Consider Your Neighbor

Posted on July 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

At the beginning of class, Saul-the-chi-lantern asked a couple to speak of their recent experiences studying with the master. They’d just returned from a trip to New York. The woman (I can’t remember her name) said, “There was a quote that really struck me: What good is your chi if it does not consider your neighbor.” Given yesterday’s post, I smiled. Interconnectivity seems to be the theme this week.

Last night I watched a potent and unsettling interview Bill Moyers conducted with journalist and activist Chris Hedges. Hedges has written a new book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, about the impact of capitalism on the world. He roots his examination in 4 devastated and exhausted communities in the United States; places where the poverty is shocking and the system is wittingly or unwittingly maintaining the cycle. There is a cost in lives of our consumer economy that we shield ourselves from seeing – even within our borders. There is also an ecological cost that we pretend is not our doing.

Chris Hedges used a term, “moral fragmentation” to describe us, a society that has thoroughly confused money with morality, whose value set has eroded and been replaced with, as he named it, “Wall Street values.” He said of the financial players, they know the impact of what they do and think that being a good father is enough or absolves them (us) of their actions. This is what Joseph Campbell meant when he said, “Our mythology is dead.” In the absence of a cohesive narrative, a greater story, we eat each other; we justify the virtues of the 1% at the expense of the 99%. “We’re good people. We are justified. Our way is the right way.”

As within, so without; and the reverse I also true. When we forget that we are a community, we cannot participate as a global community; the motives are consumptive, the collapse is internal and inevitable. To off shore the jobs and expect economic recovery is madness. To put corporate wealth ahead of societal good is suicide. A society driven by bottom line motives is already bankrupt; it is only a matter of time before the exterior of the social body shows the internal rot. It is a cancer.

It is no small sentiment – and there was a good reason the quote stayed with my classmate: “What good is your chi if it does not consider your neighbor.”

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Bring Back The Boon

Posted on July 24, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

One of the things I most appreciate about stories is this: all stories are about transformation and usually the transformation is about the change in the inner life of an individual. But, individual transformation is hollow until the boon is brought back to the community. It only seems that we live for our own betterment. None of us lives in a vacuum. All of us need to contribute or we wither. This was Scrooge’s recognition. Frodo returned the ring to the fire to save the Shire. He was changed in the journey and so the Shire was also changed.

Greater self-knowledge impacts the lives of everyone in the community. Personal growth, deeper self-knowledge, sends a ripple through the society. We rarely see or understand the full impact of our lives on others because the ripple does not stop. My mentor, Tom, had a mentor, Demarcus, who had a mentor…. Understanding the impact of a single life on the world, across time, is one of the purposes of story. Who might you become if you recognized that you mattered, that fulfilling your potential serves the fulfillment of potential in others far beyond your capacity to see. Blunting yourself serves only to blunt others, too; we all lose.

When we step toward our fear and face our bear, we face it for ourselves and for everybody we know. And our stories of facing the bear serves to help others face their bear when their time comes. And their story helps others face their bear…

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Think Twice Before Parking

Posted on July 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Years ago I consulted with some financial guys. They wanted to know about story. They wanted to know how to tell a better story. Before I could teach them about story I needed to know the story they were currently telling. My friends call me a “circular” thinker so I imagine outside eyes would have seen a brilliant comedy routine: several “linear” financial thinkers trying to squeeze my circular mind through their two-dimensional picture. I knit my brows so many times they were bruised. When I am older I will have deep furrows cut in the field of my forehead from that difficult day.
Although I had to squeeze my thoughts across the chasm I was able to finally grasp their story. Here’s what I learned: Money needs to move to grow. Our entire system is designed to entice the average Joe to “park” their money in a bank or a 401k or an insurance product. Most of us still imagine that our money goes into an impenetrable vault; the money goes into the vault and is safe, secure and the nice banker/broker will pay us a tiny percentage to keep our money parked in their vault. That image is a carefully crafted illusion to make us feel secure and grateful for the return on our parking job.

Their job is to make the money move. And they make it move a lot. There isn’t a vault, there is no parking lot; there’s a racetrack. They make the money make lots and lots of money because it never sits still. They will make your money grow 7 to 10 times larger than the amount you parked in their lot-illusion. But wait, there’s more: even it they lose the money they have a fail-safe built into the program; it’s not their money being lost, it’s yours. They were very serious when they said to me, “You never work with your own money.”

