the below-average gardener. They will make any thumb feel green, green, green!

There are rippling benefits to the illusion of green-thumb-success brought about by basil and mint. They incite belief that I, too, might someday be a better gardener than I previously understood. Basil and mint help assail the idea that green plants are a mystery never to be solved. If I can grow basil, maybe I can grow tomatoes, too! Or jalapeno peppers! And, if I am successful with a vegetable or two, maybe I will green-thumb my way into flowers! I might bring forth some color and beauty into the world!

What if this is not a one way street? What if, as I tend basil, mint, peppers and tomatoes, they tend me, too?! (Let’s face it, some questions deserve double punctuation even if Ms. Hardesty would have circled my double-punctuation and drawn a frowny-face next to it.) Maybe basil and mint are like the kindergarten teachers of the garden. Maybe their whole job is to instill the thought, “Yes I can!” – in every thumb. “You can do it!” chirp my basil and my mint.

“Maybe I can do this,” I think as we harvest the basil and tomatoes for our pizza, the mint for our sun tea.

It occurs to me, as I rub a basil leaf and savor the scent, that all of those years directing young actors new to the stage, that my job in life might have been the same as basil and mint. How many times did I say, “You can do it.” How many times did I watch the vibrant blooming of a “Yes I can!”

“It’s all a laboratory,” I used to say. “Try it and see what happens.”

And isn’t it lovely that this wise old universe tossed me into a garden and suggested I take my own advice? Isn’t it profound that, as a first step to address my dedicated-disbelief-in-my-capability, some wise soul suggested that I start this life-experiment with basil and mint?

*****

(a note about the current state of the nation and the world: today I simply do not know what to say. There is fire. The ocean’s are heating. River’s are drying. Crops are dying. And, “Shell reported a massive surge in profits, posting second-quarter 2026 adjusted earnings of $9.84 billion, more than double the amount from the same period last year.” What is there to say about people setting fire to their neighborhood and then finding pleasure in profiting from it?)

read Kerri’s blogpost about BASIL

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Filed under: Creativity, Flawed Wednesday, Identity, Metaphor, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, basil, belief, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, encouragement, experiment, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, mint, story, studio melange, support, the melange, try, Yes | 1 Comment »

Unwelcome Party Advice [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on August 3, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

This past week I’ve been revisiting a well-worn simile: It’s like trying to change the tire while the car is still moving. Life doesn’t stop until, well, it stops, so in reality, all of life’s required tire changes happen while the car is still moving. Or, to hammer the point, life is what’s happening while changing the tire. Or, to ask a perfectly reasonable question: why not pull over and attend to what needs fixing? That just might extend your life.

These thoughts are the main reason I am seldom invited to parties. Mostly people simply want commiseration and cocktails when complaining about the difficulty of changing their life-tire or wishing that life would stop long enough to get out the jack. They do not want to be questioned about their refusal to pull over or to be reminded that life never stops (until it stops).

On the upside, I have learned to listen to my own unwelcome party advice. Last week we had “a hell of a week.” The inclement weather met hard deadlines, high emotion and a Dogga health scare. We are now old enough not to resist pulling over when the tire wobbles. We have become adept at resting or, more to the point, not fighting the car when it needs some attention. And, when needed, we can do repairs on the fly. We travel with a big roll of Gorilla tape and the faith that there will be a mechanic just-round-the-bend.

The trick is to suspend all thought or expectation of a distant destination. Sometimes recovery is the route. Sometimes recovery is the destination. Sometimes the expectation of driving while attempting to change the tire is the very thing that needs fixing.

read Kerri’s blog post about RECOVERY

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Filed under: Merely A Thought Monday, Metaphor, Navel Gazing, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, attention, change, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, destination, fixing, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, life changes, recovery, resting, story, studio melange, the melange | Leave a comment »

Read The Rings [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on July 24, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

“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.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE STUMP

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Filed under: Edges, Identity, KS Friday, Metaphor, Transcendence, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, democrat, dictator, fact, history, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, Lost Cause narrative, perseverance, progressive, story, studio melange, the melange, truth, white nationalism | Leave a comment »

The Clouds Part [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on July 9, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

In Seattle, after weeks of being shrouded in clouds, Mt Rainier would suddenly appear and people would exclaim, “The mountain has come out!” I almost wrecked my car the first time I saw it. Living now as I do, near the shore of Lake Michigan, when on a clear day we walk to the park or the beach and look south, it is possible to see the tallest buildings of Chicago. I think, “The city has come out.”

Unlike Mt. Rainier, a formidable presence towering into the sky, Chicago appears as a distant mirage. A beckoning.

