I am not good at minutia. Too much detail makes my brain hurt and forces my synapses to stop all action. I experience it as static, fuzzy noise where thought should be. It’s why I nearly flunked physics in high school. It’s why writing grants – a necessary activity for freelance artists – was akin to a near-death experience. On the upside, I’ve developed an uncanny capacity to stare into space for freakishly long amounts of time. Synapse recovery on the inside, deer-in-the-headlights on the outside.
Kerri took me for a walk. I was staring into space and she has learned that movement expedites my return to the land of the living. I was updating software in an attempt to fix a bug in my computer system. It was akin to delicate brain surgery and I had to dive into the weeds to understand what to do. I was well on my way through the procedure when it happened: white noise where coherent thought once trod. “Let’s stroll,” she suggested. I managed a head nod. I may or may not have remembered my shoes.
I am learning to discern between minutia of information and the expansive beauty of the world close-in. In my life I have avoided taking a closer look, reveling in my view from “30,000 feet”. I claimed to be a global thinker, which was true, but was also self-protection against having to write yet another torturous grant or swimming through pages and pages of budget numbers. I am learning to see the universe in a peony petal. E.O. Wilson introduced me to the miracle of ants. Kerri teaches me to see close-in. “Lookit!” she says, her photo a raindrop on a leaf, the fibers of our fallen tree, tiny seeds bursting from a pod. The secret geometry revealed, the pattern in the chaos.
Often, looking close-in is just like gazing into the night sky, marveling at the infinite wonder of The Milky Way.
When you say “green,” what exactly do you mean? Each morning I stand in my backyard and marvel at the symphony of greens. The licorice plant, the tomatoes, the sweet potato vine, the ferns, the grasses, the aspen leaves…each wear a unique shade of green. Each green changes with the light. The greens are different in the morning than they are at noon and wildly different during the pre-sunset golden hour. Well…they are not different but the light changes what I perceive. The change is in me.
The change is in me.
My first line of contact with the world is my senses. Everything I know is a product of everything I have experienced and my experiences begin with my eyes, ears, nose, skin and taste buds. And then I make sense of it or at least try to makes sense of it. I build stories like, “Each green changes with the light.” In other words, the greens change while I remain unchanged. I am the center. This is the exact opposite of what happens. It’s a trick of language. I story myself as normal (Kerri will laugh hysterically when she reads that assertion!). I story myself as “right” though I also have great capacity to story myself as worthless or stupid or wishing I had kept my mouth closed.
I story other people as good or bad – a harsh and narrow measurement to be sure.
In my current story I have discovered the depths of my intolerance. I can’t understand how farmers voted again for their own demise. Since we are all suffering the impact of their support of autocracy, I have little compassion for the loss of their farms. They voted for it.
I find my intolerance necessary. And sad. These farmers are suffering accountability for their actions – for their votes – while the people who showered them with false promises and drown them in propaganda are profiting from the farmer’s loss.
I am like all others: I seek and find people and information that bolster my point of view. It feels good to feel affirmed in what I believe. Yet, what I believe – my opinions – are meritless unless grounded in fact. I have worked hard in my life to question my point of view because I was taught, as an artist who could impact the lives of others, I had a responsibility to deal in truth.
Even in writing this mind-wander about the senses and perception, it all sounds schizophrenic: seek support for what you believe and then challenge it. It’s called learning. The senses open and expand, the mind narrows and refines. It is like the tides. Open to the experience, sift it for veracity. It is how we make sense from senses.
The farmers and red-hatted others who voted for fascism would have been well served to ask a few questions before they calcified their belief and cast ballots for their own destruction. The information was readily available. They simple needed to open their eyes and exercise their minds. They only needed to take a moment – for that is all it would have taken – to challenge the gaslight.
Do you see the current scrubbing of our history? The white-washing of our national sense-making, the assault on education and educators? It’s akin to reducing all greens to a single dull shade. Do you hear the fear of the question, the fear of being questioned? Are you aware of the publication of an enemies list? Those who are exercising their first amendment rights are being branded as hostile. Do you smell the corruption? The acrid burn of our constitution? Do you taste the bitterness at the gas pump, the bitter frustration at the grocery store? Are questioning?
There is sense to be made.
Of our nation and our fear of facing our history, James Baldwin wrote: “People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”
I am not a Gnostic nor do I identify as Christian but I very much appreciate a bit of text from the Gospel of Thomas:The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it. I pulled it up on my magic computer to find what comment the AI master might offer: “…divinity is staring us right in the face in our daily lives, but our earthly preoccupations, illusions, and dogmas make us blind to it.”
