The Direction of Intention

Dream And Follow

Posted on August 8, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Patti used to say that she refused to make business cards because a business card was a commitment. Say it and you will have to walk it. I’ve learned in the past several months that entrepreneurs resist talking to potential customers for fear of learning that their idea – their dream – may not have merit. Today Sean said it best: people are afraid of failing at their dream so they find a thousand reasons not to pursue it.

Dreams can be deferred but they will not be denied. A dream rejected becomes a knot in the belly. A dream ignored becomes low-grade anxiety, heart palpitation, road rage, a good reason to drink too much, an investment in notions like perfection or not-good-enough, a deathbed regret. Ignore a dream and it will twist and block all flow.

“What if…?” is a powerful question when in reference to the future. It is a call to action, a fount of possibility, an imagination tickler. “What if…? is equally powerful question when in reference to the past. No action is possible. It is an imagination tormentor. it is an abdication of responsibility to your self.

It is an old adage: the only certain road to failure is to not try. Failure is an abstraction. It is a construct that exists only as a story in your mind. It is an investment in what other people might think. Hint: other people have their own dreams and usually if they are negative about your dream it is because they are ignoring theirs; they need allies in their impotence.

As Tom used to say, “A painter paints.” A Painter does not succeed or fail. A painter paints and becomes a better painter. Failure is not an option when you are following your dream. Success is not an option when you are following your dream. Dreams do not dally with failure or success. Dreams call. All that is required is to follow, to grow, to learn, to live. To love.

Filed under: Art, Business, Creativity, entrepreneur, Possibility, Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: dreams | 1 Comment »

Let The Story Carry You

Posted on August 7, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

868. 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 at 37,000 feet in a plane (of course) returning from my father’s 80th birthday party. He is the patriarch of the clan since his brothers are now all passed away. And isn’t that an odd phrase, passed away? They didn’t just go away. They passed away. I love how delicate and inexact language can be when we have no real grasp of what we’re describing. Passed away: an inexact reference of time and place. Perhaps it is a phrase of transcending time and place. They existed but are now away. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that they passed this way.

Many cultures believe that in death we return to the elements and the elements are forces. They are energy in motion. So, when they say, “My grandfather’s breath is in the wind,” they mean it. He was this. He is now that. He is vital and living and present. Energy can take many forms. After my grandfather died I sat in the mountains listening to the wind through the pines and I wanted to have the consciousness that saw death as transformational and generative. I imagined I could hear him in the wind and in the rustling of the grasses. He was this. He is now that. He was present. Of this I was certain: I carried forward his story.

It is rare for my immediate family to gather – my siblings have children who have children. We are spread out across the country so we often have a quorum but it is unusual for us to find a crossroads accessible to all. We all made it to this celebration. There was no question. We needed to see my father. He needed to see us. We needed to celebrate him and reaffirm our identity through sharing stories. We needed the young members to hear certain ancestor stories and through the story plug into the vitality, depth and breadth of their roots. In telling our story we revitalized and made visible the potency of our vast web of support always present in this world. We needed to know where we belonged in both linear and vertical time. I think I needed it most of all.

The event was made even more special with cousins that I have not seen in decades. My web is much larger than I understood. The entire space-time layer cake of my family was immediate visible. My niece brought her infant son, there was a tribe of two and three year old children playing, teenagers dreaming, college students aspiring, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings achieving, mid-lifers taking stock, many nearing retirement and yearning to be free of achieving, elders appreciating and playing, and a very few tissue paper hands who whispered to me as we said good bye, “This will probably be the last time we see each other.” And I could not deny it although I said, “Don’t be silly! I will see you soon.”

As I said good-bye to my father this afternoon, I knew as I have never known that story is a force. It is elemental. It is both constant and constantly transforming. I can feel my ancestors present in our story just as my grandfather was present in the wind. I am a carrier of this story and grateful beyond words at how this story carries me.

Filed under: Story, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: family | 1 Comment »

Seek The Key

Posted on August 6, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

867. 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 the next few days I’ll be at the gathering of my clan. My papa turns 80 so I’m reposting from the archives. This one was post 407:

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 ourselves that drive the quest?

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

Grasp The Impossible

Posted on August 5, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

866. 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 the next few days I’ll be at the gathering of my clan. My papa turns 80 so I’m reposting from the archives. This one was post 406:

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.

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

Force Nothing

Posted on August 4, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

865. 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 the next few days I’ll be at the gathering of my clan. My papa turns 80 so I’m reposting from the archives. This one was post 402:

Today Saul talked about moving through life with more than a dull force. It was an amazing clear image to me, a community of people who only know how to move through life using dull force. Not sharp force, not intense force: dull. I imagined the word ‘dull’ to mean a few things: 1) unconscious and 2) blunted from feeling; life as dull color.

