Posted on February 19, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
When I was young and resilient, I enjoyed doing prat falls. I walked into walls on purpose. It was good for a laugh. Suddenly falling out of my clogs was a minor-show-stopper. It’s the element of surprise. Laughter loves the unexpected.
These days (how’s that for an old guy phrase!) I am less likely to spontaneously fall down unless, of course, it’s unintentional. Now, when I fall, I’m the one who is surprised. The good news in my reversal of fortune is that I can now take full advantage of the getting-up-process. My audience is no longer wowed by my prat fall but can be thoroughly entertained by my authentic struggles to stand. It’s not pretty so it’s filled with opportunities for fun.
Posted on February 12, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
Don’t be deceived. Even though I’m a sensitive male, a soft-guy, an empath, an introvert, a painter…I am, after all, still a man. In a pre-google-maps-world, when lost, I’d never stop the car and ask for directions. I’d flex and figure it out. If you have a problem, my first impulse is to fix it. Guy stuff, through and through. Sometimes I even surprise myself. “How manly of me!” I exclaim.
Posted on February 10, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
I’m certain the first time I tried to walk I was not successful. A few stumble-steps and a return to the floor. My first attempts at speaking the English language did not receive a passing grade. As I recall (and I don’t recall), I made some gurgling sounds into which the adults surrounding me projected meaning. I’m certain they cheered and encouraged me to gurgle-on.
Learning is not a terribly difficult thing to do when 1) there’s a reason to do it, and 2) judgment, including words like “success” or “failure” are absent from the experience. Thank goodness my first art teacher treated me like an infant and, rather than critique my mess, she encouraged me to gurgle-on. Consequently, I associate my artistic impulses with fun and exploration instead of the thousand shades of rignt-and-wrong that most people are subjected to.
Recently Skip wrote and asked, “What’s the second rule?” Suspend your judgment and learn.
We just bought a mandoline. It slices and dices and chops and cuts. “The first thing we’re going to make is potato chips!” Kerri proclaimed. And, then, her brow furrowed. “What if we do it wrong?”
“We’ll learn something and make another batch.” Trial and error. Both “trial” and “error” are essential ingredients in the learning process and, since all of life is a learning process, you’d think someday we’d learn to value the “error” portion of the experience. We do ourselves a great disservice placing so much emphasis on passing the test and having the “right” answer. The essential ingredients of trial and error can’t breathe in brains fogged by so much right-and-wrong-ness.
Our first batch, like our first baby step, was a stumble. But more delicious. We stood over the pan eating our result and discussed second steps. What should we do differently next time? Less heat or more? Thinner slices or thicker? This is all I know. I love to learn, especially when food is involved and judgment is not.
Posted on February 8, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
It’s food week at the Melange. Well, truth be told, it’s always food week here. When we’re not in our studios we meet in the kitchen and either eat food or talk about eating food. Sometimes – okay – everyday, when I am up in my office working, Kerri sends me a midmorning text: “Are you staaaaarving?” My reply never waivers: “Yes. Yes I am.” Snacks appear and happiness ripples throughout the house.
It’s winter and it’s covid so our circle of experience has shrunk mightily. Kerri injured her foot so our daily winter walks through the frozen tundra are on hiatus. As our recent photographs have betrayed, we are explorers in our own house. Photos of Dogga. Photos of the moon. Clever shots of candles and glasses of wine. And food, food, food.
Because it is winter, the big pot has re-emerged. Soups or spaghetti sauce are often simmering on the stove. During the warm months, the big pot goes on vacation but faithfully returns when the temperatures drop. There are weeks when the big pot never makes it back to the cabinet. It’s a workhorse.
I appreciate the reappearance of the big pot because, in addition to being essential for soups, it evokes stories. It never fails. The pot comes out. The chopping commences. And the stories start to roll. Our big pot has been around for a very long time so it is alive with story. Big pots bring memories of parents and grandparents, holiday meals, Dorothy cooking on the cast iron stove. It evokes remembrance from childhood, steam rising from the pot and fogging the kitchen window. Once, as a boy, I couldn’t breathe and leaned over the big pot. The steam helped.
