The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (405)

Posted on April 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

405.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Lora takes photographs of my paintings when I have a new batch ready. She shoots the full image and then does a series of sections. Often I liked her cropped images much better than my original composition! It always makes me laugh how her photographer’s eye can help me see my paintings as if I’d never seen them before. I am tempted to cut my paintings into her compositions because they are more dynamic – they are better paintings.

I am a slow study and did not recognize the possibilities until a earlier today: I sent Megan a photo I took on my phone of a painting in process – and I recognized that I was seeing things in the photograph that I did not see when standing before the painting. I was seeing compositional strengths and weaknesses. Looking at the photo I knew exactly what to do to with the painting! The photograph isolates the image, frames it and eliminates all the visual noise from the peripheral. It helps me see beyond what I think is there to what is actually there. This view helps move me beyond my idea of the painting and into a dance with the painting; it frees me to play.

As I went back to work on the painting I thought about how a magic camera could help educators or organizations (or people everywhere) when they are lost in the politics or consumed in a cloud of visual noise so that nothing seems clear. I’d like to help them put a frame around it. What we need to do to facilitate great learning is simple and clear when cleaned of the power plays, business interests and intentions that have nothing to do with learning and everything to do with controlling learners. A magic camera might help us see beyond the clutter. Business leaders could use it, too. There is so much noise when an organization’s original purpose fuzzes out of focus: myopic short-term market performance is the driver of all action. The picture torques, the composition falls apart, the values disintegrate.

As I write this I recognize that the clutter comes from the mistaken notion that reason and rational thinking rule the day; they don’t. The real work in our lives happens when we hit the resistance or feel out of our comfort zone – the first person to abandon ship in a hot moment is our reason. Heart and fear are left to sort out the confusion.

Pull out your camera and aim it at the painting of your life. Don’t think too much about it and take a quick picture. Cut out the peripheral noise. Do you see your heart’s composition or fear’s work? Either way your next steps should appear: simple and clear.

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Truly Powerful People (404)

Posted on April 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

404.
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 the Sound was shrouded in fog and sprinkled with a slight drizzle. It was very quiet and the water was glassy and still. The islands, Bainbridge and Vashon, were doing their Avalon imitation and fading into the mists of time. For some reason, these mornings inspire my inner archeologist to come out and play. I generally feel that I am living in a culture/world that makes no sense to me so there’s always a bit of the archeologist peering from behind my eyes; the questions, “What is this?” and “Why did they do that?” are velveteen questions that I can’t help but consider.

This is what I found:

A single running shoe sitting alone on a bench – its mate nowhere to be found. I imagined the shoe to be heart broken, confused, wondering whether it’s mate left with another shoe or was tragically swept out to sea. It is the not knowing that is agonizing, the sudden purpose-less-ness that drove the shoe to this bench to stare into the foggy waters. Perhaps it drank too much and woke up alone on the bench and wonders silently to itself, “What the hell happened to me? What will become of me?”

A lime, whole and uncut, resting 6 inches from a child’s blue plastic sand shovel, broken, missing the handle. They seem to be staring at one another, curious, “Who will make the first move?” It is like a middle-school dance. The lime is playing hard-to-get. The shovel, hiding it’s lost handle, it’s missing piece, puts its best face forward hoping the lime will not notice or at least will have an open mind and give it a chance. So much yearning!

Eleven empty Corona beer bottles standing in a line on the sea wall (no where near the lime – of course, though the lime might have escaped the marauding Corona brothers and rolled into a budding love story); the bottles facing the sea. Knowing that bottles come in equal numbers raised the question, “Did the missing bottle run off with the missing shoe?” Or, perhaps the eleven bottles disposed of number 12 for a breach of the case code? They were certainly working hard to look innocent. They were too perfectly placed not to be up to something. I was suspicious but in no position to accuse.

A pile of cosmetics: eye shadow, lip liner, brushes, mascara, a pancake base, and other items laying in a pile on top of a concrete post. It was as if a purse ate too much make-up and vomited. Nothing else made sense. How many women do you know that dump their make-up on a pillar and walk away? It had to be a purse gone Roman, evidence of over indulgence.

This morning my inner archeologist was fired from his university post for excessive imposition of story on artifact. He couldn’t leave well enough alone and cataloguing did not seem nearly as fun as story-making. On his exit interview I asked what happened given all of his years of study and training. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’m human.” What’s the point of all that data if not to tell a good story?

Filed under: Story, Truly Powerful People | 3 Comments »

Truly Powerful People (403)

Posted on April 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

403.
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 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.

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Truly Powerful People (402)

Posted on April 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

402.
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 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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Truly Powerful People (401)

Posted on April 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

401.
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 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 when 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.” I’m tired of counting.

