Posted on October 3, 2018 by davidrobinsoncreative
The first time we visited Hippie Tom’s Serendipity Farm, Kerri said, “It’s like being inside someone’s disease.” The farm is a hoarder’s dream. Stuff piled upon stuff. Stuff packed into corners, hung from rafters, tucked under shelves. Most of the stuff is exposed to the heat and cold, rain and snow. Having the stuff is more important than the caring for the stuff, a 3-D philosophical statement. Certainly there are treasures to be found, curiosities that are heartier than the mildew and rust or perhaps have not yet been on the farm for a cycle of seasons.
In the barn there is a room for chairs. Chairs stacked to the ceiling though I use the term ‘stacked” loosely. Piled, perhaps. It reminds me a scene post tsunami, what remains after the waters have retreated. The artifacts of lives-now-gone. It would be a brilliant set for a play, metaphors abound. The sickness of acquisition. Or, perhaps it is not sickness so much as the inevitable destination of stuff after the story connection is lost.
The power of story. The value is never in the stuff, it is in the shared narrative invested into it. A diamond has no value without people to appraise it.
Once, I visited Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio in Abiquiu, New Mexico. It was spartan. And I loved it. A few chairs. And, oh-my-god the paintings. The view and vibrant connection to the natural world. It was like being inside someone’s happiness. So many years after her passing it felt alive – a place of life. That’s my appraisal.
Hippie Tom loves his farm, I’m sure. As for me, I think I’d rather walk the path with Georgia. Less stuff. More life.
Posted on September 17, 2018 by davidrobinsoncreative
Angels come in all shapes and sizes and Jonathan is my latest proof. Appearing from nowhere, disappearing into the ether, impossible to nail down on what he does each day (“I spent the day packing,” he says every-single-time-I-ask), he has an uncanny way of dropping a much needed thought-bomb at just the right moment. Boom.
Lately, Kerri and I have been steeped in the angst and frustration of the latest inevitable drought that comes with an artist’s life. The well has run dry. There is no rain in sight. The Artist’s Almanac forecasts drought. Feeling defeated we showed up at rehearsal wearing hang-dog faces and found angel-Jonathan already there, practicing his bass. He greeted us with laughter and a smile. He regaled us with hysterically funny stories of his weekly foibles. He got us laughing. He transformed our self-pity and woe into a conversation about necessary change and growth.
That’s when he velvet-hammer-smacked us with the metaphor: trees must split their bark to grow. There is pain. Matter. Of. Fact.
Contrary to popular mythology, angels do not take away your pain. They do, however, help you see it for what it is: an experience of life. They punch through the horror story spinning out of control in your mind and guide you back to the present moment. There is growth so there are unknowns. There is today. “Isn’t it great!” he laughs. “You two kill me,” he says smiling.
Posted on September 13, 2018 by davidrobinsoncreative
a morsel from ‘instrument of peace.’ kerri calls this one ‘aspen stand’
It’s a common misperception. The notion that with accurate information, with clear data, people will change their perceptions/behaviors accordingly. They won’t. They don’t. In my past-life-consulting I said (too often), “If it was true that information changed behavior then no one on planet earth would smoke cigarettes.” We are not as rational as we like to believe. Our investments have little or nothing to do with the accuracy or truth of information.
In the same vein, e-connectivity does not necessarily equate to relationship. Connectivity is not relationship. As we are learning these days, people can be hyper connected but share no common ground. The endless capacity for connection comes with no guarantee of substance or shared truth. Swipe left. Click ‘like.’ Connected, but connected to what?
Relationship, on the other hand, is a living, moving, breathing shared story. It is shared experience. It comes with varying points of view. It needs no explaining. In relationship, disparate viewpoints are aimed at a shared center.
And, so, a metaphor. A painting: Aspen trees, we’ve learned, grow in “large clonal colonies, derived from a single seedling, and spread by means of root suckers; new stems in the colony may appear at up to 30–40 m (98–131 ft) from the parent tree. Each individual tree can live for 40–150 years above ground, but the root system of the colony is long-lived.” The root system transcends the individuals. What a terrific metaphor for a healthy community. The individuals come and go but the root, the shared root system, lives on and on and on.”
How appropriate (to me) that Kerri chose this morsel from my painting Instrument of Peace. She gave it the title, Aspen Stand. Peace, like every real relationship, is an aspen stand.
Posted on September 11, 2018 by davidrobinsoncreative
Someone snapped their fingers and it is fall. Less than a week ago we skirted the Des Plains river trail, hugging the shade. We’d underestimated the intensity of the heat-humidity combination punch. “Are you dying?” Kerri asked. I nodded my head, too hot to answer. This morning, the air is cool and we are pulling out our flannel shirts.