It is right in front of us. We do not see it.
When I was younger I learned to meditate. I was chasing presence. More than once I came to the hysterical realization that my chase was in fact doing the opposite of what I intended. Presence is not something that can be chased. Rather, it is experienced when stopping the chase. Stand still and breathe. Feel. See.
I recently had a conversation about connection and control. It brought me around again to what I learned in the folly of my chase. There are so many things I thought I could control – many that I didn’t know that I was trying to control – and my efforts to control brought me a mountain of frustration and nothing more. I found it an exercise in futility, a seemingly impossible task, to try and control my illusion of controlling. Just as presence cannot be chased, controlling cannot be controlled. One day, in a flash of no-duh, I understood that all I need do is the opposite: connect to the moment instead of trying to control it.
It was right in front of me all along. Control is born of fear. It is to erect a barrier, to contract. Connection is the opposite. It expands. It releases. How many times have I learned that the heaven I seek is available and visible if I simply stop, let go, or turn around and look? How many times have I learned that what I sought was right in front of me, patiently waiting for me to open my eyes.
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” ~ James Baldwin
It’s always been dangerous to be a jester. It’s akin to working on electrical lines in the rain. Rarely does power like to be contradicted or hear the truth or be the target of a joke – but it is never-the-less the role of the comedian, the artist, to strip away the illusion. To tease forward the truth. Throughout time despots have tried in vain to silence the voice of the jester, the song of the composer, the vision of the painter. Hitler. Pol Pot. Stalin. Kim Jong Un. And now? Sadly, we have produced one of our own. Take heart: artists are servants of love while despots are prisoners of rage, and, in the end, love is always bigger than hate. It is possible for a period of time to silence the individual artist but the love of truth always transcends the volcano of hate. “Truth will out.” (William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)
Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel will be making us laugh long after this rage has burned itself out.
A truth? Our nation, my nation, refuses to grow up. It turns its back on its history. It runs from its shadow. It is like the spouse of an alcoholic pretending that all is good. It is akin to a parent who abuses a teacher who dared give their child a well-deserved failing grade. Appearance is all.
Love is substance.
Proof of our Peter Pan nation lives in the White House. He has surrounded himself with a band of lost boy pirates. The despot-wanna-be is not an aberration, he and his pirates are the ultimate expression of entrenched immaturity. They are boys who swear the dog ate their homework, responsible for nothing, responsible to no one. They do not care to compete, earn or work for betterment yet desire every trophy for their shelf. They gild themselves like the ballroom. They celebrate the vapid and court superficiality. They somehow believe 19th century nonsense that whiteness makes the man. They build their clubhouse high in a tree and post a sign: No Gurls Aloud! Their skins are thin, their intentions self-serving.
It is why artists are such a threat. They see the childishness and make fun of the lost boys vapid antics.
In such an immature playpen, there is no love, there is no capacity for love: only a competition for toys. “Mine, mine, mine!”
“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” ~ James Baldwin
I took a week off from political commentary and general ranting about the current kakistocracy and my stats took a dive. I derived two conclusions. First, studies ad nauseam show that complaining is much more attractive than satisfaction. If a human being has a bad experience at a Disney theme park they will tell at least 18 people. If they have a good experience they might tell 3. Blame is like candy. It’s the reason fox news is so successful: victimization (blame story) is yummy and a great organizing principle for a club or a cult. Blame is delicious and once eaten, people can’t stop talking about it. It’s a great abdicator-of-responsibility which is why it fits maga and the fox-mind like a glove.
Second, it is a marker of the current era that even the least among us – someone like me – has stats. I have blog stats and weekly screen time stats. The steps I take on planet earth are recorded, compared to previous steps and offered back to me as stats on my health. We moderns locate our successes and failures through numbers. If I felt it important to chase blog stats I’d find it necessary to rant on a daily basis. As Kerri can report, I need no encouragement in that department.
The numbers are useful but the challenge with reducing everything to a number is that it simplifies the complex, it sanitizes the unconscionable. We’ve read that 13 servicemen and women have been killed in the war with Iran. We know that at least 160 school girls were killed by a US bomb during the first days of the war. The number allows us to distance ourselves. Violent death reduced to a stat. I can be outraged at the number while not having to deal with the actual savage death of a school child, let alone a school full of children. Faces and names and hopes and dreams. I’ve been a teacher. What if the 160 students were mine? What if the soldier killed was my son or daughter? Would the number matter?
