Feel The Possibility

Posted on December 19, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

650. 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 am in the backseat of Lisa’s car. It is night and we are driving one of those amazing highways that knows no large city. This road is a ribbon connecting the occasional community, none with more than 10 stoplights. It’s been several miles since we passed through the last town and it will be many more miles until we see another light. My face is resting on the window because I cannot believe how many stars are visible when not obscured by the glow of a city. And I am counting my great good fortune because on this night there is a meteor shower. It looks as if stars get so excited that they have to flame and run. “There’s one!” Megan calls. “Where?” Lisa says, peering over the steering wheel. “You missed it.” I rest my face on the glass so in love with this moment and my two companions that I can barely breathe.

We pull off the road so we can gaze at the stars without worrying about driving. We stand on the edge of a fallow field, shivering in the cold winter air, necks craned to the sky. It is not lost on me that we are returning from Kansas where we attended a Launch for presenters; a workshop that, when we are old and rocking on the porch, we will look back and say, “That two days with Kevin Honeycutt changed the trajectory of my life.” And on the way home from a life changing experience called a Launch, the universe decided with great humor to coordinate with Kevin and gift us with a meteor shower. “This is what love is supposed to feel like,” I think to myself, linking arms with Megan who gasps, exclaims, “Oh My God!” and points to the latest sky streaker.

Shivering, I remember Holly from my coaching class having an epiphany, saying, “I feel possibilities. I make lists of them, all of the endless possibilities! They are visceral, like stars! It’s like, constantly discovering a new star, feeling the possibility – the gratitude extends to the possibility and the possibility extends to helping someone and the helping circles back to me! It’s a cycle. It’s an adventure and I feel it!”

“OH!” Lisa, Megan and I gasp and point at the same moment. “Did you see that one?” we chime in unison.

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Do The Dishes

Posted on December 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

649. 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. The coffee has been served. The trash has been picked up. The man sitting next to me is asleep, as are the people across the aisle. I see the flicker of movies or games on ipads; a baby somewhere behind me is fussy. We are in an aluminum tube hurtling through space at several hundred miles an hour and I am typing. And, as I look around me, I’d say that most of my plane-mates believe that flying through space is usual, mundane.

A hundred years ago very few people had seen the earth from the sky. A few people in balloons made it into the clouds. Now, hundreds of thousands of us soar through the sky everyday. I was reminded in the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas that it has only been 45 years since a human being saw the earth from space. We have been on this planet for thousands of years and the miracle of the earth was something we imagined but had never seen. I am in the first generation of humans to see a photograph of the earth from space. I remember seeing it for the first time and I gasped. Now, we think it commonplace. Sure, from space there are no boundaries, sure it looks alive (it is), but I imagine most of my globe-mates think it is usual, mundane.

It is the center of every spiritual practice, it is the task of the artist: what does it take to truly SEE. How do we develop our capacity to see what is right in front of us instead of seeing what we think is there? To think is to interpret. To think is to abstract; it is a veil that can blunt the immensity of experience. How do we become present to the enormity of being alive and cease to reduce our lives to the mundane?

Travel to another country and you will see. Fall in love and you will see. Climb to the top of a mountain and you will see. Stand in the river with the water rushing around your ankles and you will see. You will see because you want to see; you will enter your moment having decided to be there and nowhere else. You will see because you let go of the fog of knowing and allow yourself to not know. You will see because you have re-entered discovery. Do the dishes for the thousandth time. Do nothing else but simply feel the water on your wrists, smell the soap, the muscles in your hand as you hold the sponge. Feel your heart beating and you will recognize that you have never lived this moment, you’ve never breathed this breath, you’ve never done these dishes and you will come alive quite suddenly and see the miracle of your life.

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Open The Door

Posted on December 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

When I was a kid I was standing on a barrel so I could reach the pencil sharpener. I sharpened my pencil with such fury that I tipped the barrel over and landed on the pencil: it stabbed my right palm and the lead snapped off. I was in a hurry because I was drawing a picture and I wanted to capture the image before the magic dissipated. That’s how I experienced artistry as a boy: a magic door opened. I saw an image on a blank piece of paper and it was my task to bring it into the visible world before the door closed. Sometimes I knew I had lots of time; sometimes I knew the door was only going to be open for a moment and it was a race to get enough of the image so that I might complete it after the door closed. I had a muse and she lived on the other side of the door. I spent many hours staring at blank sheets of paper willing her to open the channel and send me an image.