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Truly Powerful People (400)

Posted on April 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

400.
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 morning work plan was trumped by the sound of the Sound. It was one of those rare spring mornings where the air is so still that is seems to magnify the sounds. The tide was in the magic in-between, not out and not quite fully in so the waves lapped the shore, pulling slowly on the rocks and pebbles like a lover’s fingers on your back. The pebbles became a rhythm instrument and I felt as if I was hearing the birth of music. The waves breaking, followed closely by the base drum of water thrumming on seawall, the pebbles long moan with a punctuation, a landing note made by the thump of driftwood butting together. Whoosh, thrum, mooooaaaan, thump (silence) Whooosh, thrum, mooooaaan, thump (silence). The birds joined the beat adding a chorus of notes hovering above the steady rhythm. I was enthralled. I wanted to dance it.

Many years ago I worked with an incredible musician. He spent his life traveling the world learning to play traditional instruments. He was incapable of unplugging from the rhythms around him, the beat was in his body and his body was the beat. We went to dinner when I was first getting to know him. We were sitting in a booth when suddenly he sighed, “ho, yeah,” and began tapping a beat from a source I could not hear. He smiled and told me to listen carefully. In the kitchen, across the room and behind swinging doors was an old refrigerator tapping a tune as it wheezed to keep the food cold. My friend helped me pick up the beat and then he said again, “Listen.” The swinging doors added a perfect compliment. We began running both sounds through our bodies. The ceiling fan began to play and my friend was catching them all in his toe tapping, finger drumming, and mouth popping. For just a moment I was in his world of music. He saw the elation on my face and said, “It’s always there if you have the ears to hear it and a body ready to play.”

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Truly Powerful People (399)

Posted on April 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

399.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Riding my bike over the low bridge out of West Seattle, I shifted into an easier gear and my bike locked up. No pieces flew off like the last time this happened. It was as if I tossed the anchor off the back of the bike and moored myself to the spot. I lurched and stood, secure in the knowledge that I was going nowhere. My gears where broken. I heard Megan’s voice in my head saying, “metaphor alert!” I did not want to consider the implications of the metaphor. So, instead of my bike carrying me to my studio I carried my bike half a mile back to the new cycle shop that opened the previous week; I noticed it as I passed on my way to the bridge. Another metaphor alert: if your bike is going to drop anchor in the middle of nowhere then how fortuitous is it that a bike shop chose to locate itself on the edge of nowhere? I chose this as my metaphor.

I was jamming on my bike because I had a call with Alan so, instead of doing the call from my studio I found a nice bench overlooking Puget Sound. There was a drive through coffee stand a few hundred yards before the bench so I walked through, got a coffee, and had a call with one of my favorite people on a beautiful spring day with a hot morning latte from my bench office with a spectacular view across the Sound to downtown. I took off my helmet as my head was swelling with imagined status. Also wearing a bike helmet without a bike requires people to ask, “Are you okay?” Two people asked in addition to the barista. I never know how to answer that question. I did know how to answer the man loading the truck who asked, “What happened to your ride?” I responded, “It threw a shoe so I left it at the blacksmith.” He laughed and I laughed because he laughed.
Later (from my studio – I drove) I had a call with Teresa who is helping me rethink and market my business. She said, “Let’s start from the inside out,” and I almost wept for joy; no marketing plan on the planet has ever worked for me because, as Teresa said, “People come to work with you because of who you are – not everyone is ready for that (another metaphor alert!) so they must come to you when they are ready.” She told me I was like guy in The Giver who helps people when they see color for the first time. “They see the color red and think they are going crazy and you help them know that red is what they are supposed to see. You help people know that their creativity isn’t crazy; it’s natural. Then, you help them find all the colors of the rainbow.” It’s a good thing my helmet was already off.

She made all of the metaphor alerts come into focus. I am just like the bike shop; I’ve chosen to place my shop on the edge of nowhere because that is where the seekers pass on their quest to find color. She laughed when I told her my target audience is people whose bikes have spontaneously dropped anchor and then she said, “Now we’re getting somewhere.” That was my plan all along.

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Truly Powerful People (398)

Posted on April 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

398.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sometimes a day is loaded with amazing phrases. Today was one of those days. It was one long found poem of delicious word candy. At first I thought someone was playing a trick on me! Feeding me yummy word bites so I would slip into a sweet language coma. Some of these phrases came from a class conversation, some from a walk down the street, a few from the porch of the library and some from standing in line at the grocery store. It was raining word dances and with no umbrella there was nothing to be done but tilt back my head, close my eyes and open to the bounty. Taste these words (eat slowly):

“I fell into your language and found myself.”
“Don’t be seduced by the complex, the fancy. Transformation happens in simplicity.”
“Forgiveness is ongoing. So is change, transformation, conversion and resurrection.”
“I’ve learned that most of the aggression that comes at me is a projection of the other people’s pain. The same must be true of my aggression.”
“I became real so he became real.”
“Contact the world!”
“Burst! And roll away the stone.”
“Who are you being when you’re just being?”
“The gift of the dream is to let go of trying to be anything else.”
“You know what would be cool? Neither do I!”
“What is movement when you are perfectly still?”
“Who is like me? There must be somebody!”
“Do you know the word I love saying today: “fascinating.” Say it slowly.”