Here’s the core of their story, the story beneath the story. It is finance 101: their job is to keep you and me on one side of the debt line (we pay the interest) with them on the other side of the debt line (they receive the interest). They need to create debt for us to pay (think credit card, mortgage, student loan). As they said, “Debt is not a bad thing, it just depends upon which side of the debt you are standing.” That’s why crashes like the 2008 disaster made money, lots and lots of money for some well positioned financial guys: They created lots of good debt and it wasn’t their life savings that they gambled away. They play a game in which they win either way and, in the story they told me, are careful not to consider the consequences for others.

I was not much help that day. I couldn’t get over the notion that it was not a better story that they needed but a better intention, perhaps a bigger conscience, or maybe even a better understanding of the word community.

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Pop The Bubble

Posted on July 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

A few years ago I asked Carol what was the one thing I needed to know before going to Alaska. Her answer took me by surprise. She said, “Oh, that’s easy. When you go to Alaska you re-enter the food chain.” She was right. I had the same impression: a walk in the woods is never just a walk in the woods. Being lunch for a bear is not an abstraction. It is amazing how your priorities shift when you recognize that your position atop the food chain is an illusion. It is amazing how you come alive.

Sean told me that we are always in the food chain but society acts as a kind of bubble; it buffers us from the nature of things. Besides, within the bubble with our natures buffered we are highly efficient at killing each other and ourselves (with stress, cigarettes, etc.). A buffered nature spawns unnatural acts. A buffered nature – or a “culture of comfort” as Martín Prechtel would call it – distorts our story to the point that we forget we are part of and not on top of nature. The “on top” idea is lethal. It is the mother lode of comedy. It is not bears we need fear but the neighborhood watch, the rival gang, the other political team, the police, the banks, and those who are supposed to be governing and protecting our interests. I think I prefer the bears; they are upfront in their intentions.

I suspect the point of having a bubble is to feel safe within it. A city is nothing if not one big campfire. We are supposed to be safer together than alone so why does our bubble, our mega campfire, engender so much alienation and loneliness; all these individual bubbles walking around within the larger bubble? How many times have I met with groups in urban settings who want to “create community?” Too many – apparently proximity to millions of other humans does not a community make. Life within the bubble, buffered from nature, alienates us from…our nature and each other. Bubbles create smaller bubbles.

Outside the bubble, when I was aware that I looked like coleslaw to big furry animals, I wanted other people around. I wanted a lot of other people around. I like my big Seattle campfire – and I wonder what it might be like inside the bubble if we put down the ridiculous notion that we are separate from the natural order of things and stopped pretending that we were somehow above it all.

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Where Are You Standing?

Posted on July 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

488. 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 is First Thursday, the night that artists across Seattle open their studios. To pass the time as we await the crowd, PaTan, the artist across the hall, shared with me a Life magazine from 1994. It has four articles that, read together, have my head spinning.

The first is entitled, “Saving The Endangered 100;” it is a photographic list of 100 species of plants and animals in America that are, by now, most likely gone. The second article is about the young boy who was identified as the reincarnation of Ling Rinpoche, tutor of the Dalai Lama. This boy will be the teacher of the next Dalai Lama. The third is an overview of Ken Burn’s Baseball documentary series. The fourth is a photo essay called “Eyewitness to Rwanda.”

Genocide, baseball, extinction, and among highest forms of spiritual tradition – all wrapped in a glossy cover under the umbrella name, “Life.” The magazine reads like a spectrum of human capabilities; the greatest horror to the heights of poetry. It is shocking, inspiring, troubling, breathtaking, overwhelming,…. It is life. At least it is life as we report it; it is life as we story it.

I long ago stopped asking why we do what we do. Asking the “why” question almost always brought a fixation on the horrors and injustice so that I’d miss entirely the other end of the spectrum. Asking “why” assumed the existence of “an answer.” What possible answer can there be for mass murder? What possible explanation is worthy of the reincarnation of a great teacher? There are beliefs, assumptions and justifications. There are stories. We destroy and we create; depending upon where you stand sometimes my creation brings your destruction; Oppenheimer learned this all too clearly. Is it right? Is it wrong? I no longer believe anything is clean enough for such small absolutes. Life is messy.