My fall off the barrel was over 40 years ago and I still carry the lead mark in my palm. It has become a reminder of the magic. It took me 30 years after the fall to realize that I had control over the door; the magic was not separate from me. I merely had to turn the knob, I simply needed to open and receive the image. Like two people in love but afraid to reveal their feelings I came to realize that the muse was waiting for me and I was waiting for the muse. She wanted me to turn the knob and say, “I’m here.” I was waiting for her to turn the knob and say, “I’m here.”

I look at the pencil mark on my palm when I need to remind myself that there is no door; my muse and I are now one. There is no hurry. In fact, what I came to understand was “the door” opened when I became present. As a boy, staring at a blank piece of paper, counting my breaths, I unwittingly developed a nice meditation practice and when I dropped into the moment the door opened. I work with many people and what I’ve learned is that magic is not unique to me – it is available to everyone. We are magic – all of us. If the nozzle is closed it is because we stand in the past arguing for the wound or seeking a future place, somewhere out there where there is magic to be claimed. My work is to say, “Slow down. There is nothing broken so there is nothing to be fixed. Look at what is right in front of you. Stand here and nowhere else: let the world see that you are magic.”

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Stand In The Cornfield

Posted on December 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

647. 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 I painted a portrait of my father standing in a cornfield. It was an odd painting for me to do at the time as I’d stopped doing portraits years before. I just had to do it. I wasn’t working from a photograph; I just knew he had to be standing in a cornfield. It is a painting I never show. It is a painting of yearning fulfilled.

My father was born in a small farming town in Iowa and spent his adult life yearning to live in the place of his birth. He moved for work and then for love and although he knew where he wanted to be, he could not find a way to return. I put him in the cornfield because symbolically that was where he most wanted to be: in a small community, contained, where life made sense, where people knew where they fit and where people were not in so much of a hurry that they would stop and talk.

Yearning is a funny thing. Yearning is a necessary thing. Yearning is not what is missing; it is the space between where you are and where you want to be. Yearning can be fuel. It can help clarify what you want and energize your actions toward manifesting your desire. Or, it can twist your guts and make you bitter: unspent energy needs to do something and if it is not moving toward your fulfillment it will knot your belly and make your neck tense. Once in a class, I watched several people give speeches. Many put their energy into the speech and where poised, present. Many others were ungrounded and unconsciously pounded the podium or wiggled their legs; energy must have someplace to go.

Yearning can be proof of separation (“I don’t have what I want”) or proof of connectivity (“this is what I will create”). The difference lives in how you define yourself: if you are in this life looking for what you can get, your yearning will probably feel a lot like separation. If you are in this life living according to what you bring to it, your yearning will be an umbilical cord to what you will create and will nourish you in the creating.

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Make No Sense

Posted on December 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

646. 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 in Hutchinson, Kansas at the Ramada Inn. In the center courtyard of the Ramada is a swimming pool with an astronaut theme: there are mock lunar modules in the center of the pool. Over in the corner is a mural of the moon complete with 3 dimensional astronauts skipping across the lunar surface. It’s late at night and my room looks out on the moon pool so the effect is more bizarre than it might seem in the light of day. I’d wake my inner sociologist for a look but he’d snarl, “You woke me for a peak at Americana!” and then I’d be in hot water for the next few days. Did I mention there is a hot tub in the lunar landscape? I turns out that Hutchinson is the home of a most amazing museum of the cosmos. There is usually sense to be made and sometimes sense-making reveals a beautiful treasure.

When I try to make sense of education in this nation I hear Doug Durham’s voice echoing in my mind. I used to stomp into Doug’s office when the world seemed particularly cruel to students and shout, “But it doesn’t make any sense!” Doug would swivel his big bear body in his big swivel chair and say, “The trouble with you is that you want it to make sense. Stop trying to make sense of it and you’ll be happier.” I didn’t like that response the first time or the twentieth time I heard him say it – but he was right. Stop trying to make sense of the nonsense and you’ll be happier. Call the nonsense what it is, nonsense.

I understand the governor of Nebraska created a list ranking every school in the state, all 240 schools ordered from first to last according to a performance criteria. You’ll not be surprised to learn that there is absolutely no point to the list; it is nonsense though very many people, mostly non-educators, take it very seriously. It is as arbitrary as the test scores that drive the notion of ranking schools. Actually, if you squint at the list and you will see that the schools with the most funding are generally at the top of the governor’s list and those with the least money are generally at the bottom. If it was a list of funding inequity it would have meaning but instead it pretends to be a list of performance and so ignores the obvious.

I woke up my inner sociologist when I heard about the governor’s list and he was quite curt with me. He sneered, “You woke me up for this? Are you kidding! There’s no mystery here! This list makes perfect sense!” he snarled. “When in the history of western civilization has a privileged NOT stacked the deck against the rest of society and called it high performance?” He huffed as he rolled over saying, “Idealist!”

