Dance With Alpha And Omega

Posted on November 4, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

When Kerri isn’t composing music or performing concerts, she is a music minister at a church. It is a great gift and irony of my new life that I am spending lots of time in a church. I have never identified myself as Christian – I do not believe that nature is corrupt, particularly my own nature – so the fundamental building block of the faith has never made much sense to me. However, Kerri is no ordinary music minister (imagine Sheryl Crow designing the music for church services). There is a raucous ukulele band boasting 50 players, a budding contemporary rock band heavy on the traditional drums; she is experimenting and innovating to help rejuvenate and rebuild a once waning congregation. Art and passion are now bubbling in the wellspring of this community.

During the services on Sunday I sit in the choir loft (side note: the pastor, Tom, is an excellent storyteller and I am at long last hearing the biblical tradition from someone who understands its oral beginnings) and lately I have been taken with the stained glass windows and banners. I am a lover of symbol and behind the altar is a huge window in three sections: the birth, the death, and the resurrection. This morning as I listened to Tom tell the story of the prophet Elijah, I studied the window. I admired the altar cloth that sported and Alpha and Omega symbol. Because I was listening to a story and taken by the Alpha and Omega as one symbol, one action, I had a no-duh moment. Every story is a birth-death-resurrection cycle. Every life is a birth-death-resurrection cycle – and isn’t that the point! When we know enough to read the stories/symbols as metaphors instead of taking them literally, they open like a lotus!

Stories begin when the main character is knocked off balance. Stories begin with disruption, when the old world no longer works, and we must leave behind all that we know and step into the unknown. That is both a death and a birth. It is the Alpha and Omega together as one action. And, isn’t that really the way life works? In living we are dying, in dying we are transforming and generating new life. I have heard it said that presence only becomes possible with the recognition of the impermanence of life. It is movement, as the cliché would have it, an ever-moving river.

In a hero journey, the Alpha Omega cycle ultimately leads to a return. At the beginning of many stories, the hero must go to the place from which no one ever returns and that is metaphoric. It doesn’t mean that no one returns. It means that the person that comes back to the village is not the same person that left. The adventure transforms the hero. This transformation is a resurrection. It is a return. It is a return that is universal to every life story. It is a resurrection open for everyone. Life is an Alpha Omega in every moment: it is a death, birth, death, and rebirth cycle. The return marks the beginning of the next leaving.

Before church this morning I was meditating on life as motion. Life never stops moving. Growth is movement. Learning is movement. It is when we try to stop the movement that we create pain for ourselves. In a physical body, the blockage of movement is the place where toxins accumulate and the same is true in a spiritual body or communal body. It is all movement. It is Alpha Omega in every moment.

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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Join

Posted on September 23, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

It’s been 24 hours of ritual passage.

Last night, far off the beaten path in an old barn swept clean and decorated simply, Kerri, Kirsten and I attended a wedding. Well, truth be told, we attended the reception. Kerri played for a wedding and then we jumped in a car and drove several hours into rural Wisconsin. There was feasting and toasting and dancing. Old friends reconnected. New friendships were established. I’ve always thought that a good wedding was like a barn raising: a community comes together in support of the creation of something new, special, and useful. This was a good wedding. The ritual was filled with laughter (so I’m told). The barn was raised. Two became united into one. The elements of earth, water, air and fire are part of this union, nestled in a cornfield, a bonfire roaring, wine flowing, and the dancers breathing deeply.

With a few hours of sleep we were back in a church for services that included a baptism. A water ritual, a blessing of transformation; I’ve not attended many baptisms so I paid attention. I was delighted to realize that this water ritual is meant to welcome the new spirit into the community. The pastor kissed the baby on the head and said, “We have your back.” The congregation laughed and nodded.

Later, the congregation celebrated communion. I watched this ritual, too. “This is my body, take this and eat. This is my blood, drink….” This, too, is a ritual of joining. The community eats the god, they take the god into their bodies and in so doing become the god. They unify. They transcend. The bread is earth like the body is earth. It returns to dust. When alive, the body is fire. It eats, consumes, burns calories, and is constantly transforming. The air moves through the lungs, oxygen is carried through the body in the blood. The blood and body are water and fire and air and earth. “This is my body, take this and eat. This is my blood, drink….” The Makah literally consume their god, the whale. They hunt and eat their god. Actually, the god, the whale, chooses the worthy hunter to enact the ritual. The god feeds the people. The people resurrect the god. The indigenous people of the plains ate the buffalo in an agreement of death and resurrection. The god will feed you and, in exchange, you must perform the appropriate rituals to bring it back to vital life. It is a beautiful cycle.