There are better questions and they usually come in pairs. For instance, “Where are you standing?” is a great question. Locate yourself but don’t stop there! Before justifying your actions consider asking, “I wonder what might this look like if I stood over there with you?”

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Set Foot On The Stage

Posted on July 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

When John was in college he was rehearsing a play. It was late, perhaps midnight, and the director wanted to do more work. The student-actors complained. The director asked them to follow him. He led them across campus to the medical school and pointed to the med students visible through the windows, hard at work burning the midnight oil. He said, “Your work is also capable of saving lives. If you are not working this hard you have no business being on the stage.”

Once, when I was assisting a director, he told the student-actors, “Each night on the stage your work will have the capacity to impact the lives of others. That is a very serious obligation. If you take it lightly you will do harm and it is best if you never set foot on the stage.”

This is how I understand art in all its forms. It is meant to change lives. It is meant to hold the central narrative of a community (the identity); the arts are the container of both tradition and change. It is necessary and powerful because it is capable of holding paradoxes. It is potent because is serves the conservative impulse while facilitating the path into the unknown. A healthy society is built upon a living art. A healthy society negotiates its paradoxes through its arts.

Reduce the arts to entertainment, intellectual concepts or a luxury for the elite, remove it from the schools and from daily life, and there is no center. Social gravity weakens with the absence of a coherent narrative – people are like planets and without the pull of narrative gravity they spin off into space and wonder why they feel so alone. Without a common center we will continue to kill each other for bling because we have no concept of what matters and what does not.

Rather than walk away from our arts, telling our selves they are too expensive or merely electives, it might be time to attend to our business, look within (that is the point after all), and set foot on the stage with a gravity worthy of our obligation to others.

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Take A Peak Beyond Appearances

Posted on July 5, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Pal is a taxi driver. He was the driver at the head of the cue so he gave Lora and me a lift from the airport to our apartment. It’s a twenty-minute ride, no time at all yet enough for the story of a life. In 20 minutes we learned that Pal is from the Pujab region in India. He has lived and worked in the US for 25 years. With the exception of his father, his family now lives in the United States. He was mugged during one of his graveyard shifts at the 7-Eleven because he would not buy stolen property from a man who wandered in one night. He is a Sikh though he no longer wears his turban; he’s cut his hair and his beard. To a Sikh, cutting the hair and the beard are not done without good reason. Pal’s reason is safety. In the United States he has been beaten for his appearance. It’s better to fit in than to be beaten.

Central to the Sikh’s belief are radical notions like the equality of humankind and universal brotherhood. In my twenty minutes with Pal I learned that he was generous, gentle, bright, present, and open-hearted. He was not in a hurry. He loved his family. He worked hard. We unloaded our bags from the taxi and stood with Pal to continue our conversation. He showed us a picture of what he looked like before he went into hiding by cutting his hair and beard.

When Pal drove away I was awash with conflicting feelings. I was so grateful for our magic taxi conversation and his generosity – and equally saddened that in a country that prides itself on individualism, this man, this good man, does not feel safe being an individual. He was not beaten for his actions; he was beaten for his looks.

Once, someone I love but do not understand told me that, “not all Americans want this diversity thing;” an odd sentiment in a country comprised of immigrants. Evidently the diversity in his neighborhood made him uncomfortable and rather than walk toward it and meet his neighbors he chose to close his front door and fear. I wonder if he would have recognized Pal’s kindness or held him suspect because he looked different.

Of this I am certain: those who do not want this “diversity thing” are missing out. This “diversity thing” is a human thing and there are extraordinary treasures (human beings who do not look like you) all around. It only takes a moment to peak beyond the appearance, ask a question, and find the riches.

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Truly Powerful People (480)

Posted on July 2, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

480.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

My grandfather is 103 years old. His mind is sharp and his body is worn out. He wheels around his retirement home in a space-age scooter, cutting sharp corners, pivoting on a dime, covering the distance to the dining hall in less time than I could run it. Until yesterday it had been eight years since my last visit, too long. For an hour we sat and he told us stories of his life, this man born into a horse and buggy world.