Martín Prechtel writes of speaking beautifully to feed the world. Don Miguel Ruiz writes of being impeccable to your word as an act of self-love. Say what you mean, mean what you say and say it lusciously. If language is the building block of the story you tell yourself about yourself, then the language you choose creates your world. Change your language, change your story, change your world. Today, the people around me fed the world (and me) a feast. I fell into their language, was seduced and found myself saying slowly over and over again, “fascinating.”

Filed under: Language, Truly Powerful People | 4 Comments »

Truly Powerful People (397)

Posted on April 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

397.
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 week I pulled out everything in the studio; all of the archives, the drafts, the drawings, the paintings – all of it, and I took a good long look. It’s been a year since I completed a painting. I lost my arm for several months (I put it down and couldn’t remember where I left it) and when I finally found it my working life was blown to smithereens. It is amazing how much energy is required to remake yourself. And the truth is, in the midst of arm-less-ness and work-life-explosions, I had no energy for my artist life. I was empty: e.m.p.t.y. Zip. Ziltch. Nada. Who drew that? It wasn’t me.

The good news is that I have been empty before and recognized the feeling so I let the field go fallow. In past incarnations I would have panicked and forced myself to produce something, thus, draining the tank even further while convincing myself that I have no business being an artist. We do not grow wiser as we grow older, we grow more self-loving and that looks wise. There is less room for self-abuse and too high of expectations when you recognize your mortality. The moment I recognized my empty tank I thought, “Time to rest.” So, I did. All winter – as we are supposed to do in winter. “Be as the bears,” I thought as I rolled over mid-hibernation.

Today I stapled a canvas on the wall. It was an old canvas, gritty and color smeared, perfect for jumping back into the pool, getting back on the pony, picking back up the brushes. Some of my paint had dried over the year so I chucked the jar across the studio, banked it off the drafting table and scored when the jar went into the waste basket – swoosh. Not rim. Sometimes you want people to be watching! But since the studio is a solitary place I roared like a crowd and pranced, arms in the air (both arms) as the basketball player that I am not. It was a game winning shot, of course. Raw Siena gone all rubbery and here I am taking a victory lap having just won the championship.

Ana once told me that my goal now is to make the world my studio. I think she is right. A studio is a sacred place to me so why contain it? And since I accept her notion as an intention I’m issuing a blanket caveat: if you find that someone has drawn on your walls and you exclaim, “Who drew that!” It wasn’t me. Unless you like it; then, I will do a victory lap, make roaring crowd noises and pretend that I knew all along that you wanted drawing on your walls.

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Truly Powerful People (396)

Posted on April 9, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

396.
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 crows and the seagulls are at war. They must not know that it is Easter. Children everywhere are scouring the bushes for colored eggs and above their heads the skies are alive with aerial combat.

Squadrons of seagulls hang on the breezes screeching warnings to their mates. They are not the aggressors. The crows soar above, tip their wings and swoop into the seagull squadron breaking their tight formation. The crows are relentless in their attack and the seagulls are persistent in their objections. I imagine a transcript of the seagull chatter might read like this: “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t do it! AH! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU DID IT! (repeat as the crows reset for their next foray): a mini Syria and the United Nations.

And then the eagle enters the neighborhood and slowly, regally, lands in the madrona tree. A territorial insult to the crows that is too much to bear! En masse, the angry crows forget the gulls and swoop into the madrona tree; they take turns bombarding the eagle. The gulls, now allied with the crows, fly a circle around the tree and cheer on the offended crows (“Get her! Get her! Get her!” they cheer). The eagle is unaffected, almost bored by the assault. “What to eat next?” she ponders, “Or who?”

On the ground, children fill their baskets with chocolate bunnies, marshmallow chicks and shiny new pennies. There are a plethora of new Easter dresses, colorful hats and clip-on ties, cinnamon rolls, fruit salad, egg dishes, coffee, pastel sweaters and shoes too tight for the feet they hold captive. The Masons march in Georgetown, swords clanking, the feathers on their caps fluttering in the morning breeze. Church organs honk. Bells clang. Gas prices rise. A sacred day for some, an oddity to others, on the ground or in the sky the rituals of spring are in full bloom.

The madness of spring is upon us so the play of life is more apparent. There are nests to build. The eagle steps off the branch and soars toward the Sound; unhappy news for an unsuspecting salmon. The crows crow their perceived victory as the seagulls scatter, old alliances forgotten.

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