The Direction of Intention

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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Enter The Cathedral

Posted on July 18, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

848. 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 stood and watched the dragonflies at the pond. One came to visit me and I remembered a dragonfly a year ago that rested on my shoulder and stayed with me for nearly an hour. It was a harbinger of change. It comforted me and I knew that everything would ultimately be okay. That dragonfly was purple. The dragonfly today was vibrant orange and reminded me of a dragonfly statue that decorated the sill in a room that will always be sacred to me. Dragonflies have been with me all year.

Daphne caught up to me and gave me a large piece of obsidian. Barney looked at it and said, “The native people wouldn’t have use for this. They only used the pieces that were harder, blacker. They used the pieces that could hold an edge.” I thought it was beautiful: sienna, grey and speckled white. It was radiating the heat of the sun and also vibrant with the energy of the volcano that produced it. Elementally, it was fire and I didn’t want to let it go. I held it to my solar plexus and the dragonfly hovered with me. “I am in the most beautiful place on earth,” I thought as I looked up the hill at the vine terraces. I was standing at the bottom of a basin that forms the Benziger winery. It is a biodynamic farm. It is an energy vortex; a very powerful place and you can feel it pulse in you if you stand quiet and feel it. As Barney said, “This place is the cathedral.”

One of the Hermetic Principles is, “As above, so below.” Here, at the winery, it is not an abstract concept but a concrete, living dynamic. The roots of the vine are equal in weight to the parts that we see above ground. Unless of course the ground around the plant is subjected to weed killer or other additive chemicals, then, the plant protects itself. It cuts itself off from its deeper root. It cuts itself off from the capacity to thrive and cannot pull the nourishment from the earth. “The metaphors are everywhere,” Barney said. I was grateful; for once, it was not me seeing the metaphors. “People are like the vines,” he said, “Try to kill the weeds or cheat the natural process and they cut themselves off from deeper nourishment. Survival is the best they can do.”

Earlier I stood in a natural ring of redwoods. I stepped into the ring and it took my breath away. Daphne sat down. Barney smiled and said, “I knew you would love this place. This is your place. People call this the faery ring. It’s for air spirits.”

I am air and water and today I held obsidian (fire and earth). The dragonfly, vibrant orange and yellow, the color of flame, flicked around my shoulder and the past month of my life suddenly made sense. I held the obsidian closer and was quiet for the first time in months.

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Can You Hear Them?

Posted on July 16, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Two simple images: as we descended from the vineyard, walking the path between the properties, Skip asked, “Can you hear the stories?” Earlier in the day he said that five stories where shared when drinking a single bottle of wine. That means that vineyards are full of stories. “Yes,” I said, “I can hear them.” And I could.

Barney walked with me up the hill to the insectory. He is teaching and practicing biodynamic winemaking. He said, “We’re not in the business of growing grapes. We’re in the business of making great soil. It all begins with the soil.” He clarified that by saying, “We’re in the business of getting out of the way and letting Mother Nature do what she does, which is make great soil.” He jumped up and down and asked, “Can you feel it?” I jumped up and down. Yes. I could feel it.

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Be A Master

Posted on July 15, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Many years ago Doug and I waded into the river that ran just beneath his cabin and he taught me to fly fish. Doug was amazing. I remember watching him place the line in the stream exactly where he wanted it to go – it was like watching a dancer or a sword master. He was doing something more than fly-fishing. He became present. His “being” changed. He became the flow.

Today Skip took me behind the scenes at a winery in the Willamette Valley. We walked the vineyards and he taught me about growing grapes. We went into the winery and he walked me through the process of sorting, fermenting, barreling, blending and aging the wines. I learned about oak and stainless steel and concrete. Skip was like Doug. When he began telling me about the wines he changed. He became present, excited, passionate, and joyful. His “being” changed. He became the flow.

I have been fortunate in my life to meet and come to know a few masters. They inspire me. They delight in sharing their passion. They delight in offering their gift. They seem to have all the time in the world. They know their craft so well that it becomes an extension of their bodies. They are easy in their doing. They know what they can control and what they cannot and have long ago given up trying to control the uncontrollable and so they radiate a kind of peace when they enter the temple of their passion. And their peace is infectious. It is as vibrant as it is quiet.

I asked myself the same question today that I asked myself years ago standing in the stream with Doug: What is the temple of my passion? What do I love to do so much that my being changes and I enter the flow? And why would I give my time to anything else?

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Know Where You Are Looking

Posted on July 14, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

845. 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 Saul said, “The chi will go where your focus is.” I’ve heard variations on this theme: where you place your focus grows. Or, another: what you think is what you create. Mo was a world-class cyclist and she would say, “Don’t look at the pothole because you will go where you are looking.”

I’ve been thinking about my thinking – or more specifically, paying attention to my thoughts. This has been an unparalleled time of transition for me so all of the old thinking patterns are laid bare. They’re easy to see. Yesterday I wrote this sentence as commentary for my comic (www.flipcomic.net): Most significant limits to success are self-imposed so it follows that all paths to success are also self-imposed. I place the limits. I am the only one who can remove them.

