Metaphor | The Direction of Intention

Exit The Smelter

Posted on September 20, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

Soon I will be closing down my studio of the past 3 years. A lot of life has happened while I worked from here. I made a lot of great art in this space. Some of the most significant moments of my life happened in this studio. I lost and found my soul (poetic but true), was gifted with a special shade of turquoise, received a message across time from a harper that knocked the air out of me for weeks, finished writing a book, dreamed for hours at a time while losing all of my illusions. It has been a refuge and at times a home. It is more than a space to paint!

There are over 100 studios in the building – it has a long (and dark) history. Many years ago it was the Immigration and Naturalization facility. The 2nd and 3rd floors were detention facilities for people attempting to enter the country. Dipping sticks in tar made hot from the sun, the detainees wrote their names on the walls of the courtyard. They didn’t want to disappear and scratched a record of their passage with the only tools available. The people that renovated the building were wise enough to preserve the proof of life. I like the idea that artists now occupy the building. The history isn’t being erased but explored, honored, challenged and informed.

During the era that it was the INS building, the 4th floor was actually an assay office. Citizens carried their gold nuggets to the 4th floor to be weighed and exchanged for dollar bills. They rode an elevator through the detention center to arrive at the assay office. My mind swims with metaphors.

My studio space is on the 4th floor and was, at one time, the smelter room. It was the room where the gold was melted, the impurities burned off, and the raw nuggets transformed into bars. In preparing to leave I can now look back and see that I was in the perfect space. The heat of the past year burned off more than a few layers of impurity and I barely recognize the person I was when I first rented the studio. I feel thoroughly smelted.

Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness ensues. It follows. It is a decision. It is not something you pursue but something you feel after the pursuit. Gratitude is very much the same. It follows the heat. It becomes available when the heat of transformation has fired. As I transfer my studio to another place, closing down this era, I am eternally grateful for the meaning I am now able to make from my time smelter.

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

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, check out my new comic strip Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Filed under: Gratitude, Metaphor, Truly Powerful People | 2 Comments »

Step In Front Of The Canvas

Posted on September 16, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

I used to stand in front of a blank canvas, clear my mind, and look for the painting that was waiting for me to draw it out. Mostly, but not always, there was an image waiting for me. It was like a very shy animal staring back at me. I would coax it forward and it would slowly reveal itself to me. The act of painting was the act of following the signals. If I moved too fast the image would retreat. It drew me out as I drew the image forward. As it advanced, coming into the light, the image would shapeshift. It would try to frighten me. It would test my agility and capacity to pursue it. Finally, after it had tested my respect for it and gained respect for me, the image would rest, give up the chase and open. In that moment we merged. I was the art and the art was me. Many hours would pass in a single moment. Time was no longer fixed. None of the usual rules of life applied.

This sounds like a strange and reactive process until you consider that I spent days stretching and preparing the canvas. I prepared myself, too. I opened the portal and chose the moment to step in front of the canvas, brush in hand, and issue the call. Sometimes the animal that came forward was aggressive, sometimes magical, and sometimes swift. Always it was dedicated to opening a portal in me. Art is like that. Art opens portals in people.

Today I know without doubt that the world has at last become my studio. Each day is a blank canvas that holds a unique gift and demands one from me in return. It is a portal that I open that, in turn, opens me. It calls me to the center. I’ve spent a lifetime preparing this canvas. Each morning I step forward into the day and so begins a unique relationship with this vast field of possibilities shimmering in front of me – as it teases forward the vast field of possibilities within me. Life is like that. Life opens possibilities in people.

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

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, check out my new comic strip Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

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Live The Metaphor

Posted on August 25, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

884. 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’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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Use All Of Your Colors

Posted on August 12, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

873. 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’m tired today and getting ready for travel. Actually, the last time I truly got ready for travel was in December when I left my last apartment. To travel one requires a stable place to leave. I’ve been traveling all winter so in truth I’m not getting ready for travel I’m preparing to shift locations. I am my only constant and isn’t that a great lesson to learn!