Many years ago just prior to moving to Los Angeles my friend Dwight gave me a how-to-drive-in-LA lesson. He said, “It’s all about forcing traffic to do what you want it to do.” We laughed as my usually benign and peaceful friend Dwight morphed into a self-centered road demon forcing traffic to his will. His lesson was more than insightful, it was prescient: I found drivers in LA to be mostly aggressively unconscious of others and aggressively protected against feeling the impact of their hostility: accidents and a violent city was always the other person’s fault. It was, to me, the city of moving-through and very hard to be present-in. It was the image that hopped into my mind when Saul said, “dull force.” Rodney King, road rage and marshal law; I imagine the land upon which the city was built to be in shock with dull force; all of those orange groves paved over, the hills and blue-blue sky choked with the exhaust of automobiles driven by people trying to be some other place.

Saul bent over to demonstrate a point, pretending to tie his shoe, he said “If you allow there are options other than trying to force your way through your day, you might actually be in your day; you might see that there is no stress necessary to engage with the tasks before you. Rather than dull force you might actually participate within your day!” The idea tickled him and we laughed.

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Pass Through Zero

Posted on August 3, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

864. 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 the next few days I’ll be at the gathering of my clan. My papa turns 80 so I’m reposting from the archives. This one was post 403:

This morning Mark wrote a comment about my recent post on Zero. His thoughts and question made the top of my head blow off. Everything from the eyebrows up is gone. I have substantial eyebrows (from my father’s side of the genetic pond) so I will attempt an eyebrow comb-over to cover the crater that used to be my cranium. If heads were volcanoes I’d be Mt St. Helens. I may need to invest in hats.

In my post about being at Zero I wrote, “As choices go, Zero can be utter stillness, the wasteland, lost in the woods, a score on a math test, or the moment before the big bang. It most certainly is a state of mind.”

This is Mark’s comment:

“If the Big Bang occurs at the very moment that the universe knows all that is knowable, and the subsequent explosion forcibly disperses that knowledge in the formation of the rapidly expanding new universe, that next infinitesimal moment represents one unit of knowledge gained. Therefore, the journey has begun whether or not you know it. You’ve passed through zero already. What do you learn next?”

Sitting in front of the Fremont Library on a sunny spring afternoon I mentioned to Scott that I was at Zero and he hit me between the eyes with poem by Hafiz. I wrote about being hit by Zero and Hafiz and Mark shot from the hip unloading both barrels of E.O. Wilson at point-blank range. I’m not sure what I learn next but this is what I just learned: 1) Zero is provocative! 2) I have amazing people in my life, and 3) my new dish shaped head is great for carrying a full half pound bag of peanut M&M’s; I’m never far from a tasty treat.

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

Be Zero

Posted on August 2, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

863. 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 the next few days I’ll be at the gathering of my clan. My papa turns 80 so I’m reposting from the archives. This one was post 401:

I told Scott that I was at zero; all around me was a blank slate. He smiled and said, “That reminds me of a poem by Hafiz I recently heard:

Zero
Is where the Real Fun starts.

There’s too much counting
Everywhere else!”

I laughed and he said, “You’re right where the real fun starts.” How does this always happen: seeking sympathy my pals hit me with a poem and I realize with cartoon stars swirling around my head that I am again standing right where I want to be! Zero is the beginning of the adventure. As choices go, Zero can be utter stillness, the wasteland, lost in the woods, a score on a math test, or the moment before the big bang. It most certainly is a state of mind.

Once, I was represented by a gallery whose owner was also a painter. His home was his studio and in one of the seasonal fires sparked by humans and blown into conflagration by the Santa Ana winds, his house and all of his paintings burned. He was at zero. He said, “There’s nothing but space around me and I’ve never felt more alive.”

Scott watched my thought train and said, “It’s a good one isn’t it.” I said, “Now that I know better, Zero is the only place I want to be.”

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

Receive The Message

Posted on August 1, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Images from this magic day:

The space needle disappeared into the fog. A jogger saw it and jogged in place for a full minute before pointing at the shrouded space needle and mouthed, “Holy Cow.” He touched his heart and spun around and then jogged on.

A young man stood very still until the pigeons gathered around him. And then he slowly started to spin and the pigeons lifted off the ground, swirling around him. He laughed a belly laugh and then he stood very still until the pigeons again gathered around him.

A child from another life touched my heart. She had my eyes and hair that she refused to comb.

Skip glanced at his phone. His face, for a moment, looked as if he’d seen a ghost. It wasn’t possible but his infant granddaughter had sent him a message. He caught the mischief and burst into laughter.

I took a walk as the sun was setting and the night grew still as the sky melded pink into purple. Gratitude like a rushing river gushed from me and overran my banks.