A number is easier to swallow. Blame is terrific hand sanitizer.
I have a friend who intentionally keeps herself close to the margins. She doesn’t want to sleepwalk through life. Chasing comfort too often cultivates complacency. She wants to be awake. It’s akin to taking a cold shower to wake up. It’s the reason that when we walk our trails I often leave my phone and my stats behind. Kerri draws my attention to the living things, the smallest of buds, the trout lily bowing its head. A field of trout lilies. It’s visceral and wakes me from the numbers. It opens my eyes and ears and heart to the beauty and the inevitable roll of seasons.
It reminds me not to become what I hate, not to reduce myself and others to a data point, not minimize my life to the numbers. It reminds me to create a rich conscious life, to stand in my experiences, eyes and heart wide open and not measure the worth of my days by the number of people who know about it.
In our house it is possible to accidentally lock yourself into the bedroom. It is simple, really; there is an old doorknob on the outside of the door but the matching inner knob is missing. Close the door too hard and the door will latch just as the old knob falls. Instant bedroom prisoner. We used to keep a screwdriver in the bedroom for face-saving escapes but I looked for it after the last lock-in and couldn’t find it.
It is useful to keep in mind that our house is nearing its 100th birthday and is alive with the quirks and issues of age. I admit that we could fix the bedroom door problem but we see it less as a problem and more of a character trait. Besides, it gives the person on the outside the satisfying opportunity to play the role of rescuer. Note: the rescue always comes with the mixed message of a smirk and an admission. We’ve both been on the inside in surprise lock up.
We keep a knob on the kitchen shelf. It is placed near the antique coffee pots that serve as tea containers. The knob is beautiful so it serves as a decoration. Another glass knob sits in the hole next to the kitchen faucet that once was a soap dispenser. The dispenser was problematic so it was retired but that left a hole. One morning I found a knob plugging the hole and knew Kerri was trying it on as a solution. It catches the morning light and occasionally casts a rainbow on the backsplash. Kitchen performance art; it’s a keeper.
You might be asking why we use the extra knobs as decoration or as sink-hole-fillers instead of fixing the bedroom door – and it is a fair question. Neither knob works as a knob; the inner threading is stripped. They have no internal grip so have transcended mere function and live beautifully in form. You know the old saying: form follows function. Isn’t it glorious when the function of a form evolves finally to become beauty in the world? Or, maybe it is better to ask, isn’t it glorious when we evolve and see beyond mere function and at last are capable of seeing the beauty available in our lives?
If I look for them, there are signs of normalcy in these abnormal times. This week the striped squill popped up in the front yard. They are always the first comers, the flower-harbingers of spring. I am grateful that the plant life does its best to maintain nature’s routines. As far as the squill and day lilies are concerned it’s business as usual.
It’s a surprisingly powerful phrase: If I look for them. The striped squill would run amok in the front yard whether or not I decided to see them. They bring their promise of warmer times with or without my appreciation. Most years I look for them. I watch the patch of grass where they always first show themselves. I like to witness the pioneer squill, the early risers that poke through the winter grass and unfurl their striped-hope-petals. “Spring’s-a-comin’!” I sigh.
This year they surprised me. Lost in the daily crazy, the national nightmare, I simply forgot to look. In fact, I didn’t see them until the full striped squill chorus had arrived. There were so many that I couldn’t miss them. “Hello, old friends”.
This year, instead of being the augury of spring, they served a different purpose, perhaps a far more important purpose: a reminder of an age old lesson: I have the power to focus on hope just as I have to capacity to focus on all that is amiss in this nation. Both are necessary and it is far too easy to miss the hope in the onslaught of abuse. The assault on our democracy may be immediate but hope is by far more powerful.
If I look for them, I see the bearers of hope everywhere. I see them in the No Kings protesters, I see them in the volunteers at the food pantries, I see them in Marc Elias and Heather Cox Richardson, I see them in my friends and neighbors. Everyday I see multiple acts of kindness – but only if I decide to look for them. They are easy to miss, especially in the multiple acts of violence that dominate the media, the ubiquitous language of violence that permeates our politics. And yet, if I paid attention, if I counted and compared, the hope and kindness far outnumbers the ugliness.
The striped squill put me on notice: it is far too easy to get lost in the horror show. It is, indeed, important to pay attention to the arsonist’s fire burning through our democracy but it is equally important to keep sight of the many hundreds of thousands fighting the fire, the legions of people supporting the firefighters, calling out the lies, lending helping hands, stepping up to help in any way they can. They are everywhere, bearers of hope, believers in goodness, guardians of decency, heralds of the coming spring.
