Metaphor | The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (465)

Posted on June 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

465.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“Can I tell you a story,” Teresa asked. She is brilliant and helping me re-think and market my business. We’ve been working together for a few months. She is one of a choir of voices telling me that I am my business – it is not something I do. She is brilliant and gentle and clear and helping me work, as she says, from the inside out. I’m having some world-class revelations – and I am impatient. I want to force things into being.

“Two robins built a nest in the utility box just outside my window. My daughters and I watched them quickly assemble an amazing nest and soon there were four eggs. My nine year old was especially taken with the nest so each day we would watch for progress. An egg broke and my daughter’s heart broke with it. Later, another egg cracked and we had another heartbreak. Finally, the two remaining eggs hatched. We saw two little beaks poking up from the nest. My daughter named them Rascal and Lazy.

As we watched we saw the two hatchlings slowly open their eyes. Then we watched as they grew their feathers. They grew stronger and one weekend, the weekend that I knew they were going to fly, my daughter was going to be away from home with her father. Sure enough, the momma bird chirped from the fence, calling them out of the nest. The babies were terrified but the momma knew they could fly. And, finally, one of the babies jumped and flew. Soon the other followed. They didn’t know until they did it. How could they?

My daughter called and was sad to miss it and this is what I told her: If you only knew your nest, if your whole life was in the nest and one day you jumped and suddenly your life opened and you knew the whole backyard – and then one day you flew and came to know the whole sky, wouldn’t that be the best day of your life? Today was the best day in those little bird’s lives.”

Teresa told me her daughter got it. She was thrilled that the birds came to know the whole sky. And, I got her message loud and clear. Hatching comes before feathers. Feathers come before flying. No amount of pushing or forcing will expedite the process. In fact, if I try to skip steps, I will be as an un-feathered bird leaping from a nest. Cat food. Hearing my sigh Teresa added, “One day you will know the whole sky and that day will be the best day of your life.”

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Truly Powerful People (433)

Posted on May 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

433.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Today was lonely-odd-object-on-the-beach-and-beyond day. The morning was overcast and cool; the smell of rain was in the air. It was quiet. The tide was out and the Sound was unusually still.

As I walked my usual loop I saw, sitting all alone on a bench, a microwave oven. It’s long grey cord stretched behind it as if the oven had slowly crawled across the street and lifted itself up onto the bench to stare longingly at the sea. Since I recently fired my inner archeologist for excessive storytelling I was left to my own devices to understand how a microwave oven came to be sitting on the bench. I sat down next to the oven hoping to strike up a conversation but it was not in a talkative mood. After a while I felt oddly responsible for its melancholy so I moved on.

A hundred yards later I spied a bunch of balloons, blue and white, sitting at the water’s edge. Clearly the bunch had escaped a wedding or birthday party and had finally come to rest at the exact spot where water meets dry land. I suppose that might have been an accident but it seemed much too intentional (not to mention metaphoric) so I went to have a look. The balloons were clearly exhausted after a long flight; their once tight rubber skin was now wrinkling. The shine of festive blue and white was fading. Life, it seemed, for this tribe, had been about flight – running from a celebration that must have seemed false or like a prison. They flew rather than suffocate. I wondered if they individually or collectively had regrets but it didn’t feel appropriate to interrupt their meditation.

I arrived downtown and while walking from my studio to a meeting I passed the train station and came upon a huge statue of Anubis suspended from a crane. The jackal-headed Egyptian god weighs the hearts of the newly deceased; if your heart is lighter than a feather you may pass go and collect 200 afterlife dollars, if not, you are crocodile lunch. Anubis seemed embarrassed to be swinging from a crane. Exposed. It broke my heart to see such a powerful deity so ungrounded. I wondered what he thought about doing his heart-weighing at the portal of a modern train station. It was clearly the wrong time to ask so I walked away.

On the way back to my studio while crossing the street a man with a crazy red beard ran up to me and sang, “Do Your Life and Do It Out Loud!” A seer? A message? Personal? Random? By the time I recovered myself he had moved on. So many unanswered questions!

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Truly Powerful People (431)

Posted on May 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

431.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune – without the words
And never stops at all.
– Emily Dickinson

When I lived in Santa Maria I used to run early spring mornings between the strawberry fields. They were alive with birdsong. Sometimes I would stop my run, stand still, close my eyes, and listen. The song always quieted my mind and lightened my heart. It brought the life I yearned to create one step closer; all possibilities were within reach within the magic song of the birds.