He is ready to go but insists that hell is full so he’ll need to stick around a bit longer. As he told stories I wondered how this world of computers, cell phones, and the internet must look through his eyes. He was born a few short years after Orville and Wilbur Wright lifted humans into the possibilities of flight. He saw two wars to end all wars that gave rise to atom bombs, nuclear power and the industrial military complex (he was at Pearl Harbor on that day of infamy), the rise of radio that gave way to television, refrigerators, moon walks, microwave ovens, international space stations, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the Hubble telescope, and this thing called Google,…he has lived an extraordinary life in an extraordinary era.

It was not lost on me that, when asked about his life, he talked about the day he met his wife, a trip over the pass when the Model-T ran out of gas and people trusted him with a gas can, an aunt that read fortunes and gave him and his new bride a place to stay for the night. He talked of friends and relatives and his children.

Earlier in the day he’d taken a fall and he talked of the woman who held his hand as they waited for the paramedics to arrive. He was fine, reseated in his scooter, and the kindness of another human being became the center of the story. As I listened I recognized that the events and inventions are trappings –miraculous to be sure – but they serve only as the circumstances of our lives. The real story is in the people that we walk with on our passage through this planet and how we are with them. When I am 103 will I spend much time thinking about the gadget that connects me to satellite radio, the anti-gravity chair that zips me to the dining hall? Probably not. I’ll be grateful for the new easy knee replacements and non-invasive surgeries. Perhaps I’ll have new straighter teeth. However, when I fall, I hope there is someone available to hold my hand and wait with me until the paramedics arrive. And later, I hope someone comes to visit so I can tell them my story of the kindness of strangers, of the day I met my love, and the people that made my life rich beyond measure.

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Truly Powerful People (460)

Posted on June 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

460.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

A week ago, Judy came to my studio and we talked for hours. When we talk, time has a funny way of condensing: 3 hours becomes three minutes. It is not uncommon for us, 3 minutes into our conversations, to notice the sun setting, the day slipping into night. We jump up, look at a clock, eyes popping at the time; with Judy I always feel the need to make sure my clock is not broken or that it didn’t somehow slip into east coast time. It is one of my favorite aspects of our relationship: so engrossed in our banter, we never have slow goodbyes – the ferry is about to sail or the meeting has already started; we rush to the door like teenage lovers whose parents came home early.

In our last “good god look what time it is” revelation, Judy pulled from memory this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye:

Red Brocade Pillow

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.

Let’s go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.
.

Isn’t it lovely? Being busy is the armor everyone wears to pretend that they have a purpose in the world. How nice to stop pretending – even for a moment – and go back to the real purpose of living. Your plate is waiting.

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Truly Powerful People (457)

Posted on June 9, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

457.
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 on the bus with 3 ladies from Wisconsin. They landed in Seattle without a plan and the wrong clothes for the weather we’re having. They came prepared for summer and were not prepared for the cold winds and freezing rain. It has not dampened their spirits. They are on an adventure and the wrong clothes are now part of a big story of stepping off the edge of the farm belt and into a new land called Seattle.

They’re asking me for tips: where to go to buy wool socks, what to do at the Market, how to best get around. Note: they purposefully did not rent a car because they wanted to navigate the city, to ask questions, to bump into people, to get lost; their plan was to step out of easy and into relationship. “People are so friendly here!” they exclaim. I am stunned at their brilliance and realize that the 3 ladies from Wisconsin are actually Midwestern-Buddha-ladies-in-training. They are not from the big city so talking to strangers is, in their rulebook, polite, so they are talking with everyone. The culture of the bus transforms as the usual stone-faced crowd opens and giggles with the Buddha trio.

We hear a harrowing tale of the drunk man that sat at their table the previous evening. “We were having margaritas!” they declare, “But he was too young for us!” and giggle riotously. “But we did ask if we could borrow his car.” They smiled knowingly as the nearest Buddha to me leaned close and whispered, “We didn’t want him to drive home in that condition. Plus, we thought we could stop by the store for supplies on the way.” Then, she winked.

“Do you have a plan for the day?” another rider asks, wanting to join the fun. “NO!” The Buddha trio chime in chorus. “We want to see what the day holds.” Buddha number one affirmed. “We’ll know our plan when the day is done!” added Buddha number two. Buddha number three smiled and announced to the bus: “Isn’t this great!”

Filed under: Perspective, Seeing, Surprises, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

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