Marriage. Baptism. Communion. Thresholds all. They lead to joining, belonging, and transcendence of the small self to participation with something much greater. Life honors life.

[910. 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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Open Your Hands

Posted on July 19, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

This morning before leaving the vineyard I walked back to the redwood ring, the faery circle. I had to go back and spend some time there. I wanted to be alone in the ring. I wanted to reenter that place of quiet and feel connect again with the palpable vibration.

It was foggy, damp and cool as I walked across the vineyard and up the hill to the ring. The crews were just climbing into the vineyard so I could hear distant voices, cars on the road leading to the property. As I stepped into the ring the rest of the world disappeared. There were no more voices, no cars, no machinery, no business, no future, no past. The fog closed behind me and I was suddenly in an ancient place. The quiet returned and I stood in the center of the redwood circle. As I looked up at the trees – so tall that their tops reached beyond my site and disappeared into the fog, it began to rain within the circle. In truth it was not rain but condensation from the fog dropping into the circle but I had the impression that it was raining within the circle but nowhere else. I felt like I was the recipient of ritual cleansing or baptism.

As I stood there looking up into the rain I closed my eyes and was suddenly transported to a day not so long ago when I knelt in the river. On that day I ran my fingers through the sand and pebbles, filling my hands with silt and watched as the current washed the sediment from my open hands. As the current cleansed my hands Megan-The-Brilliant said, “I want to learn to pray.” I thought, Yes. Me, too, but not the kind of prayer with my eyes closed to life as I chirp requests to some abstract principle. I want to learn to pray with my eyes wide open. I want to look to the miracle of life that is right in front of me. I do not want my prayer to take me away from life. I want it to bring me fully into it, hands in the soil, face to the rain. I do not to make prayers based on want or lack. I desire to learn to make prayers of participation and thanksgiving.

I opened my eyes and was once again in the faery circle. It was a magic place but then again, I understood (again) that the whole thing, this entire planet, is a faery circle. If I am ever going to learn to pray the first realization must be that there is no such thing as non-prayer. There is no in or out door to the sacred. There are only different elements, different energies, and different levels of participation. I stood there for a long time, hands open, and felt the water wash the sediment away.

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Celebrate The Return

Posted on July 1, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

834. 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 I was present as a very special community gathered to dig a hole. The event was the equivalent of a barn raising but instead of assembling a structure, this community dug a hole and made a pond. People arrived with shovels, plates of food, and bottles of wine to share. They came because someone in their community, someone that they dearly loved, asked them to come and support her. The pond marked a passage from the old into the new. She wanted her friends to celebrate her passage.

I can only imagine that digging a pond by your self would be no fun. It’s a lot of work! Walking alone through a life passage is no fun. It’s a lot of work, too. It’s necessary to do it alone and requires a lot of digging. It requires removing layers of dirt and muck. It requires stepping in new and unknown directions. Ultimately it demands releasing who you know yourself to be, creating space and living with the ambiguity of not knowing who you are or what you are doing. Walking a life passage is a process of internal combustion and internal reconfiguration. One day you wake up and understand that you are different. You have, as Rilke advised, lived into your question.

After the passage you return to your community. You are different and they must learn you anew. Because you are different you bring to the community the wisdom of your passage. Digging a pond with a community of support is a riot of fun and it is easy. People smile. They laugh and share stories of their passages. We dug our hole in a matter of minutes. The dig master had prepared the electrics. Rocks were chosen to line the pond. A liner was laid, water filled to level. A pump and small fountain was readied and placed. The community cheered the pond but really they were cheering the return of the person they loved. They knew that there is no reason to make such an arduous passage when there is no community to return to. The passage happens within the individual but the real boon is in what the individual brings back to the community. That demands a proper celebration.

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Kiss The Cosmos

Posted on June 26, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

829. 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 just wrote the word “cosmos” because I wanted to use it in a cartoon and needed to check the thesaurus for alternative meanings. It turns out the cosmos is pretty much everything. For instance, as I walked across town this morning I heard someone declare, “It’s always a good time for a cookie!” Cookie. Time. Always. Good. A perfect expression of the cosmos in contemporary small talk!