Over these months I’ve unloaded most of my possessions. I have my paintings and my books. I have a few treasures from friends. I’ve eliminated most of my clothes. I am light in the world and it feels good. For me, times of great change have always come with layers of stuff (literal and metaphoric) dropping off. It has happened so many times now that I recognize it like an old threshold guardian. “Ah,” I say, “time again to let go.”

In these times I am always reminded of what’s important and most real. I spent the day with friends. I talked to people I love. There is nothing better. I’ve been thinking about the last chapter of the book Siddhartha: an old man in a shack by a river. Metaphors upon metaphors upon metaphors – nothing is permanent. What matters is this moment and this is no longer and abstraction to me. It is not a cliché. Walk out of your door for a year and after a few months you will know what it is the live in the moment and recognize that all you have is a moment. Even if life looks like the same thing day after day it is not but it takes old eyes to see the impermanence in everything.

I have had the gorgeous opportunity this past year to have no patterns. Life today bears no resemblance to life yesterday or tomorrow or last year or next week. I work. I draw cartoons. I listen. I consider where to stay tonight. I eat when I am hungry. There is no day-to-day rhythm to even the most basic of my needs. I’ve never been happier. I’ve never felt so much terror, laughter, grief, joy…, all the colors of life are on my palette and I have a big brush and nothing but canvas in front of me.

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Seek The Key

Posted on August 6, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

For the next few days I’ll be at the gathering of my clan. My papa turns 80 so I’m reposting from the archives. This one was post 407:

I found a key today. It was on the sidewalk. It was a skeleton key, antique and mysterious. “Now here’s a story,” I said to myself. A lonely key is a beginning of a mystery tale.

Finding a key is different than finding a button or a toy. The story of a lost key points to treasure or secrets or diaries. A key is a guardian, a gatekeeper, so finding a key can be like finding a genie’s bottle. What requires locking implies value.

The flipside can also be true. Malidome Somé wrote that a society that needs locks on its doors is a sick society. When you cannot trust your family, neighbors, and community the society has disintegrated: the real value is lost when the society resorts to locks.

This key comes to me at a time when I am unlocking life patterns, seeing my life, past-present-future, through new eyes. My experiences of the past several months have worked like a key unlocking new chapters in the book of, “How did I get to this place again?” One question illuminated; many more beckon.

I hear Megan’s voice announcing, “metaphor alert!” Yes, indeed. Isn’t it the mystery that keeps us vital? Isn’t it the search for the keys to ourselves that drive the quest?

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Release The Following Wake

Posted on July 20, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

“Have you ever noticed how the ferries in Seattle never come directly into the dock?” Skip asked. We were riding the ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco and it was moving along at a fast clip. “Pay attention to this ferry. It will slow and nearly stop and then make a turn before it docks.” Skip watched me watch the ferry. He was right. It nearly stopped and made a turn before docking.

I looked at Skip and he laughed at my confusion. “The water displaced by the ferry would smash the ferry into the dock if it went straight for a landing. They have to slow and turn to release the energy of the wave. It’s called a ‘following wake,’” he said. In other words, the displaced water, the wake, has such force that it would push the ferry into and smash the dock. In order to dock, the ferry first needs to attend to its momentum. It need to deal with what it has created. Now there’s a metaphor!

In the past six months I have displaced a lot of metaphoric water. I did not know about a following wake and have splintered plenty of docks. I tried to go straight into my landing and found myself being carried further than I intended. No amount of brakes will help when being pushed by a following wake. Good intentions will do nothing to mitigate the damage to the dock. The wave doesn’t care. It is energy in motion and does what energy is supposed to do when released. It transforms. It changes shape. It is equally destructive as it is creative and the energy does not make that distinction. Destruction and creation are false separations necessary only to we storying humans.

A few days ago Barney told me that water carries the memory. He told me that water brings up the memory from the deep. “Air is changeable. Water carries the memory,” he said. I couldn’t help but combine the notion of a following wake with the idea that water carries the memory. Memory is a powerful wave, a following wake and if it is not attended to, if it is not dealt with, its force will smash you into the dock. Take a moment. Slow down. Turn ever so slightly so the memory wake can release, and then you can move slowly into rest.