Kerri has her entire life kept a daily calendar that doubles as a journal. Her calendar makes it possible for us to look back in time and re-member when memory has scrambled experiences. This past weekend Dogga turned 13 years old and we were reminiscing about the events that led us to suddenly have a dog. We were fuzzy on the details so Kerri fetched her calendar and we found ourselves reliving our initial meeting, my near spontaneous move from Seattle to Kenosha, and the moment on the road trip between those two cities, driving a Budget truck loaded with paintings, that we saw a sign for “Aussie pups” and decided to stop. We revisited each day in that wild progression and marveled at how much we’d forgotten or rearranged in our minds. The clouds part. Our life together towers and we are amazed.

What of the road ahead? It is a distant Chicago. I remember my grief on the morning after the election. The ugliness that loomed was hazy on that morning and has become crystal clear in the subsequent months. Masked thugs hauling people into concentration camps. The suspension of due process and habeas corpus. The utter corruption of the Department of Justice and FBI. An all out assault on the vote and right to protest. The collapse of the two party system, the rule of law and co-equal branches of government. The unmasked and unbridled profiteering of a president, his family and his party.

Kerri’s daily calendar entries rarely chronicle the political chaos but captures the details of our passage through it.

We’ve learned much about the underbelly of our nation. We’ve learned much about the bright lights and courageous spirits pushing back while holding the torch of democracy high, inviting hope and lighting a path through this dark time.

Someday, perhaps 13 years from now, we will have grown fuzzy on the details, and will pull out Kerri’s calendar and revisit these days and remember how the people of this nation came together to secure their democracy against a fascist near-takeover. That, at least, is my hope, my dream for our future. The clouds will have parted and we will ask, “Do you remember how the nation came out?”

read Kerri’s blogpost about DISTANT CHICAGO

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Filed under: DR Thursday, Edges, Metaphor, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, chronicle, corruption, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, democracy, diary, fascism, government, hope, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, memory, story, studio melange, the melange | Leave a comment »

All Feminine [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on July 7, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

If the sun is symbolic of male energy, Apollo and his chariot, then the moon is all feminine. Artemis. Selene. Isis. Parvati. Yemaya. Durga. Cihuacoatl, Kali. Mary.

The moon provides a symbolic-something that the sun does not: it changes.

While we use both the sun and the moon to mark time, the moon shapeshifts in her cycle-path around the earth. She waxes and wanes. Hers is a more complex symbology. She will have you listen to your intuition. She will ask you to close your eyes and feel. She will point you in the direction of your heart. She will receive your yearnings and your whispered prayers and hold them close until you are ready to live them. She will slip through your fingers. She will have you drop the reins and allow the horse to run.

Not so much the sun. He’ll send you outside to play. He’ll send you to school to develop your reason.

I wonder at the long-ago people who looked to the sky and understood the direct relationship between their survival and the primal forces called sun and moon. The stars. They slowly developed their relationship and participation with these energies, recognizing the movement of the celestial forces that also moved within their bodies. They associated. They identified. They engaged.

They symbolized, assigning identities and attributes that aligned the deep mystery of their existence with the celestial bodies that oriented them to the seasons and cycles of life. They mythologized. They worshiped. They personified, projecting themselves into the dance of it all. Storying.

Yin and yang. Outer focus and introspection. Birth and rebirth. Male and female in balance.

Theirs was an experience of direct connection. Their symbols were not intellectual abstractions like ours. Their symbols were alive, open gates to the mystery. They cast themselves as part-of rather than as removed-and-above-it-all. Their relationship with the crescent moon or the summer sun would not allow them to treat the earth as resource to be exploited. They had more respect for themselves than that.

They did not fear the power of the feminine moon. They did not fight to control the tides.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE MOON

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Filed under: Identity, Intuition, Metaphor, Two Artists Tuesday, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, connection, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, feminine, identity, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, masculine, moon, story, storying, studio melange, sun, symbol, symbology, the melange | Leave a comment »

That “Something Bigger” [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on June 26, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

Sun through chives. I found myself staring at this photo-prompt this morning. Normally I would catch a spark from the prompt and be off and writing. Not today.

My thought-void is not the fault of the photo-prompt. The exhaustion from the news of the day has caught up to me. It happens. There is nothing normal about deporting black and brown people who’ve fled violence and found a safe home in the USA. There is nothing normal about stripping people with disabilities the support that affords them a life at home and meaningful integration into society. I could go on and on. I wonder if we-the-people are even close to grokking how far we’ve descended in normalizing the violent rhetoric spewing from this administration? It is not only the rhetoric that is violent.

And so I stare.

Sun through chives.

