Seeing | The Direction of Intention

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!

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

Truly Powerful People (428)

Posted on May 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

428.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“Wherever you are is the entry point.” Kabir

John was my seatmate on the flight from Seattle to Minneapolis. He was in school in Hawaii and returning home to see his parents before he stepped off the edge of the world. He wore swimming shorts, an old (very old) tee shirt, and rope sandals. His blonde-blonde hair had not seen a comb in years (a man after my own heart!) and was more comfortable in the world than almost anyone I’ve ever met. Joyce would call him an old soul: he is at home everywhere.

He told me that during the last semester he felt compelled to travel. He said, “I can go to school anytime – it will always be there. But I’m not always going to be so footloose. I want to learn Spanish so I’m going to South America by way of Mexico.” He told me he consulted his advisor – apparently a wise woman because she cheered his choice and told him to go. “There’s plenty of time to settle,” she told him. “Life begins today.” I told him that I thought his advisor was enlightened.

He squinted at me and told me that I was “different.”

“I get that a lot,” I said squinting back at him. “What do you mean by that?”

“Dude!” he laughed, “people in Hawaii are happy. They are choosing to be happy. You’re like that. I mean, look around this plane! Look at all the serious faces! No body’s talking. People going somewhere and never being anywhere. That’s different.”

We raised our paper coffee cups in a toast to good life, travel, and being different.

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

Truly Powerful People (418)

Posted on May 1, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

418.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Mike was in an especially fearful place. Life’s challenges were stacking like bricks and she could see nothing but wall. In a particularly dark and monster-steeped moment the phone rang. It was her old friend Andrew. He asked the requisite conversation starter, “How are you?” and Mike, not wanting to unload the full weight of her monsters on Andrew instead confessed her fear. “I’m really afraid,” she said.

“Oh. Well, let me tell you what I do with fear?” Andrew chirped without missing a beat, “I put the fear in the palm of my hand, place my hand on the small of my back, and let the fear move me forward.”

Later, Mike told me the story of her conversation with Andrew. “Sage,” she said. “First, he didn’t commiserate and reinforce my fear. He made me laugh with the idea of putting fear in the palm of my hand. Second, I saw immediately that as long as I held the fear in front of me I was going to be debilitated because fear was the only thing I could see. When I placed it in the palm of my hand and put it behind me…well, the wall was behind me and I had some useful fuel to move forward. So I did.”

Filed under: Perspective, Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

Truly Powerful People (406)

Posted on April 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

406.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Yesterday David and I were supposed to talk about teaching opportunities but instead we fell into a great conversation about communal narrative, the power of belief, quantum mechanics, and the incomprehensible size of the universe. If you want to experience the sacred all you need do is look through a telescope or a microscope. Or, better yet, take a walk and pay attention. Or, even better, look into the eyes of someone you love. Or, even better still, look into the eyes of someone you don’t know and allow that their hopes and dreams and desires are just as big and potent and real as are yours. Incomprehensible! And that’s precisely the point: if you can grasp it in its entirety it is probably not worth knowing. How might we tell our story together if we allowed that it is impossible to grasp the enormity of any living being?

Just before I went scuba diving for the first time Lora was giddy but she couldn’t tell me why. She was an advanced diver and knew the revelation that is available for first time divers. There is the surface of the ocean in all its beauty and drama and that’s what most of us see; ask most people about the ocean and they will talk about the surface or what they’ve seen in National Geographic. The first dive beneath the surface, not just seeing it but being in it, there is beauty and color and the shocking infinity and power of life that opens when you go just a little ways beneath the surface. There are no words. Your inner world changes when you recognize how little you really know of the outer world.

What was even more shocking for me was returning to the surface after my first dive. What was true beneath the surface was also true above it. I’d stopped seeing the beauty and the color and the teeming life above the water line because I had generic words for it: I assumed I knew so I stopped seeing and experiencing how incomprehensible (sacred) is this world we inhabit.

What’s funny to me is this conversation with David about the incomprehensible was intended to be an interview and discussion about teaching what I know; which, as I’ve just revealed, is nothing.

Filed under: Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

Truly Powerful People (386)

Posted on March 30, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

386.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

David asked me to think about color and my relationship to color. Later this summer we will have a chat and I can’t wait. Since he sent me the note with his questions (on brilliant yellow paper, I might add. A shade of yellow that tends to the reds and not the greens so it is warm and inviting), I’ve had several surprising encounters to help me prepare for my color conversation.

For instance, today as I work with the incredible educators in Hastings, NE a teacher told the group about her kid’s belief that color did not exist before the 1970’s; camera’s caught the miracle of color coming into being. Television programs caught it, too! I imagine the kids asking, “What was the world like before color?”

My dear friend Judy has an app on her phone that allows her to mix and create color. She tells me it is mesmerizing and can play with the app for hours. When she greeted me instead of saying, “Hello, she announced, “I’ve created the most extraordinary color.” It is not mystery what Judy’s relationship is to color!

Silvia took me be the hand and said, “You have to see my new basement color!” She skipped down the steps, flipped on the lights, and told me the story of her accent wall, an amazing shade of blue, warm and relaxing. And, it went perfectly with the couch. “I really love it!” she said.

Driving to see the Sand Hill cranes, Megan pointed to the magenta sun slowly setting through the purple gray clouds. “Look!” she exclaimed. I caught my breath. It was a color I rarely see and was growing more saturated by the second. She took several photos to capture the colors melting together in the sky.

My first revelation for David: I am seeing color through the eyes of others and I am astounded at what I see. When am I not having a relationship with color?

Filed under: Seeing, Truly Powerful People | Leave a comment »

« Previous Page