Watching a time-lapse of the vine you’d swear it was a conscious creature. Tendril arms search for supports, stretching. seeking and grasping, it knots itself around leaves and stems of competitors, twisting to strengthen its grip, competing to secure its place in the sun. It begs the question, how might we humans be in the world if we understood that plants were conscious, like us, awake and aware of their surroundings? Would we be more awake and aware of our surroundings? Or would we fear green consciousness and fill our mythos-minds with a Little Shop of Horrors? Feed Me!
This vine evokes The Gordian Knot. It is a tale in three parts. The first is the existence of an impossible problem. The second is the ease of the unforeseen solution. The third is the fulfillment of promise and prophesy. It seems in these times we have in these un-United States a substantial Gordian Knot. I am anxiously awaiting the unforeseen solution.
A Gordian Knot suggests that bold action is necessary to cut through a complex problem. In our case bold action is not a sword but the voices of innocence: in the story an innocent punched through the chorus of enablers by telling the emperor the truth. He is, in fact, naked. His majesty is make-believe. Our emperor already knows he is naked but surrounds himself with loud sycophants and bullies his fear-driven court to sing the praises of his imaginary cloak. The decades-long rape of innocents, the recent bombing of innocents, is a sharp sword cutting through the illusion.
Truth-telling in the face of rampant pathological lies is a bold action. It fits the bill. Truth-telling is, after all, surprisingly easy and, in time, always slices the hard knot of misinformation. It is now the only way for us to protect and fulfill the promise of our democracy against the would-be-fascists (republicans). The sharp truth, the voice of the innocents, calling out and cutting through the Gordian Knot of the Epstein Class and those who are afraid of shining light on the naked truth.
I inverted the canvas. Turning a canvas upside down jiggles the eyes and loosens the grip of a mind that is fixed on seeing what it wants to see. It helps to pop the assumptions and see what is there and not what I think is there.
If the United States was a canvas it is a fair assertion to make that we’ve been inverted. Our eyes are jiggled. Our assumptions are popped. We can clearly see what has been here all along and it’s not what we thought. Power protects the pedophiles and threatens the lives of those abused. The Justice Department refuses to seek justice and, instead, covers-up the crime. Thugs in masks brutalize citizens, invade homes and kidnap people from the streets, all the while claiming that they are making our cities safer.
We are upside-down so we can see it.
We clearly see the lies of those who insist that all is as it should be. They stand and applaud the liar. They attach themselves to the lie and so create a very low bar to jump, wrecking democracy and giving rise to authoritarianism. The enthusiastic embrace of an obvious lie. Huzzah! The felon convicted of over thirty counts of fraud concocts a “war on fraud” to distract from his ongoing titanic swindle. His party pumped their fists and cheered. And then he started an actual war, Operation Epstein File Diversion.
Have you ever for a moment mistaken the sun for the moon? The disorientation is temporary but inspires an immediate question: What time of day is it? Later it might seem a silly question but it is, in the moment, necessary for reorienting in space and time.
As a nation we are upside-down. We were momentarily disoriented. Now, it’s only a matter of time before go to the polls and remind the liar and his sycophantic tribe that we see what is there, that we reorient to the Constitution, the rule of law, and give boot to the clown-car-cult of the would-be king.
Posted on February 5, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative
My mind tells me this photo is a study of black and white but if I really look at it – really look – there are purples and blues and greens and browns. It is, in fact, a festival of color. There is very little white. We don’t often see. We think we see or, better, we see what we think.
We see the world through a lens made mostly of confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories. It’s black and white – unless you take the time to really look. It takes time to see what’s there beyond what we think is there.
If your confirmation bias tips toward the maga, it makes you easy to gaslight. Believe what I tell you; do not believe what you see.
Gaslighting: the practice of psychologically manipulating someone into questioning their own sanity, memory, or powers of reasoning.
The antidote to gaslighting is the same as sorting through a dedicated confirmation bias. Take time. See what is there beyond what you think – or are told – is there. Take the time to look. Take the time to check. Take the time to challenge or question. Take the time to see all the colors. A manipulator, an authoritarian, will insist that the entire world is black and white. Their goal is to reduce all things to two choices: Us or Them. Their goal is to hardwire the populace to be reactive rather than thought-full.
But, if we look – really look and question – we’ll see that there is an expansive palette of choices, a rich and colorful world available if we only take the time to see what’s actually there, to see beyond what we think – or are told to think.
The Direction of Intention 