With fall comes a sweet melancholy that usually creeps in slowly but this year, absent of any transition, I awoke fully awash in the seasonal sorrows. It is, oddly, like a warm blanket. An old friend that calls, “Remember me?”
Kerri tells me this melancholy is the feeling of time passing. It is the season of standing still and remembering. It is a reach to the past when the past feels like the autumn sun on your face. Turning toward the warmth, eyes closed, basking.
Haven’t you heard your elders say that the older you get the faster time moves? This morning, pulling my flannel shirt around me, I know that it is true. Time races. Time is relative to “the long body,” the entire span of a lifetime. With so much time behind me, so many memories, the road traveled seems to have passed in a blink. Life happens in the blink of an eye.
There’s no better reason to stand still, eyes closed, and reach for the sun as its rays reach for me.
Posted on September 10, 2018 by davidrobinsoncreative
“It is a sacred art that deals with revelation rather than observation.”~Jamake Highwater, The Language Of Vision
Tom used to say, “A writer writes and a painter paints.” Those are wise words grounded in the mechanics of art. Simply show up. Do the thing. Nuts and bolts. That’s the first step. Show up at the easel, on the dance floor, at the piano, at the writers desk and begin. Tom was a teacher and over his life heard an overabundance of excuses, reasons ‘why not.’ Said another way, he advised his students to stop thinking about it and do it. “Get out of your own way,” he’d counsel. That’s the second step. Horatio calls this step ‘trust-your-work.”
Show up. Do the thing. Get out of your own way. Trust your work.
And, what happens with trust? When the artist can get out of his/her own way, the sacred art, the art of revelation becomes possible. It’s a beautiful paradox. Show up and get out of the way. And, between those two actions, those crackling oppositions, a greater force, inspiration, gathers and releases like a storm.
Posted on August 17, 2018 by davidrobinsoncreative
This piece of Kerri’s could be the soundtrack to the past half decade of my life. Almost five years ago I moved from Seattle, WA to Kenosha, WI, and, during that time, I have been cleaning out, clearing out, paring down, letting go. Pulling weeds.
Some weeds are easy to pull. Others have roots that seem to have no end. They require multiple pulls, daily in some cases. They are great teachers of persistence.
I love PULLING WEEDS because it is gentle, a cycle. In the midst of the weeds it is warm and hopeful. It ambles. It reminds me that there’s no sense trying to control things or to race. There is much pleasure to be found in the tending – and perhaps that is a good rule for a happy life. Let go of the control and tend. Attend.
Feel the sun today and begin by PULLING WEEDS with Kerri.
PULLING WEEDS on the album RIGHT NOW is available on iTunes & CDBaby. Purchase the physical CD’s available here.
There are a few consistent thought-practices that cut across most spiritual traditions. ‘Just Shrug’ is our version of one of those universal practices. In some traditions Just Shrug it is called ‘detachment.’ Or, spun another way, it is known as ‘take nothing personally.’ Lilies of the field. Centering, grounding, presence, stepping back, quieting the mind,…, are variations on the theme. Practice not taking the bait of the crisis-of-the-moment. “There are 7 billion people on the planet,” Quinn used to quip, “and none of them are thinking about you.” Just shrug.
I laughed aloud when Kerri dashed off this Two Artists graphic because it looks like an operator’s manual illustration for detachment. The little arrows are diagram-perfect instruction for how to begin the practice. Just shrug.
Once, during a particularly dreadful and seemingly eternal period of lost-ness in my life, fully indulging in my panic of not knowing what to do or which direction to go, Rob gave me some world-class advice. He said, “When you are lost in the woods the best thing to do is stop and sit still.” In other words, the first thing to do is to stop doing anything at all. Just stop. The first step in finding where you are is simply to stop trying to be somewhere else. I laughed out loud.
Be here. Now, you know where you are! The problem of lost-ness is solved. Breathe a bit. Take in the unknown sights and listen. Direction and/or clarity are more likely to become available after a good still-sit.
Posted on January 11, 2017 by davidrobinsoncreative
A view from 30,000 feet (a meditation on metaphor):
Joe used to say that the universe tends toward wholeness. “Tends” is a precarious word of movement, like a tree that leans. Still, to me, Joe’s sentiment – his metaphor – is hopeful. He might have said that the universe tends toward confusion.
Chris and Janelle are starting a new theatre company, The Seadog Theatre Company. They are dedicating their work to exploring stories of alienation and reconciliation. Both alienation and reconciliation are words of movement. The first, alienation, is a movement away from wholeness (toward confusion?). The second, reconciliation, is a movement toward wholeness. Push away. Reach across.