This week we are excited: we have a new soup to try. Last week we made a simple vegetable soup, a recipe we lifted from 20. The big pot also helps us to dream. We remember a pre-covid world when we had gatherings and dinner parties, when we squeezed people into chairs at the table, elbows negotiating heaping plates of pasta, crusty bread, and wine. Laughter. “It’s the first thing we’re going to do,” Kerri says, “when this is all behind us.” The pot will come out. A vat of sauce will bubble on the stove. Friends will pack into the kitchen, asking, “When do we eat?”
Posted on February 7, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
In our kitchen, I am the sous chef. Second in command. I chop, slice and dice. Then, I place my colorful preparations in glass bowls, carefully arranged relative to the stove so the chef need only reach to add an ingredient to her magic-making. “What’s first?” I ask. “Onions and garlic,” the chef replies, tying on her apron. I know the answer before I ask but it’s our ritual signal, like the kitchen version of “On your mark,” to the runners at the starting line. The onion steps onto the cutting board.
We love to cook together. I have learned through the many phases of my life that my relationship with food mirrors the relationship I have with life. If I attend to the the palette of tastes and textures that I eat, if I take the time to savor and appreciate my food, I carry that attention into every moment of my day. If I rush through and jam any food-like-object into my mouth, I carry that same inattention into my life. Appreciation, savoring, is mindfulness. Slowing down to plan and fully fill the palette of flavor fosters anticipation. Moving through a grocery store or farmer’s market is a wholly different affair when favorite recipes call.
I did not arrive easily at my understanding of food and life. The first recipes I tried were utter disasters. Don’t ask BK about my inaugural batch of lentil soup. It will send him into waves of horror-laughter. I ate it to prove that my cooking was not so bad but could not hide that my soup nearly killed me. And, I remember the moment that I decided to learn to cook. I remember like it was yesterday the understanding that sent me to the stove: I wanted, perhaps for the first time in my life, to take care of myself. More than that, I wanted to fully taste the richness of being alive and to do it, I had first to stop running. One must stand still to fully taste. To savor, one must stand still with others. “What do you think? Kerri asks, “More salt?”
Experimentation, trial and error, are the only way. Taste and adjust. And, isn’t that a terrific life credo?
In the recent past, each week, we try new recipes with 20. We’ve discovered some incredible flavors, our repertoire is expanding. Soups and chilis and stir fry. Mostly, that we intend to make meals together, that we slow down and enjoy each other’s company en route to a new taste, an ingredient that we can’t pronounce, a spice that is unknown. “This might be a disaster,” we say as steaming bowls of deliciousness hit the table. “Well, there’s only one way to find out,” we say as we click together our spoons and dive in.
Posted on February 5, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
Once, after sleeping through the sunrise at a rest area, we drove through a Starbucks without stopping at the order kiosk. The kind young woman at the window, after politely telling us that we hadn’t yet ordered, brought us vats of coffee for free. She said we looked like we needed it. And, we did. We needed it.
I suppose we don’t really know what is good for us. That might be the reason we regularly step into the ridiculous and only recognize that it is ridiculous after-the-fact. My favorite part of our folly is the paradox that makes it all possible: we have the spirit of feral cats but were raised to be polite and clean our plates. It’s this inner collision that makes possible each and every attempt at scaling Mt. Pancake.
We’ve yet to summit. But, never fear, the next time all-you-can-eat crosses our fancy, we’ll get out the ropes and pitons, the special forks and belts that loosen-a-notch or two, and we’ll climb that mountain until I collapse in the booth and Kerri glazes over in a pancake-coma. Some nice serving person will gently take our plates and tell us to take our time. “No rush,” they will say, “You look like you need to sit for a while.” It’s a wonder they don’t take our car keys.
