The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (395)

Posted on April 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

395.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Saul is a great teacher. I meet him in the Dance Underground every Saturday morning to attend his beginners Tai Chi class. He is one of those amazing people who is near 70 years old but looks and moves like someone a quarter century younger than he is. He is filled with the laughter of someone who has nothing to prove and everything to give. I would call him a master and he would tell me to shut up.

He teaches through story. While clarifying a move he’ll stop mid stream and tell a long winding story that usually begins with a foible and ends with a question. Sometimes he gets lost in the maze of his story and re-enters the movement with a shrug and a chuckle yet I have gained something in the journey. Today he stopped mid-cycle and said simply, “Power demonstrations interrupt learning.” When he saw our confused looks he laughed in recognition that the first half of his story was told in his head so he filled us in saying, “I once worked with a teacher that would do impossible feats to show how much better he was than his students. It was impressive but discouraged his students. It took me a long time to realize that this was a demonstration of power for power’s sake. The teacher needed the students to know his superiority. That is not teaching. That interrupts learning.”

I loved the phrase, “power demonstrations interrupt learning,” and repeated it a hundred times so I would remember it after class. It made me wonder how much of our education system is about learning and how much is about power demonstration. The excellent teachers I know and work with are empowering their students. Their focus is not on what they know but on how they serve the bigger questions of their students. The system in which they work is nothing if not a power demonstration – a system designed to control the batches of kid-lumber moving through the mill. I once worked with a group of vice-principals that gave each other high-fives when they successfully expelled a student. That is a power demonstration, an ugly ship sailing without a map or a star to guide them.

Recently I had an email exchange with the executive director of an arts organization. We are collaborating on a grant and the guidelines require us to squeeze our art outreach program into the language of state standards. She wrote, “I loathe these standards, I don’t believe in them and hate that my own children have to learn in a system driven by them.” I hear parents, teachers and administrators use the word “loathe’ a lot in reference to the standards and tests they spawn. I told her how ubiquitous the word loathe is in the education community and wrote back asking, “Then why are we participating by squeezing our big expansive arts program into the minimal lowest common denominator thinking of the standards?” She replied, “Because we have to play the game.” “Do we?” I asked. “If we want to grant money we do.” That’s the rub, isn’t it? If the schools want the funding they must dance the power demonstration dance regardless of its impact on learning.

Repeat this phrase100 times so you remember it after class: power demonstrations interrupt learning.

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Truly Powerful People (394)

Posted on April 7, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

394.
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 grandmother grew up in a gold mining camp in the mountains of Colorado. There is a wonderful picture of her as a young girl, riding a mule, dressed in overalls and a straw hat, a female Huck Finn. In her lifetime she experienced the advent of electric light, flush toilets, hot water on demand from a faucet, and central heat. She saw two world wars – each the war to end all wars that, ironically, gave birth to the war industry. She lived the mind bender that came with the atom bomb. Airplanes took flight, automobiles took over, and she saw a man step on the moon. Hearts became transplant-able, credit was forever associated with a plastic card, food became fast, ovens could microwave and salad could be found at a bar. Serve yourself.

Once, she hid an old horse in her kitchen because the truck from the rendering plant was trolling her neighborhood. She lived near Pearl Harbor on that day of infamy. She out-lived two of her children. She was a tiny woman who technically could not ride some of the rides at the carnival (she was shorter than the clown) but no one stood in her way. She taught me that formidable had nothing to do with size.

I once half-joked that if the world came to an end the one thing I wanted to guarantee my survival was my grandmother’s purse. It was shaped like a punching bag and was a bottomless source of food, bandages, water, rain gear, tools, utensils, maps, wire, string, duct tape, clothing, shelter and toys. Her purse was something out of Harry Potter: pure magic.

She drove an orange Volkswagen bug and was not above tying her wet clothes to the antenna to dry as she drove to the next adventure. She could barely see over the steering wheel. Once, in her little bug we were surrounded by a herd of buffalo and although I initially tended toward terror it was her laughter that defined the experience for me. It is her laughter that I most remember about her. It was her laughter that carried her through.

Everyone lives a big life story and few know it so adept are we at reducing our lives to the mundane. So gifted are we at not noticing the extraordinary in the day-to-day ordinary of our lives. She was not a movie star, she never won a Nobel prize or took the blue ribbon at the fair. She worked a mind-numbing job on the line at a candy plant and achieved almost nothing that this world might recognize as valuable. However, she lived every moment of her time, she never once lost sight her glorious life. She walked a beautiful life. How’s that for a legacy!