She asked me the best question I’ve ever been asked: “What keeps you from receiving this with joy?”

The biggest shooting star, the kind that you can actually see the flames right before it disappears, arced across the night sky at just the right moment. I received the message.

Filed under: Gratitude, Love, Truly Powerful People | 1 Comment »

Consider Laughing

Posted on July 31, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

861. 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 every FL!P cartoon I also write a short bit of commentary that will someday blossom into a blog post. I pass the commentary to Skip and magician that he is, he jumps into an incredibly complex process to enter the strip and commentary into the FL!P site for publication. I give him the commentary on a separate document and identify for him which strip goes with which comment by the last line in the strip. Tonight I was preparing the next batch of commentary and saw the list of last lines as a kind of poem or theme map. Here’s an example of 6 last lines in sequence:

Are the edges cutting you?
They forget to use their precious time creating relationships.
Now, no one has enough time and everyone is looking for money.
I think it’s been a while since you made contact with humans.
Wouldn’t it be easier to ask people what they want?
Shoot me an email and I’ll get back to you.

I laughed when I saw it. I’ve known for a while that I am producing micro series of cartoons based on themes that interest me in the moment but I had no idea how clear the themes actually were.

I learned in school that humor is all about other people’s pain. We laugh at the guy slipping on the banana. A pie in the face is funny as long as it happens to someone else. Beneath the mask of humor lives the mask of tragedy. The reverse is also true. Tricksters are in the world to help us not take our selves or our gods too seriously. Every bloody king needs a court jester. Beneath the tragedy runs a river of humor. You’ve heard the phrase, “I laughed, and otherwise I’d have cried.” The mask of humor and the mask of tragedy work together like the vine and the soil. They provide nutrient for each other. They also provide relief from the other. That’s how polarities work. They are dynamic.

Skip and I started FL!P because there are conversations in the world of entrepreneurs that people aren’t having because they are taking themselves too seriously. We thought that if we poked some fun at the whole affair we’d be able to surface some of the deeper conversations. Humor creates movement. Humor creates chaos and chaos moves toward order. I’m of the opinion that most of our world could use a bit of the trickster. Our national jammies are wound too tight and could use some counterclockwise rotation. The issues won’t go away. The tragedy will wait for the laughter to stop. I think it’s time we made some contact with humans.

Filed under: entrepreneur, Perspective, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: Flip | Leave a comment »

Meet The Opponent

Posted on July 30, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

On the white board Skip wrote, “The enemies.” We were planning our business and as we moved deeper into specific details, the forces of opposition became apparent. Skip listed them as “enemies” rather than “obstacles” because forces that rise against clear intention are not passive. A boulder in the road is an obstacle. A tide of opposition is an opponent and the strategy for meeting an opponent is different than that of meeting an obstacle. Both strategies begin with respect and then the paths diverge.

Innovation will always bring a tide of opposition. Several times in my life I have seen “the system” crush the very innovation that it purports to seek. It smashes the innovators that work to improve the lives of all involved. Their innovation would necessitate change and the fear that change inspires in a system is lethal to change makers and the advances that they bring. Tom used to say, “You will know the worth of your work by the size of the tide that rises against you.”

On the list of enemies Skip wrote “The Four Overcomings.” This is a reference to one of Carlos Casteneda’s books. The Four Overcomings are 1) The Fear of Learning, 2) The Fear of Clarity, 3) The Fear of Power, and 4) The Fear of Old Age. In the book, Don Juan tells us that very few people move beyond the first fear. A true learner must open to change. A true learner must embrace the unknown and become practiced at stepping into it. One in ten will face this fear and overcome their need to know. The majority will seek safety and grasp firmly to what they know.

Learning brings clarity. Of the people that move beyond the first overcoming, only a very small percentage will face their fear of clarity. As Skip explained, those who become clear are dangerous to the status quo and are ostracized or worse. It takes courage to speak truth in a society dedicated to maintaining the safety at all cost. Most will hide their clarity. They will pretend ignorance. A very few will embrace their clarity and give voice to what they’ve learned.

If one is able to face the fear of learning, move beyond the fear of clarity, they become potent. They become powerful. And the powerful must embrace their power. They must not deny their power and in fact must willingly use their power. Fear of being power defeats almost all people. As Marianne Williamson famously wrote, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” All people are powerful beyond measure but would rather measure than be powerful.

The fourth and final overcoming is old age. Skip smiled and said, “By the time you get beyond Overcomings 1 – 3 you will be old. And no one overcomes number four.

Learning, clarity, power, and old age are forces. They are not obstacles. They are not passive. They are opponents and to overcome them one must begin with respect – not for the opponent but for one’s self. And then you must ride out to meet them on the field of your life.

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

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