And now I’m in Hutchinson, Kansas. There is an amazing and inspirational history of the race to the moon told here in Hutchinson. There is also the most inspirational educator I’ve ever met.

All the while, a governor makes a list and checks it twice, to be poor is to be naughty and to be privileged is to be nice. And I’m enjoying this moment in the Ramada Inn precisely because there is some sense to be made of an astronaut standing in the corner by the swimming pool and none to be made of the governor’s notorious list. Won’t it be a lovely day when instead of list making we put our minds to creating great learning with the same verve that we used when once upon a time we made it our task to put a human being on the moon?

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

Check Your Mask

Posted on December 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

645. 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’s an early morning at the airport. The line through security snakes slowly forward. There is nothing to do but look at the faces and wonder at the lives that have sculpted these amazing masks. No one arrives at their face without living a big story. Some are distinct for their laugh lines; some are worn and tired. I see angry fearful masks and faces excited to step into the adventure. There are children, young faces like a new canvas, wide-eyed at this odd place, staring like me at the people shuffling along. The children dance or melt down. That, too, is part of the mask making process as their parents shush them or encourage them or simply sigh and take another step forward. Learn to express, learn to withhold, learn to ignore, learn to hide, learn to receive or reject…it all eventually shows in the face we assume.

I look at all of these faces, these distinct masks, and wonder if they recognize their story as unique, huge. Very few of us realize the enormity of our lives. Emily Dickinson lived much of her life confined to small garden and yet lived an extraordinary life; she paid attention. She looked and felt and shared. She feared and hid and failed. She loved mightily. The adventure of living, of vivid, rich experience is available in every moment.

I wonder what others see when they look at my mask. I make up stories for everyone as the line moves toward the man standing behind the desk stamping boarding passes, scrutinizing driver’s licenses, checking faces as proof of identity. I love that moment when the TSA agent lifts my license comparing the picture to my face. Sometimes I cross my eyes to get a rise out of them; most TSA agents have great humor when you treat them as humans instead of threshold guardians. They wear masks, too; masks of authority, masks trained not to show their humanity. Imagine how that imperative is sculpting their future face!

I wonder what masks we would wear if we gave ourselves full permission to share, to express, to feel… I wonder if there would be need for this slow line to face-checking if we actually allowed our humanness to show.

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Show Up In Stillness

Posted on December 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

644. 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 the dark days of winter in Seattle. We are rolling toward the winter solstice and my inner bear wants to burrow beneath the blankets and hibernate. Is there anything better than a nap on Sunday? Isn’t it beautifully decadent to sleep in after a long stretch of early morning wake up calls? To stay in bed on a cold morning, read and drink coffee – my inner bear just groaned with pleasure at the thought; bears in my world love coffee almost as much as naps.

It is also during these dark days that I return to the necessity of stillness. It is easier for me to get quiet in this season. Persephone returns to the underworld and Demeter grieves so the world rests. We mortals bundle up and meditate on the year we’ve lived and the dreams we entertain. And when we wind down our reflection, we get quiet. This morning I stared out the window for a long time! Don’t ask me what I was thinking; I wasn’t thinking anything. It’s as if the cold and dark pulled the thought right out of me.

I associate inner quiet with health. To me, inner quiet is akin to the absence of war. I’ve exited the debate. I can be present to what is in front of me. I can see beyond the interpretation. In class a few weeks ago, someone said, “I want to foster stillness so it is the default mode.” Isn’t that lovely? What a gift to give yourself to foster stillness so that it is your state of being; inner noise as the anomaly. So much of our stress is a result of the story we tell; can you imagine your life if inner quiet was the norm? Another person in class said, “I have great choice in how I show up in the world. I think I will make it my choice to show up in stillness.”

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Say What You Mean

Posted on December 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

One of Don Miguel Ruiz’s 4 Agreements is to be impeccable to your word: say what you mean and mean what you say. This, he writes, is an act of self-love. It is the greatest act of self-love.

I have been thinking much about this agreement particularly as I step through another threshold and leave behind all that I know. I find that am often NOT impeccable to my word. I am not so concerned with my honesty with others. I edit myself, I soften the impact of my words, and I manipulate my meanings; I am human. I’m not sure what it means to be honest with others because I am not sure that I am honest with myself. Impeccability with others is only possible if I am impeccable with myself.

Someone once told me that the best part about me was that I tell a great story and the worst part about me is that I tell a great story. I have exercised my capacity to see the light side to such a degree that I sometimes make light of the darkness. A friend once asked me, “Why is it okay that these things are happening to you? Where’s your rage?” It was a great question and, in fact, opened my eyes to my lack of impeccability with myself.