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Truly Powerful People (393)

Posted on April 6, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

393.
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 cleaning our some files and came across more notes from the archive; these thought are connected to the last batch:

Not only is story capable of holding us in a coordinated orbit and conversely, blinding us to each other, story also holds the power of guiding us through the wasteland and back to the garden. The old stories are like maps: this is how it will look and feel; these are the challenges you will face, this is what you can expect.

Knowing the stories won’t save you from your trials but they will bring greater meaning to them. Stories connect: every human that has ever walked the face of the earth has been born, grown to adulthood, wondered what was theirs to do, loved and lost, fulfilled themselves or not, grown old, and died; their advice comes to us in the form of a story.

If we listen metaphorically, the wisdom it holds will spill its guts. Stories don’t need to be tortured to reveal their secrets, they are eager to share. However, treat them as fact and they will clench their jaws and clutch their fists and hold their breath until they pass out. Their treasure lives beyond the realm of facts, beyond the superficial. You have to listen deeply, engage it, feel it in your body. Story requires a relationship with you. Reading a story factually is to cage what is wild, to shackle what is free. Reading a story as fact generates fog.

This principle holds true of people – because we are, each of us, storytellers. Believe that your thoughts are fact, that you are right, and you will impound your spirit.

Jay Griffiths writes in her delicious book, WILD, “To me, the human spirit is not a stain on wilderness as some seem to think. Rather the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air.”

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Truly Powerful People (392)

Posted on April 5, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

392.
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 years ago Sean said, “I want to write a book.” He had the idea, he had the desire, and he had no belief that he could do it. There is always a first painting, a first strum on the guitar, a first time at the keyboard. Usually, there is a desire to do something and no reality to the dream. There is an image of “how I will be” when the dream is complete, but no image of the hours and hours and hours and hours of pursuit of the dream.

Sean wrote 500 words a day. Sometimes he wrote more and sometimes less. He wrote on his commute to work because a more-than-full-time job, 2 kids, a wife, school activities, in-laws, and all the other demands of a busy American life consumed his energy and his time. On the train to work each day he had some uninterrupted creative space and ample energy to turn the idea into words on a page. He wrote on his blackberry, more than 70,000 words in the only way possible to capture his thoughts given his circumstance.

On the way to a completed manuscript he doubted, he feared that he was not good enough, he wondered if there was an end, whether he was crazy, whether he had anything worth saying, he lost sleep, he rejoiced when ideas expanded, he celebrated milestones, he got to know his characters and their backgrounds (and his characters got to know him). He was full and empty and full and empty. He realized that writing the book was only a part of the journey. He attended classes about publishing, conferences about how to get an agent, seminars about publicity. He made a strategy. He wrote letters to agents. He interviewed editors. He asked a million and one questions and made no pretense about needing to know anything because he didn’t; he wanted to learn.

Somewhere along the way he recognized that the book was going to be written. It was no longer an abstraction but an actual dream being manifest. It was little steps, everyday, that accumulated over time. His first book, Colter’s Hell, will be available to the public in the next few months. He’s about to pull the trigger on his publicity plan and he’s excited to start letting the world know that his book is complete because he’s already chomping at the bit to write his second book. He knows the story; he has the idea. He has the desire. And now he has the belief that he can do it. One step at a time; there is glamour in the fire of creativity, but mostly it’s a slow walk. Sean said, “I’ll get there when I get there.”

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Truly Powerful People (391)

Posted on April 4, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

391.
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, during my walk, I was taken by how many people had stacked stones on the beach; little mini-cairns sprang up overnight! The seawall was festooned with seashells laid in patterns. Someone gathered feathers from the seagulls and crows and ducks and geese and create a small maze in the sand – an installation of black, white and blue. The driftwood was upended and rearranged. The design brought to mind Easter Island or Stonehenge.

It reminded me of an email from Horatio. Recently, without coordinating, Horatio and I watched the same movie, The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet cave paintings. I was so moved by the paintings, what we know and don’t know about how they were made, that I wrote a blog entry. Horatio, excited by the serendipity of having been similarly impacted by the same film on the same night, wrote me an email that I adore. Here is an excerpt:

“….What struck me was the obvious wonder of creation, that elemental thing you and I and every other artist feels when the work is genuine, that clearly burst in a relative blink of an eye into human life.. …The raw power of that creative act obviously made the cave a kind of holy place, and the fact that over millennia (millennia!) other Picassos emerged and picked up the torch (literally and figuratively) and added their images is maybe the most profound of all the facts the movie told. The power of representation, mirroring the world, telling a story, and passing it on. Boom. Suddenly you have power, as a man, as a woman, as a tribe! Wonder. Awe. The Mysteries!