Later in the afternoon as I passed the bus tunnel I was approached by two older men from somewhere in the world that I do no know. They were Sikh and trying to find bus number 150 to Renton. It took us a while to establish that it was a bus that they were seeking. I took them down into the bus tunnel and that was a great revelation to the two men. They were seeking the bus on the street! It never occurred to them that buses run under the street in tunnels. They looked with wide eyes at the tunnel traffic and were at first dubious to get on a bus in a tunnel. In a communication that was more dance than word I helped them see that the tunnel was temporary. We found the 150 bus and before boarding they blessed me. I was an angel sent to them by god. A perfect expression of the cosmos in contemporary urban kindness.

Later Alan called. He’d sent emails that never showed up in my inbox. The emails are lost in space (the cosmos). Mostly, he could feel that I needed a connection so he reached out to find me. I told him that I had become a ghost and was delighted that he found me. We talked for ten minutes or so and our conversation brought me closer to substance. Great friendship is magic that way – it pulls us from the insubstantial ethers and gives us form, shape, and identity. When we ended our call I was more human than ghost. The cosmos is energy that takes many forms and a simple phone call is, too, a perfect expression of the cosmos.

The sun was out today so on my way back to the studio after talking with Alan I found a warm brick wall in the sun, leaned against it, closed my eyes and drank in the heat. I had not a single thought in my head, just immense appreciation for the light that seeped into my body and warmed me to the core. You might say that I was touched by the sun and isn’t that a perfect expression of the cosmos. Everything is everything all at the same time – it only seems to be separate.

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Allow The Silence

Posted on February 5, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” Aldous Huxley

There are few things more satisfying to me than closing the studio door, picking up a large brush, turning the up the volume on the music, and giving over to the forces that want to find expression through me. The night before my latest trip, without really meaning to do it, I turned from my computer, saw the canvas stapled on the wall, and the next thing I knew several hours had passed, the music was rattling the windows, and both the canvas and I were covered in paint (it’s why I stopped buying new clothes…). It had been too long since I gave myself over to the call.

I used to draw everyday. It was my practice, my imperative. In recent years I’ve moved on to other practices. I write. I facilitate. I walk. I find the quiet. And then, like a starving man who stumbles into a feast, I disappear without warning into a painting gluttony. It is a different kind of quiet, ferocious, vibrant, and necessary. There is no thought; my body takes over and the painting comes through: silence in the center of a hurricane of movement and sound. When finally I step away from the canvas and come back into my body, I discover an image in front of me. It is less correct to say, “I did that,” and more correct to ask, “What just happened?” I’ve spent hours of my life standing in front of paintings that I just painted, thinking, “Whoa. Look at that!”

Once, many years ago, Jim looked through all of my recent work and asked, “What is the significance of the three balls in your paintings?” I had no idea what he was talking about so he pulled out of the rack ten paintings, lined them up, and showed me that each had three balls as if some unseen figure was juggling them. I was gob-smacked. I studied the paintings for a few minutes and said, “Whoa. Look at that!” Jim laughed.

The silence is not empty; it is full. It is rich and vibrant. The silence is what happens when we get out of our own way, open to the forces, and let them come through. Words like “art” or “transformation” or “perspective” or any other word can’t contain all the meaning that becomes available when we learn to step out of the way and allow the silence.

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Meet The Beautiful

Posted on January 26, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

688. 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 one of those glorious clear nights in Seattle and the moon is round and bright and high in the sky. I was leaving the Samurai Noodle restaurant, one of those lovely tiny crannies turned into a food establishment. It’s the kind of place where you need to keep your elbows in tight or you’ll upset the table next to you and nobody cares because the chili noodles and genmaicha are to die for (the noodles are homemade, the tea is renowned, the food moans are genuine).

I stepped out into the cold night and was stopped in my tracks by the moon. I was not the only one who paused in my arc from here to there. Shoppers from the grocery store stopped, too. The moon called and we took a moment to listen. In a city where the lights blot out most of the stars and we the people are in a perpetual rush to be somewhere else, it requires a potent call to reach us, to make us look up from the ground, to bring us to a full stop for just one moment. And, in that moment, we touch that deepest of human places, the appreciation of beauty, a single breath given to the sublime.

Because the good people at the Samurai Noodle gave me a to-go cup and more hot water for my tea, I decided to sit for a while and watch people answer the call of the moon and touch the transcendent. My favorite part is the moment of recognition, the moment that the light of the moon stops the story, and for an instant, peoples’ faces relax and reflect the light back at the moon; just for an instant, a single breath, the beautiful meets the beautiful, time suspends, and there is not discerning which heavenly body is the source of the light.