I look at the limit or I look at the horizon. It is my choice. I want to go to the horizon and not into the pothole. I’ve spent significant time in potholes and would like to explore something else. This morning on the break, Craig told me of a blog he’d recently read. The blogger wrote about the two sides of practice. We think of a practice as a movement toward what we want to create but a practice can also be destructive, like discomfort avoidance. The inner monologue that says, “I can’t” is, in fact, a form of practice. The inner monologue that says, “I can” is also a practice. The difference is focus. And, as Saul taught me today, the chi will go where you place your focus. Practice “I can’t” and you surely can’t. Practice “Try and find out,” and you surely will.

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Say Yes Each Day

Posted on July 13, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

There is now a poem on my desktop by e.e. cummings. It’s entitled, “i thank You God for most this amazing.” I’ve read it every morning since the poem found its way to my desktop. I read it to remind myself to say Yes to each day; to say Yes to each moment of each day.

One of the themes that appeared in my conversations these past several weeks is the realization of each precious moment of life. My friends are losing friends to death. We know that we likely have less life in front of us than behind us. And, so we talk of our lives with the kind of appreciation that only a limit can bring. Here’s the poem for your desktop if you are so inclined:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping green spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

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Step Beyond The Woe

Posted on July 12, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Somehow, somewhere, I lost my debit card. I used it last night in the grocery store when I sprinted across the street to get some food before the store closed. I didn’t discover the missing card(s) until this morning. In retrospect I wish I’d had a camera trained on my panicked search-and-rescue response. Although the missing card could only have fallen from the wallet resting on the shelf, I opened drawers, dug through pockets, lifted papers (evidently those pesky cards can crawl), opened drawers again, looked inside coffee cups, crawled on the floor, dug through the garbage, opened and closed the door three times (I can’t explain it so don’t ask), and am certain I performed a perfect triple flip and stuck the landing (unassisted).

During my panic I told myself a horror story and had myself convinced that my survival depended on those cards. It was the zealousness of the story that brought me back into my body and my senses. When I heard the narrative I was whipping up in my mind I came to a full stop and started to laugh. Our thoughts are indeed the mother lode of comedy.

I crawled out of my drama hole and took care of it. The cards were gone. No one had attempted to buy a yacht with my vast holdings. I went across the street to the store, inquired with the lost and found, and then went into the branch of my bank that was conveniently attached to the store. It was simple. The people at the bank were pleasant, funny, and very helpful. They laughed at my panic reenactment (I didn’t attempt the triple flip but reenacted it with full body gesture), and in a few moments the old cards were cancelled and the new cards were on the way.

My survival was never at risk. There was no tragedy. Even if someone had taken every dime from my accounts, my survival was never at risk and there would have been no tragedy. The necessary actions are never hard; it is the story that we attach to our experiences that make life a struggle. There are legitimate struggles in this world and I’ve very rarely actually encountered them though you’d never know it by my inner monologue. How hard is your life really? Really? What would the day look like if you dropped the story of woe and simply took the necessary actions? And, what might your story become if you looked at your tale of woe from the lens of the ridiculous? I was a Keystone Cop this morning. I had the people at the bank looking under their coffee cups in mock search for my debit card. We had a great time.

This week I have been prone to telling myself a story of difficulty. After leaving the bank I crossed the street and was, for a moment, grateful that I lost my card(s). It was just the dope slap I needed to see beyond the story of woe and step again into a quiet center.

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

Pick Up Your Ordinary

Posted on July 11, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

In his book, The Pilgrimage, Paulo Coehlo writes that the path to wisdom can be identified by three things: 1) it must involve agape (love), 2) it must have practical application in your life, 3) it has to be a path that can be followed by anyone. My pilgrimage this winter has brought me face-to-face with the third characteristic.

I’ve many times taught the phrase, “Put down your clever and pick up your ordinary.” This concept comes from the world of improvisation and it reveals the path to full uninhibited expression. What you label in yourself as “ordinary” is actually your most extraordinary and potent gift. You think it is ordinary because it is natural to you. Because it is natural to you, you assume that everyone has it. They don’t. In addition, trying to be clever or smart pulls you out of the moment. It creates a façade. It pulls you away from your extraordinary gift. To put down the need to be clever or right actually allows you to show up. It’s a paradox, to put down your clever and pick up your ordinary is the route to extraordinary fulfillment. It is the route to presence.

The path of the ordinary is a path that can be followed by anyone. To distinguish or attempt to be above the herd is an excellent way to block the flow. It is a remarkably effective strategy for creating inner poverty. This winter I have been summarily stripped of my many devices for distinguishing myself. I have been expert at keeping myself aloof and above it all. I have preached a path of unity while investing in a devoted separation. I isolate myself in a studio, walk like a ghost across a city each day, belong nowhere and refuse to join. And since I desire to walk a path of wisdom I have necessarily been crushed and ground into a fine powder. I have, in the process, crushed others in my confusion, acted poorly and been reintroduced to the ugly side of my nature – the part that makes me ordinary and human. I have been messy and brutal and can no longer be above it all.