The movie made all the work of the last millennium or so seem a bit smaller in a way, with our classes and our Photoshop and our internet and Shakespeare’s royal patrons and The Globe and those Italians and their papal audience and the camera obscura and fancy paints that those Dutch guys used in their well-tailored clothing. But it also made it much, much more grand as we see how we involuntarily continue to seek and represent our subjects and images and the stories that they drive as we continue to live on the earth. The movie laid the elemental creative act bare, with its mysterious but clearly profound repercussions to the tribe. We can’t help it. We keep picking up the torch.”

Horatio is exactly right: we can’t help it. We stack stones. We face the driftwood to the sea to stand guard. We see the feathers and must arrange them for no other reason than we must arrange them. We draw in caves for reasons beyond reason. We can’t help it.

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Truly Powerful People (390)

Posted on April 3, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

390.
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 found these notes in the archives and brushed them up a bit. My thoughts loop back as I find myself remembering how central to communal health is a common story and a vibrant, shared image:

Where is the story that unites us?

Story is the gravity that holds us together, pulls us into a common orbit. It is the irresistible cadence of invitation: come. Sit. It is singular and essential; it holds us in affirmation like a burgeoning pod: it is the common narrative that affirms, “This is who we are.” In the absence of a shared narrative it is almost impossible to truly say, “This is where I belong.” This “story that unites us” is the nucleus, the artist’s obligation and most important role.

I took my fingers from my ears and heard the whispered possibility of a single narrative when I recognized the artist’s call, not as an obligation, not as something I had to “do;” it was something that I already was. I recognized that I am an artist, not as a role, not in the sense that I need to produce anything; nor that I need to comment on the politics of my world. I am an artist because I am aware. I am aware that I create my world in how I engage and interpret every moment. We create in every moment. And, because I am aware, I am capable of listening to the story behind the words. I understood the call when I began to ask, “What is the story that I am telling through my life (with my fingers jammed in my ears)?” What is the story that I am telling my self about myself? I am an artist not through anything I do, but in how I choose to be, in what I choose to hear and see, in the story I choose to tell. Is there a story that we choose to tell together?

Story is the gravity that holds us together, this we’ve forgotten, I know. And like the musicians in an out-of-tune orchestra, when we no longer recognize our common story the gravity reverses itself, we spin off into the void, alone in a cacophony of inner monologue. Hell is a community of individuals lost in the fog of their own story. Hell is the universe that has forgotten the existence of symphonic music. Hell is where you compare yourself to others (and the others always win), where you have to be perfect, where you are never good enough; Hell is where you invest in false notions of who you should be, have to be, could have been. In Hell there is no present moment because you are too invested in the fears of the future and regrets from the past. It’s a dense fog, an inner wasteland, a lonely place.

Staying in hell takes a real commitment to the story that you tell! The commitment to telling a common story is no less arduous but produces a dramatically different sound.

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Truly Powerful People (389)

Posted on April 2, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

389.
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 sand hill cranes leave prints in the mud. They return to the river each night, find a nice sand bar, swoop in by the thousands and land en masse to await the return of the sun. Although I don’t know this to be true I imagine they huddle together, moving like a river eddy, impressing the sand and mud with a map of their movement. It’s an incredible map to see! The natural world’s Jackson Pollock made more impressive when you consider they’ve made versions of this map at this time of year for centuries!

Remove your shoes and walk the map and you’ll receive a crane reflexology treatment. Their map is 3 dimensional and massages the bottoms of your feet! All of life’s stresses slip away when you add your impressions to their map. Tragic tales and stories of woe melt like butter as crane perspective fills your body and soul. I felt an entire year’s worth of life gumbo leave with a sigh.

As I stood on the map I wondered what geography I scribe in the mud of my life. What mark does my eddy leave? Of this I am certain: if you removed your shoes and walked my mud map you would be more likely to break a toe than leave behind your stress. Now that I have had crane reflexology and filled my metaphoric cup with their perspective I am committed to tracing a different life map. Smaller steps, more circles, with attention paid to my natural migration pattern instead of walking the concrete paths and straight lines of urban human flight. At the end of my days I want my fellow walkers to be inspired to take off their shoes, stand in my impressions, and feel the goodness of the being that once walked in this place.