Say what you mean to yourself. Mean what you say to yourself. It is a double-edged sword. Like me, you are not impeccable when you call yourself names: are you truly an idiot? Neither am I. Do you mean to diminish yourself? Neither do I. Do you mean to diminish others? Do you need to push others down to elevate yourself? Neither do I. These are the easy misalignments to spot. Suspend your judgments and you will return, at least partially, to impeccability.

The more difficult stories to catch are the stories of, “It’s okay.” Is it truly okay for you to give up your needs to fulfill the needs of others? Is it okay for you to give away your voice? Are you sure it is not important if you let go of your dream? Are you certain that is doesn’t matter if the world steps all over you? Impeccability comes when we say, “That’s not okay.” Boundaries and impeccability go hand-in-hand. That’s why, to Don Miguel Ruiz, impeccability is an act of self-love.

Recently, a woman in class, who lost her house to Hurricane Sandy, said that she was “investing in her darkness.” She was telling herself the story of “everything is ruined.” Certainly the house was ruined. She realized that she was not ruined; she was alive. She needed to feel what she was feeling; she needed to grieve so she could move forward. So, rather than telling a story of ruin, she began to tell a story of grieving so she could reach the story of “what’s next.” She said, “ I realized that we need the light AND the dark. We need them both…it was all okay when I allowed that it wasn’t okay.”

Filed under: Awakening, Identity, Navel Gazing, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Write! Right!

Posted on December 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

5 times this fall I have been asked, “So, how can I get your book?” My inner high achiever wiggles when I say, “It’s still in my head.” That’s actually a lie. I have hundreds of journals, reams of notes, several hundred blog posts and 3 ebooks that constitute the armature for a book; it needs some organization and a bit of connective tissue but the pieces are all there.

“The trouble with my book,” I tell myself, “is that it is about too many things.” Is it for educators or business people? Is it for all people (I call people “artists”)? Megan rolled her eyes and told me that I was being dense. “Maybe,” she said, “Just maybe it is more than one book. Write the first one, choose the door, and later you can make it accessible to other audiences. Get out of your own way.” Right! Write. As I have blogged in the past, it is fire-aim-ready and not the other way around.

Diane offers courses in divine mastery and I just proofed her workbook. In it she asks a question: how will you match your greatest gift with the world’s greatest need. I thought, “Oh, that’s easy.” I think the world’s greatest need is a new narrative. Truly, the power-over narrative is miserable and is killing us. The new narrative (which is actually a return to an ancient narrative) is power-with. My greatest gift and my work for the past several years has been to help people live power-with narratives. Right! Write. Could it be any clearer?

Recently Alan said, “You really need to write a book.” I said, “I need time. I have the pieces and just need the clear space and time to assemble and connect the dots; I can’t afford it right now.” So last week, wielding the hammer of the universe, Judy said, “Do a Kickstarter campaign and buy yourself some time to write. I’ll help you!”

I am a slow study and really good at constructing obstacles for myself. What I recognize in my obstacle construction, if I hold it to the mirror, is a very specific path to writing the book: clear some space (I call it my “cabin in the woods), ask for help, and get out of my own way. Write. Right. Aiming and readiness will come after I fire the intention.

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Touch With Your Eyes

Posted on December 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Last night was first Thursday in Seattle, the night that all the artists open their studios, the galleries and museums stay open late and people come to see what’s new. It was a cold rainy night so the crowds were small but steady. One incredible mother brought her five-year-old daughter to see the art and meet the artists. I heard them coming before I saw them. The little girl was ecstatic! “Mommy!!!! I SEE PEOPLE IN THAT PAINTING!!!” She squealed. Her very calm mother replied, “I see them too. Make sure you touch with your eyes and not with your hands.”

If the first exchange wasn’t enough to slay me with delight, the little girl’s reply killed me outright. She said, “Mommy! My eyes love touching paintings!” They stepped into my door and the little girl brought her hands to her cheeks in disbelief. My studio was suddenly better than the North Pole; I was more intimidating than Santa Claus. She squealed and twirled in circles and announced to me that she was only going to touch the paintings with her eyes. I asked, “What does it make your eyes feel when you touch the paintings?” She squealed and shook, sat down, and put her hands over her eyes.

Her mother looked at me and said, “That means it feels really good.” The little girl nodded her head, looked at her mom and flung open her arms, “LET’S GO TOUCH ALL THE PAINTINGS!” And in a blur she disappeared out into the hall. Her mother smiled and said, “Which one should we touch first?”

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