Chris and I agree that all stories, from the deepest mythology to the most whimsical lampoon, are explorations of alienation and reconciliation. It is the human journey, it is humanity’s journey. It is the human experience. Journey is a word of movement, from here to there.
The Big Bang is science’s great narrative of alienation and reconciliation. Out of nothingness (formlessness) in a violent explosion of energy, all forms took shape. Stars, meteors, planets, atoms and oceans and daisies and Dog-Dog. Energy expressed in form. And then, so the narrative goes, form returns to energy. Like the tides going out the energy of the explosion will eventually turn, exhausted, and fall back toward the center in the Big Merge.
The eye blinks open, a universe comes into being. The eye blinks closed, a universe disappears. The tide comes in. The tide rolls out. It’s a cycle of movement. Metaphor.
“Your words are alienation and reconciliation,” I wrote to Chris, “mine are separation and unity. Same thing, yes?”
I’ve never been comfortable with religions because they often claim their metaphors as fact – and that freezes movement. For instance, Adam and Eve were Big-Banged out of the Garden of Eden for eating an apple from the tree of knowledge. One bite of the apple blew their minds open to differences. Separation. It is the experience of birth into this whacky world of duality and confusion. And just like all the stars and planets and oceans and daisies of the field hurtling through space and time, it is a story meant to help us seek wholeness as we stride though this field of opposites.
The universe may tend but we can intend. We can create. We can choose. We can point our ships toward alienation, we can cleave our world into us-and-them, run in fear and separation. Or, we can make conscious our stories (as Chris and Janelle intend in their theatre), we can walk the middle path (a potent metaphor), and recognize that the separation is at best temporary and arbitrary. Like the stars and planets and oceans and daisies, we will also exhaust the force of our explosion into form and fall back into the Big Merge.
Posted on December 10, 2016 by davidrobinsoncreative
It occurs to me now that all along I’ve been asking irrelevant questions. Or, perhaps framing my questions too narrowly. For instance, years ago I went to graduate school to study systems because I wanted to follow a question that reached deep into my life and identity as an artist: can a mythology be rekindled once it has died? Art, after all, is one of the primary life-keepers of a culture’s story and the beating heart of the story is its mythology. And, according to all indicators, our mythology is mostly dead [as Joseph Campbell said, for evidence of our mythological demise, all you need to do is look at the news]. So, the younger version of myself wanted to understand the purpose of my life as an artist if, indeed, I was in service to a dead mythology. Heady questions, yes? Relevant questions?
In the early 1990’s I was invited to a photographer’s studio to see the “newest thing” in photography. The photographer had a new “program” called Photoshop. Before my eyes he “photoshopped” me into a picture, a place I’d never before visited. Today, all of this seems commonplace. Now, any 5 year old can manipulate an image but at the time a photograph stood for proof that something had actually happened. A photograph could not lie. It was evidence of truth. That day, standing in the photographer’s studio, I realized that the old reliable anchors for truth no longer existed. What was our anchor?
The truly significant events in our lives rarely come in with a roar.
We’ve been hearing a lot lately about fake news – as if this was a new phenomenon. It brings to my mind a terrific book written in 1985 by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death. Here’s bit from the first page:
“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
I suppose fake news refers to something wholly concocted but I’d argue that when news agencies pander and promote themselves to conservative or liberal viewpoints, when ratings drive content, it’s all fake news. News with an agenda is…not news. It is, however, dangerous to a democracy and no longer free (as in free press, a cornerstone of our democracy). Historically, newspapers have always had a point of view but there was some attention paid to what was printed as news. Opinion was confined to an editorial page. When the line between true and concocted is blurred, when a populace cannot discern between entertainment and substance, it no longer has the capacity to make sound (read, “informed”) judgments. Worse, it is gullible, gossip-eaten and infinitely manipulate-able. It is, as Neil Postman wrote, entertaining itself to death.
I recently wrote about the absence of recognizable communal anchors (mythology) and the dangers of a community with nothing but the soft soil of belief and opinion as its driver. Is planting a personal-truth flag and defending its territory all that is left to us?
What else can we do? Now, there’s a relevant, open-ended question! Roger once told me that he would never be able to understand suicide. He said something like, “In that moment, rather than take your own life, why not do anything else? Why not make any other choice?” Another relevant question!
What else can we do? In the face of our own entertainment-driven suicide, why not do anything else? Turn off the blather, go outside, meet your neighbor, tell stories of your children or your ancestors. If common ground can’t be found it can certainly be created. Inhabit something bigger than opinion. It’s less entertaining but certainly more useful. Great art – no matter the form- lives in those bigger fields.
The Direction of Intention 