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Join The Symphony

Posted on January 23, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

685. 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 exercise in class was a word cluster, a free association exploration about stepping into personal truth. Afterward, Winifred shared an image that surfaced during her cluster. She told the group that it was as if every living being on earth was a musical note in a song. When she stepped into a global perspective, she heard all the notes combine into a chorus. As she moved further out into a more universal perspective, the planets had songs and everything combined into a symphony of notes, high and low and everything in between.

According to her revelation, no note was insignificant; the symphony, to have full power, needed all the notes – so to diminish or minimize her self was to diminish the voice of the symphony. She said, “The world needs our notes.” And then, after a pause, she added, “…within every individual is a universe and each emotion is like a single musical note. In order for an individual to fulfill their universal note, they must feel the full spectrum of music within themselves.” She said, “Even suffering is a note, a note necessary to complete the symphony.”

Her message: Living your truth means to play without inhibition in the symphony of the universe. We need your note to complete the sound.

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Die To The Past

Posted on January 21, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

683. 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, Diane and I talked at length about dying to our pasts. She shared a potent meditation image – looking from her grave and in death no longer being invested in the limitations and attachments that previously confined her life. Her fears no longer mattered. She let go of her past and in so doing opened the way for growth and a new relationship with her future.

In story cycles, a character must leave behind all that they know in order to step into unknown territories. It is the movement away from the known, the comfortable, and the safe that is the metaphoric threshold to adventure and transformation. Leaving behind what you know is “story language” for dying to your past. Frodo will always return to the Shire but he will be a greatly changed. The Frodo that leaves on the adventure is not the same Frodo that returns. He knows too much about middle earth and himself to resume his former identity.

The caterpillar’s body does heroic battle resisting the cell replication that will eventually bring re-formation to a new way of being called butterfly. The caterpillar’s body reads the sweeping tide of change as cancer and fights back. This classic struggle within the caterpillar’s body of change meeting the conservative impulse ends when the resistance ends; the caterpillar can fight no more and surrenders the struggle. The imperative for change overwhelms the old identity; the caterpillar’s body releases the known and collapses into mush. Only then can the new form materialize and the new form is beyond the caterpillars capacity to imagine.

Diane’s meditation, Frodo’s journey, and the caterpillar’s process of transformation are the same metaphoric image. Each had to die to the past to step into the possible. The lesson over and over again, whether in story cycles, nature or human transformation, is that the new identity will always be greater than our wildest dreams. The only requirement is that we surrender the struggle, leave behind all that we know, experience the little death, and take a step.

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Shine

Posted on December 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

656. 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 woke up this morning thinking about lights under a bushel; hiding your light. Now, I’m not really a bible guy. I think there are many paths up the mountain and the higher you go the more distinct and individual is your path – and the more universal are your revelations. The path is yours and the recognition is oneness. So, it always piques my curiosity when I have a distinct image pop into my noggin, especially in this season steeped in metaphor and with the portent of transformation.

A week ago I put out an offer for 10 free coaching sessions and was delighted when over 30 people responded. I decided to try and honor each request. I have been bah-humbug during this holiday, looking for some way to reconnect with the deeper meaning and rituals of this season; I wanted to create a ritual for myself that was truly a gift of giving and receiving. I bumbled into my ritual with these calls. Each was rich and warm and magical. Each call in one way or another was about removing the bushel from the light – these amazing brilliant, beautiful people recognizing and desiring to offer without inhibition their gift to the world. I was more than once moved to tears at the yearning and courage and simple perseverance of their impulse to life. In every case, they wanted to share their light. Think about that for a minute. Isn’t that true of you and every person you pass on the street? The impulse to offer yourself and your gifts without inhibition is at the core of each of us. As Joe once said, “Our impulse is to wholeness.” What would it take for you to remove the bushel and fully share your light? I ask myself that question, too.

I realized that the light-under-the-bushel image was actually my wish – for myself and for you. If you are hiding it is a good bet that you think you will be judged. If you are hiding it is a good bet that you think your light is not worthy. Or, perhaps you have invested in a mistaken idea of humble. In any case, why are you blunting the light? I no longer believe in angry judgmental gods (they seem particularly human to me – gods worth worshiping certainly must live beyond the fields of judgment and selection); these notions live at the heart of separation and the need to hide. My wish for us in this new era is to share our light, without inhibition or editor, to throw away the debate of worth, to know unequivocally that the whole of nature needs what you bring, how you bring it, and masking it robs us all of the magnitude of our collective brilliance. Put down the bushel. Show up for me and I promise I will show up for you.

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