I have no clever left to heft. All that remains is basic, essential and very ordinary. And now, because there is no more illusion of “special” or “different,” perhaps I can begin. Perhaps my artistry will find its community because I am no longer attempting to be distinct. Artistry is about joining. And this brings me back to the first characteristic, agape. Love cannot exist in a world of better or worse. Love is never found in the separations; separations preclude agape. Agape must include everyone, no exceptions, even when the exceptions are self-imposed.

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Who Really Knows?

Posted on July 10, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

841. 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 inner anthropologist rubbed his eyes and sat up as I walked across the city this morning. For some reason he took an interest in the phrases that people wear on their clothing or that adorn their bags. The phrase that woke him was, “I eat cake for breakfast.” It was stenciled prominently across a woman’s shoulder bag. He looked around his study for a pencil because he wanted to write the phrase in his notebook. He asked, “Does eating cake for breakfast signify that you are breaker of rules?” I didn’t respond so he continued, “Or does the fact that you have to announce it imply that you are a ruler follower and want to be seen as a breaker of rules?” She was clearly on her way to work in an office tower (we watched her enter the building) so I told him it was an excellent question but remained noncommittal. Who really knows?

He huffed at me but then immediately spied a man in a black shirt with the phrase “Turn That Sh*t Up!” emblazoned in bold green letters. The message was aggressive but the man was meek. He wore a matching hat and pressed shorts. He also wore white socks with black sandals – it is a common sight in Seattle in the winter but frowned upon in the summer. He was self conscious of his clothes. My inner anthropologist was thrilled with this find. It was a fashion contradiction, a betrayal of message and messenger. “Look at that!” chirped my inner anthropologist! Such a bold message scrawled on a less than bold messenger! Perhaps it is aspirational statement!” he posited as he scribbled in his notebook. “Why do people wear specific phrases on their clothes?” he asked. “Identity,” I offered, knowing that could mean anything. Each of us chooses our hairstyle, we pick our clothes, and design how we want to be seen. Clothes in any form and combination are a statement. We are essentially saying, “This is who I am.” Or more specifically, “This is who I want to be.”

“Yes, yes, I know all of that,” my inner anthropologist sneered in frustration. “Why the phrases?” Just then a man walked by with messages tattooed on his arms. “Better and better!” my inner anthropologist exclaimed. “Follow him!” he commanded. “See what message he’s tattooed on his body!” There was a symbol, a cross, covered by a circle-slash, and the words “anti-Christ” adjacent to the symbol. “Oh my!” my inner anthropologist said, setting down his pencil, “Well we know what he’s against. I wonder what he’s for?” I remained quiet. Who really knows?

He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Why do people work so hard to tell the world how they want to be seen?” I thought of Quinn. Many years ago he told me that if someone told me that they were an expert, it was a sure sign that they weren’t. He said, “Someone who really knows what they are doing has no need to tell you. They don’t need you to know.” My inner anthropologist returned to his couch and lay down saying, “I wonder what phrase I would choose for my t-shirt if I wanted to claim an identity?” I remained quiet. Who really knows?

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Step In Front Of The Wall

Posted on July 9, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

K. is an entrepreneur and asked me to help her with her investor pitch. We met in a small conference room and the moment she stood before me to give her pitch she disappeared. She retreated behind a wall of words that had no real meaning. She is a vital, dynamic woman so it was startling to see how far behind the wall she fled.

We did a few exercises designed to help her laugh and bring her self back into her body. Language is a physical act, speaking requires embodiment and she needed to be coaxed back into her body. Once she felt safe and stepped in front of the wall, we talked. She told me that she wanted to be powerful and I asked her what that meant to her. She used phrases like “owning the room” and “captivating my audience,” phrases that she picked up along the way but had no real meaning for her. When I asked her what she meant by “owning the room” she blinked and stammered. She blinked again when I asked, “Instead of owning the room, why not own your self?” Owning the room is an abstraction. Owning yourself is doable. It is concrete.

It is common to give away the power when standing in front of other people. It is common to believe that “they” are judges and grant “them” all of the power. As judges, their opinion matters more than your opinion. It is common to step in front of others oriented according to what you might get from them. Approval, being liked, funding, applause,…, the list of what you might get is endless and ultimately a commitment to a power-give-away.

K. and I talked about reorienting according to what she might bring to the world. The investors have no power over her dream. The investors are one route among many routes. I asked if she believed in her business and she was enthusiastic. “Yes!” she smiled. Why then, I asked, would she believe that the investors had the power to make or break her business? It was her idea. It was her passion. It was her work. Was she dedicated to bringing her dream to life? She was. I could see it in her eyes. So I asked her to own the dream and give up the illusion that investors (or anyone else, for that matter) have the capacity to make or break her business. Bring it with all of the love and passion and commitment that she feels for her dream. I asked her what she would have to change to orient according to what she brings and bring it with all her heart.

There is no room for judges when you orient according to what you bring. There is no need for a wall of words or a cave in which to retreat.

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