During this week Skip, Barney, and Daphne gave me a lifetime of incredible gifts. And without my “knowing,” they showed me how to put my hands in the earth, to slow down enough to feel it, and while I was sitting in the present moment my following wake released its energy. I turned ever so slightly as the powerful wave passed me by. Now I can safely go home.

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Enter The Cathedral

Posted on July 18, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

848. 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 stood and watched the dragonflies at the pond. One came to visit me and I remembered a dragonfly a year ago that rested on my shoulder and stayed with me for nearly an hour. It was a harbinger of change. It comforted me and I knew that everything would ultimately be okay. That dragonfly was purple. The dragonfly today was vibrant orange and reminded me of a dragonfly statue that decorated the sill in a room that will always be sacred to me. Dragonflies have been with me all year.

Daphne caught up to me and gave me a large piece of obsidian. Barney looked at it and said, “The native people wouldn’t have use for this. They only used the pieces that were harder, blacker. They used the pieces that could hold an edge.” I thought it was beautiful: sienna, grey and speckled white. It was radiating the heat of the sun and also vibrant with the energy of the volcano that produced it. Elementally, it was fire and I didn’t want to let it go. I held it to my solar plexus and the dragonfly hovered with me. “I am in the most beautiful place on earth,” I thought as I looked up the hill at the vine terraces. I was standing at the bottom of a basin that forms the Benziger winery. It is a biodynamic farm. It is an energy vortex; a very powerful place and you can feel it pulse in you if you stand quiet and feel it. As Barney said, “This place is the cathedral.”

One of the Hermetic Principles is, “As above, so below.” Here, at the winery, it is not an abstract concept but a concrete, living dynamic. The roots of the vine are equal in weight to the parts that we see above ground. Unless of course the ground around the plant is subjected to weed killer or other additive chemicals, then, the plant protects itself. It cuts itself off from its deeper root. It cuts itself off from the capacity to thrive and cannot pull the nourishment from the earth. “The metaphors are everywhere,” Barney said. I was grateful; for once, it was not me seeing the metaphors. “People are like the vines,” he said, “Try to kill the weeds or cheat the natural process and they cut themselves off from deeper nourishment. Survival is the best they can do.”

Earlier I stood in a natural ring of redwoods. I stepped into the ring and it took my breath away. Daphne sat down. Barney smiled and said, “I knew you would love this place. This is your place. People call this the faery ring. It’s for air spirits.”

I am air and water and today I held obsidian (fire and earth). The dragonfly, vibrant orange and yellow, the color of flame, flicked around my shoulder and the past month of my life suddenly made sense. I held the obsidian closer and was quiet for the first time in months.

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Take One Single Step

Posted on July 5, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

836. 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 am thinking today about loss. Every path taken leaves a life path unexplored and therefore unknown. Sometimes that feels like loss. Sometimes it feels like extraordinary loss. Sometimes the grief of the loss is crushing and it reduces you to nothing. And, it is from nothing that the new has space to take shape and grow. It’s a cliché until you live it.

A simple dip into the thesaurus gives me four options: Damage. Defeat. Bereavement. Deficit. The dictionary tells me that loss is a fact: the fact of no longer having something. I think the dictionary is wrong because it assumes possession. It assumes that the loss is a “thing.” Loss, real loss, has nothing to do with possession.

A year ago I sat on a lakeside beach in New Hampshire. I was alone and had a troubled heart because I did not want to do the thing that I knew I needed to do. I did not want to start walking the path of loss. Donna emerged from the woods and sat beside me. She is wise and somehow knew what I was struggling with. She helped me see that my reticence was about the hurt that my choice would bring to others. She helped me see that the hurt was necessary and would begin a path of growth for all involved. When I left the beach that day I knew what I had to do and although it took a few more months to work up my courage, I did it. And the trail of loss began. The trail of growth began.