This lazy afternoon, twenty years after the birds first taught me about incantation, I sit on the balcony with my eyes closed. My world is alive again with birdsong. It’s as if all the nation’s bird choirs have gathered in the field across the street for a hope-song competition and I have been selected as the sole adjudicator. I’m taking my time picking the winning team because I do not want this hope-fest to stop. If my heart were any lighter I might lift off the balcony and join the singing, disgracing adjudicator’s everywhere. It is moments like this that irresponsible decision-makers like myself award the blue ribbon to all the teams. They are glorious, singing their hearts out trying to distinguish themselves and help me with my soul decision.

I wonder if they know that they are magic? I wonder if they know the power of possibility that they stir in the human heart? I wonder if they know that they bring mighty love one step closer? Fingers outstretched and reaching to touch our heart’s desire; with their birdsong magic entire worlds shimmer, take shape, and perch within grasp.

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Truly Powerful People (429)

Posted on May 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

429.
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 sometimes have to remind myself that everything isn’t a metaphor. The powerful headwinds that slowed our progress but afforded us the opportunity to go slow enough to see and be in our moment (instead of just passing through) might not have been a metaphor. Also, my renewed appreciation for the wind is probably not metaphoric of the unseen forces of my life. No way.

The fish I spied swimming too intently and accidently beached itself on a sandbar and then had to slowly and painfully wriggle it’s way back into water again was clearly not a metaphor for going too fast. My great-aunt Dorothy used to have a sign on her wall that read “the faster I go the behinder I get.” The fish had never read the sign.

The students covered in paint, loving school and their teacher (Melissa-the-inspiration-to-us-all) and their lives, believing anything and everything is possible – that probably wasn’t really a metaphor for the heart of possibilities or perhaps the essence of education. When Kimmie swept up the snow sculptures made from the torn bits of paper that once held the limiting stories of her students – that wasn’t a metaphor. And it really wasn’t a metaphor when she put the bits of paper in a gallon jar so her kids might remember the day they began telling a more loving story.

The sun on my face, the eagle that rode the thermals like a Ferris wheel in what I understood as an act of elation and metaphoric of my moment – was probably not really a metaphor either. But, then again, the world seemed extra alive this week. How else can I explain it?

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Truly Powerful People (407)

Posted on April 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

407.
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 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 our true selves that drive the quest? Aren’t we looking for where we fit, to find our unique purpose, our one true soul mate?

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Truly Powerful People (382)

Posted on March 26, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

382.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

The little door to the gas tank is stuck shut. I am at the gas station and I can’t get the little door open. As life metaphors go, this one leaves me dubious. Dado, my mailman, pulls into the station and jumps out of his mail truck with his usual life-giving greeting. We embrace and he asks why I was tugging on my car. I tell him my problem but leave out the part about its possible metaphoric implications. I know how hard he would laugh and then I’d laugh and we’d be at the gas station all morning. I’m especially pleased that he pulled in when he did as I was starting to doubt my sanity – the kind of doubt that comes when you loose your car keys and look in the drawer and check your coat pockets for the eighth time.

Dado gives it a tug. There is no lever on the inside of the car; the gas cap door is old school and opens when you pull on it. At least it is supposed to. We both give it another tug. Now the laughter begins. We are giddy with the absurdity of the situation. Lacking any option I do what guys always do: I pull out the manual from the glove box and pretend that I know what I’m doing. Dado and I laugh harder as I thumb through the manual looking for the section that tells you what to do when you don’t know what to do.

I call the dealership and a nice man named Elliot tells me he’s never heard of anything like this before and asks if I can drive to the shop. I can’t. I have no gas. Now I am certain it is a life metaphor. Elliot tells me that there is nothing to be done but pry it open or tear it off. Dado looks concerned as I report the options; he is not a violent man. I am concerned at the options because now I am certain this is a life metaphor. Where is my gas door, metaphorically? What does it mean to pry it open or tear it off? How far can I go with limited fuel and no access to the tank? Questions I leave unanswered as I abandon Dado and drive for home; I have no tools in the car.

As I drive away from the station the other life metaphor, the one I almost missed, occurs to me: in my moment of stuckness, the most joyful man I know showed up. Dado would have delayed his mail route and spent all day with me, laughing and pondering ways to break in to my gas tank. As life metaphors go, this one leaves me delighted.

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