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Truly Powerful People (388)

Posted on April 1, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

388.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Kicking back on the hood of her car, gazing at the stars, Megan said, “Now, there is something I can worship.” The sky is so big in Nebraska that it is almost impossible not to fall into it and I had the feeling we’d been falling into this moment, this place and time for a lifetime. How many people before us have looked into the sky on a still quiet night and felt the enormity of their universe and the quiet intensity of being alive for the few turns of the earth that we have together? It is a gift to bear witness and story it into existence. Sky gazing opens us to the mystery and isn’t that the purpose of worship?

Earlier in the day Megan, Jill and I stood in the Platte River. We’d come to see the cranes. Megan said, “I always wonder where this water has come from; how far has it traveled to be here?” We immediately put our hands in the water to feel it – not just any water but this water that traveled this way at this moment, the same moment we decided to wade into the river. Little did we know that soon we’d be covering ourselves with mud to incite stories from kindergarteners, Jill’s inspiration. As I stood in the back of a classroom watching these incredible mud covered women listen with rapt attention to small people telling stories of bear hunts and being shot from a cannon into a mud pie I felt like the water having traveled so far and was grateful for the hands that reached into the river to touch my life at just the right moment.

Sitting on the hood of a mini-van parked far beyond the city lights on the spinning earth with a brilliant half moon slowly circling around us, coyotes howling far in the distance, cranes by the thousands sleeping beyond the fields, clock time was no where to be found. I marveled at the currents that brought me here to this place and this moment and thought, “This is what it feels like to worship. Isn’t it amazing to be alive?”

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Truly Powerful People (387)

Posted on March 31, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

387.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

We hold our workshops in Hastings on the top floor of the police department – a building that used to be a school so on the third floor it sports a small multi-use room with a stage – it is perfect for the experiences and messes that we create. This morning, dense with fog, we sent the teachers out of the building looking for edges.

Fifteen minutes later they proclaimed, “There are edges everywhere!” We live in a world that knows itself by the lines that it draws and the rules that it makes. They translated their edge discoveries into art installations and then taught us what they learned about edges.

First, we learned that it’s at the edges where the real learning happens. Edges are uncomfortable. Edges are to be played with, feared, challenged, leapt over and run from. Edges are where differences come together. Edges are necessary and not necessary. Judgments are edges. Edges are useful in making distinction and it is through our edges that we come to know ourselves. Edges can be sharp, broken, smooth, clean, rough, precise, unknown, limits, boundaries and horizons. Playpens are defined by there edges and so are prisons. Stories have edges just as pictures have frames. There are edges to perception. Doubt is an edge just as choice designates an edge. Opportunities are found on edges. Your edge is different than my edge. We seek our edges and redefine them. Yesterday’s edges look small and today’s edges look intimidating.

That’s just a snapshot of what they found. Who knew there was so much to be found on an edge! What do you find on your edges?

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Truly Powerful People (386)

Posted on March 30, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

386.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

David asked me to think about color and my relationship to color. Later this summer we will have a chat and I can’t wait. Since he sent me the note with his questions (on brilliant yellow paper, I might add. A shade of yellow that tends to the reds and not the greens so it is warm and inviting), I’ve had several surprising encounters to help me prepare for my color conversation.

For instance, today as I work with the incredible educators in Hastings, NE a teacher told the group about her kid’s belief that color did not exist before the 1970’s; camera’s caught the miracle of color coming into being. Television programs caught it, too! I imagine the kids asking, “What was the world like before color?”

My dear friend Judy has an app on her phone that allows her to mix and create color. She tells me it is mesmerizing and can play with the app for hours. When she greeted me instead of saying, “Hello, she announced, “I’ve created the most extraordinary color.” It is not mystery what Judy’s relationship is to color!

Silvia took me be the hand and said, “You have to see my new basement color!” She skipped down the steps, flipped on the lights, and told me the story of her accent wall, an amazing shade of blue, warm and relaxing. And, it went perfectly with the couch. “I really love it!” she said.

Driving to see the Sand Hill cranes, Megan pointed to the magenta sun slowly setting through the purple gray clouds. “Look!” she exclaimed. I caught my breath. It was a color I rarely see and was growing more saturated by the second. She took several photos to capture the colors melting together in the sky.

My first revelation for David: I am seeing color through the eyes of others and I am astounded at what I see. When am I not having a relationship with color?

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