When I am stuck I generally stir my pot by investigating symbology. When asking about symbolism, one is actually asking about a relationship between people and their “something bigger”. For instance, I just learned from the Old Farmer’s Almanac that, historically, bunches of chives were hung around homes and gardens to ward off evil spirits or negative energy. How did people from our past come to associate chives with protection from the likes of Stephen Miller? I’m contemplating sending a ton or two of chives to Washington D.C.

I also just read that in ancient times to the Chinese, chives were associated with spring festivals and represented vitality and the cyclical nature of life. Renewal. Purification. Roman soldiers ate chives because they believed chives could “conjure courage”. Do you suppose the republican congress would gnaw on chives if I sent them personalized bundles?

Now I’m contemplating sending chives to every corner of the nation, to every household. I’ll include a note: For courage and renewal. Place this between you and your television, wave it at your phone when watching the news of the day.

We would do well to revivify our relationship with our symbology. The Liberty Bell. The Eagle. The meaning sewn into the stars and stripes. E Pluribus Unum. The Statue of Liberty. The Declaration of Independence, after all, is much more than a document.

There is great power in the symbol of the simple chive. There is great power in every symbol if it still connects – in a real way – in a meaningful way – to that “something bigger”.

The sun through chives.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes or streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blog about CHIVES

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Filed under: Identity, KS Friday, Metaphor | Tagged: artistry, chives, courage, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, protection, purification, renewal, story, studio melange, symbol, symbolism, the melange | 1 Comment »

Embrace The List [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on June 25, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

The rain was a visitor that stayed too long. In the evening we walked to the lake shore to wave goodbye and to make sure it was really going this time.

Earlier, when the rains came, we built a channel of towels to guide the river in the basement toward the drain. It’s protocol. The towels were stationed in their basket, freshly washed after their last call of duty. The fans were also ready for quick deployment. I was amused at our automatic response to the downpour. No words needed to be exchanged. We knew what had to be done.

A raccoon pulled back the roofing material on the sunroom roof and ate the tar. At least I think it was tar. It did not look appetizing to me but I am not a raccoon or an expert on raccoon dietary choices. I admit that a tar snack surprised me so I’m adding it to the ever-growing list of things-I-do-not-know. I did, however, know the storm was coming so we clamped the loose sheeting back in place. We need a sunny day or two and a YouTube lesson to make a full temporary repair. Our quick fix mostly worked. Mostly.

We live in an old house. In a few years we will celebrate its 100th birthday. When I first moved in I thought I should try and make everything perfect. I’d never owned a house before. Kerri was patient with my efforts-at-impossibility and finally convinced me to relax. “There’s always a list,” she said.

It turns out that it’s a great life philosophy, too. Relax. There’s always a list. Do what you can do when you can do it. It doesn’t hurt to have the towels and the fans ready. And, a few clamps and a few boards. They just might keep the rain out of the sunroom or the raccoon at bay. And then, enjoy the rain. Above all, remember to expect a sunny day.

Nap With Dog-Dog & BabyCat, 36″x48″ mixed media

read Kerri’s blog about RAIN

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Filed under: DR Thursday, Metaphor, Random, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, ingenuity, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, lists, old house, rain, relax, repairs, story, studio melange, the melange | Leave a comment »

There Is This [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on June 19, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

Trees breathe. In the daylight hours they “inhale” carbon dioxide and release oxygen into the atmosphere. At night, they breathe in oxygen and release carbon dioxide. “…trees absorb vastly more carbon dioxide over their lifecycles than they emit.” (AI)

The leaves of our aspen tree, Breck, pull water up from the root and release it as vapor through her leaves. Transpiration.

It is everything that climate change deniers do not understand. The rain is not separate from the tree or the soil or the sun. It is a single dynamic breathing cycle of life. Human beings, no matter their opinions or hard-held-belief, are part of and not separate from this cycle.

Interconnectivity is a reality that we seem unwilling or unable to comprehend. Our resistance to this interplay, this relationship, this inhale and exhale, is recursive, a fractal that runs through and through our identity. It is our Achilles Heel, our greatest vulnerability. We story ourselves as superior, separate, above it all.

This morning I read this from Jame Baldwin: “It is so simple a fact and one that is, apparently, so hard to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.” What we do to others, what we do to our environment, we do to ourselves. Do we not see this simple fact demonstrated on our political stage and in our public discourse each and every day? We are witness to a debasement cycle that seems to have no bottom.

And, as I write, I realize it is also true, perhaps more obvious but somehow not as visible, that we are witness to a community coming together, working hard to upright itself, a community reaching to fulfill its ideals, even in the midst of the authoritarian ugliness, a community forged (again) in the fire set by those who desire to melt down our democracy.