Little did I know that the trail would take me to a loss at the far end that would be greater – exponentially greater – than the loss that began on the shores of the lake in New Hampshire. Along the way, each successive loss has been like a layer falling off, like the rings of a tree dropping away until only the core remains. This last and greatest loss-layer has brought me to a core. My core. There is no more armor, no more deflection, no more pretense, no more masking, no more illusion. There is only this raw exposed core and an intense amount of gratitude for the first step, for Donna coming out of the woods and all the guides and friends that appeared along the way, and mostly for the clay that for a brief and special time formed a container for heat, healing, exploration, laughter, and a desire to learn to pray. It is in that desire that a new step beckons. It is a call that requires one single step out of this loss and into the space that the new has space to take shape and grow.

Filed under: Metaphor, Random, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: grief, growth, loss | 1 Comment »

Step Into Nonsense

Posted on June 25, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

828. 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 took a break from work today and turned on the radio. The first words I heard were, “Is the government doing enough to stop intelligence leaks?” It’s an old joke but it got me anyway and I laughed heartily. Governing is hard. However when the same people who got embroiled in the debate about whether or not pizza is a vegetable are the crew with their finger on the scary red button, it is an important question for the public to ask: Is our government doing enough to stop the intelligence leaking from the ears? And, more to the point, is it a slow leak or do we need to pull off the road and change the intellectual tires?

In all fairness, I am drawing cartoons today. On these days everything becomes fair game. I look for the ridiculous in everything, especially myself. I have been on a literal and metaphoric walkabout for months. The more I try to make sense of things the less sense I make. Truly. It is like a mathematical equation. Try to make sense = no sense. Perhaps there is no sense to be made. There are only choices. And when the available choices make no sense it is time to put on the cartoon artists eyes. Or, it is time to stop trying to do anything and sit still. The intelligence has long since leaked from my tire-brain and I am miles from the nearest air pump. I am like a cartoon character that tries to clean the house and ends up making a mess of everything. Dr. Suess would love me. Lately I have Cat In The Hat tendencies.

There is a moment in the Sisyphus story when Death knocks on Sisyphus door and in a grand moment of tricksterism, Sisyphus chains Death to a post. With Death held captive all motion stops and the world begins to suffer because of it. Sisyphus has no idea what to do so he sits. He does nothing and considers his options. He comes to see that his choice is really between two types of death. The first is death by all things known. This is the death that most people choose. It is death by boredom, slow and predicable. It is to hang on for ten years until retirement. It is an imagination killer. The other kind of death is to step into the unknown. It is unpredictable, fiery, and fast. This type of death fuels his imagination. It runs wild. He chooses the unknown, the death that brings life. He releases Death from the chains, unleashes Death on himself.

The metaphor is clear. When transition comes knocking and we choose to hang on to what we know, intellectual and spiritual death will come slowly through boredom and control. Let go, step off the edge, embrace the unknown and the death will come quickly but so too will the transformation. It’s a cycle. Life feeds life. Winter only looks like death when, in fact, it is a necessary part of the cycle of life.

On the surface it makes no sense to unlock Death. It makes even less sense to keep Death chained up and continue the suffering and boredom. None of the choices makes sense because growth is never in the direction of the known. Growth has nothing to do with sense. Growth is always on the path through the unknown.

Filed under: Edges, Emergence, Metaphor, Story, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Root And Reach

Posted on June 19, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Here’s a simple image that came to me from Megan-the-brilliant. She and I have been having an extended conversation about roots and hope. She told me that roots are filled with hope. The green plant that grows from the hope-root is an expression of faith. Hope reaches into the earth providing a sturdy basis for faith to reach into the sky.

Both are nourished in their reaching. Hope is fed from reaching deep into the warm, fecund earth. Faith is fed bountifully by opening its green leaves to the sun and drinking deep draughts of light. The earth nourishment is released into the sky while the sunlight is pulled into the earth via the hope-root.

One cannot live without the other. They are, in fact, not separate even though it would seem that they reach in opposite directions and are nourished from seemingly different sources. The separations do not exist. The root-hope and plant-faith are in fact a single organism – as are the earth and sky. The separation lives only in our language and necessity to distinguish the parts.

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