There is this, perhaps the central promise of democracy: “If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.” (Jame Baldwin, The Fire Next Time)

Isn’t it beautiful, this promise of democracy? We can be free only when we set others free. We can only prosper when we prosper others. This earth supports us when we support this earth. Is this simple truth capable of opening our eyes?

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE LEAF

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Filed under: Identity, KS Friday, Metaphor, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, democracy, freedom, interconnection, interconnectivity, James Baldwin, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, story, studio melange, the melange, transpiration | 1 Comment »

Perhaps The Sun [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on June 16, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

These soft petals belie the harsh thrumming that they survived. Most of the peonies did not fare well in the wave after wave of storms. Petals on the ground, stems and leaves drooped, heavy from the rain. It was mere happenstance that this peony was a late bloomer. Unlike its fellows, it opened to the world in the aftermath. The sun returned and it stood tall and responded. A single witness to the wreckage. Compassion made it gentle.

We took a walk in between the storms. Most of the neighborhood was out, ostensibly to survey the damage but I know better. Storms bring people out. People who ordinarily do not think to stop and talk will spend hours after a storm or quake comparing notes, sharing experiences. Witnesses to the wreckage, many people in our neighborhood, people we did not know but who seemed to know us, stopped us to expressed condolences for our tree. We swapped stories. We expressed concern for each other. “Do you have power yet?” Politics were nowhere to be found. Compassion made us a community. Gentle. Caring.

When we arrived home I asked Kerri, “Why does it take a storm to bring out the best in people?” Like me, she had no answer. I’ve experienced this tiny miracle before, after 9/11, after the Northridge earthquake…many times. It is in our nature to help one another when mother nature shakes us awake.

But what of the times when we wreak havoc on each other? The same rule does not apply. The daily mass shootings divide us. Our leaders offer empty thoughts and prayers. We make war on each other; is that not an unnatural disaster worthy of bringing people to the streets? Ukraine. Palestine. The Sudan. On and on and on. Age after age. Man made disasters seem to anesthetize us or at the very least to confuse us. They evoke the opposite response: they numb us. Divide us. Instead of compassion they conjure antipathy. Madness. Is that in our nature or is it unnatural?

It seems we return to our senses when the scale of our man-made disaster takes on the scale of a storm sent by mother nature. Is it the scale of destruction that at last wakes us up? An earthquake or tornado is out of our control: is that why we soften and take to the streets to find each other? Wars and guns and supremacy-fantasies are within our control: is that why we harden and turn our backs on the pain until the wreckage is so undeniable that we are forced to say, “Enough!”? We awake, at least for a short time, from the fantasy?

Doesn’t it feel as if this nation is at long last waking up? Is it finally – finally – too much? Perhaps the sun is calling us out of the maga-fantasy-storm, to witness the wreckage, to reach out our hands and ask, “Are you okay?”

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE PEONY

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Filed under: Identity, Metaphor, Perspective, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: artistry, community, compassion, concern, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, division, human nature, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, nature, story, studio melange, the melange, unity | Leave a comment »

One Of A Kind [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on June 15, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

“When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety…” ~ Maya Angelou

The house shook. “What the hell was that?” she asked. Later, I noticed bits of plaster on the black couch, fine white dust on the hardwood floor, shaken loose from the ceiling. Our great old maple tree split and fell.

“Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us…”

It was the first blast of wind, the leading edge of a storm that lasted no more than a few minutes. It was enough. “My children climbed in that tree,” she told the crew boss sent to clear the mighty limbs from the road. The crew cut a piece for her to save. These burly men were kind.

She told me stories over the buzz-roar of many saws as we peered out the window, witness to the quick dismantling of her guardian. Heartbroken. The crew was methodical, efficient. The storm had taken more than a few of the old guard trees and they needed to beat the next wave of incoming storms. To them our great tree was one of many. To us, it was precious, one of a kind.

It is serendipitous. Maya Angelou wrote her poem, When A Great Tree Falls, to process the loss of her mentor and friend, James Baldwin. On the day our tree fell I was reading The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; a book about our nation’s inability to deal with its history. He was a mighty voice, a giant tree. On the morning our tree fell, I read his prophetic words: “The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

The end of an era. A methodical and efficient dismantling of our great nation made possible by the spineless. To them our great nation-tree is one of many, easily disassembled. To us, it is precious, one of a kind. Democracy.

Our tree shook the earth. “What the hell was that?” Plaster fell like snow from the ceiling.

“Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.” ~ Maya Angelou

“We can be. Be and be better.”

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE GREAT TREE