Posted on February 4, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
“The devaluation of music and what it’s now deemed to be worth is laughable to me. My single costs 99 cents. That’s what a single cost in 1960. On my phone, I can get an app for 99 cents that makes fart noises – the same price as the thing I create and speak to the world with. Some would say that the fart app is more important. It’s an awkward time. Creative brains are being sorely mistreated.” ~ Vince Gill
I am the first in line to tell you that everyone has a creative mind. Everyone. That river of ridiculousness running between your ears is nothing other than creativity-run-amok. What else? Telling yourself that you are not creative is, in itself, a creative act. Seeds planted early in life grow into mighty obstructions. Creative wastelands are created. If you want to hear a terrific appeal to educators to nurture rather than stifle the creative mind, listen to Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 Ted Talk. It’s appropriately titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”
I’ve listened to numerous school boards tell me how much they truly value the arts – until it’s time to pay for it. Sadly, it’s not a question of whether or not they value the arts; it’s that the arts, the creative minds, do not fit any of the standards of valuation against which all things are measured. They do not know how to value the creative minds that they steward. Arts organizations and artists, mostly, are not money makers. Creative minds, creative acts, do not fit in the boxes and are not measurable on standardized tests. Thinking outside of boxes is, after all, the point of a creative mind. Metrics and goals stop a creative mind and heart in its tracks. The cruelest thing you can ask any artist to do is write a grant.
And yet, an artist has to make a living. Yaki asked me if I had to choose between making a living and making my art, which would I choose? I answered, “Art, of course,” but that it was really a question of Maslow’s hierarchy: it’s hard to make art when you are not surviving. What I didn’t say is that his question perfectly captured the reason schools kill creativity and creative brains are sorely mistreated: it is assumed one must choose between. Making a living and thriving creativity are understood as oppositional.
How many parents have tried to dissuade their children from following their passion for the arts? How many times have I heard Kerri say of the stacks of music on her piano waiting to be recorded, “What’s the use?” How many times have I sat in my basement studio looking at my stacks and rolls of paintings and wondered, “Why bother?” We do it to ourselves, too.
And then, the phony metric falls and we breathe, pick up our brushes and sit at our keyboards. There is a river of riches that runs deeper than money. It is, after all, a creative act to kill a passion. It’s also a creative act to feed and nurture an artistic soul. Both. It’s what the school board doesn’t understand: the choice is not between making a living or living as an artist, the choice is between feeding inspiration, expanding a creative mind, or smothering it.
Posted on February 2, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
From the school of if-you-are-sitting-on-the-mountain-you-can’t-see-it comes the hot mess we call healthcare in these un-united-united-states. Insanity never looks at itself and says, “I’m insane.” Our system of healthcare – and I use the term “system” loosely, is insane. In my sordid past as an organizational consultant I facilitated an experience called reverse design: ask people to design the worst system possible. The worst product imaginable. Hilarity ensued. None of those mad-mad sessions could have concocted what we call healthcare in the richest nation on earth. It seems the money has both blinded us and made us batty.
I just asked Kerri how much a postage stamp costs. “58 cents,” she grumbled, “And we got three mailings.” We finally achieved our get-out-of-jail-free card: a job with benefits. We canceled our ACA prison policy but, apparently, there was a one-day crossover in the billing cycle. I know a computer sent us the three-times-nasty-gram and spent $1.74 in postage to collect $.27. No human was involved though, having spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone with people paid to try and make sense of the nonsense, we’ve learned how numb the human mind can become when sense-making in a swamp of gobbledygook. We paid our debt online.
No human involved. De-human-izing. The Turing test is…a test of intelligence in a computer. Is the machine’s behavior indistinguishable from that of a human being? Hubris is a human quality that imagines the computer will become more like us while not recognizing that, in the process, we are becoming less like us. I doubt the computer will ever evolve to that point of pomposity. I suspect that the computer will someday recognize the folly of attempting to model itself after something so flawed as human intelligence. What intelligent machine would model itself on beings that seem incapable of creating a competent system for the care of its own health? No advanced intelligence would submerge its prime directive for the secondary intention of stacking nickels and pennies.
Posted on January 29, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
One of the cruelties of multiple daily zoom meetings is that, in addition to seeing other faces, you also stare at your own. “OMG!” I think to myself (of course- who else would I think to), “I look old!” The picture that I see on the screen does not match the picture in my mind. In my mind, I am much younger. “Some old guy stole my voice!” I shout to myself.
Here’s a strange bit of phraseology: I did not know our kids when they were kids. I came into their lives when they were already adults so I don’t have the memories of footie pajamas, bath time or back yard swing sets. During a recent visit with Craig, I realized that Kerri measures her time on earth relative to her children. She’s constantly reconciling the adult son/daughter sitting across the table with the infant son/daughter that she remembers like it was yesterday. “Where did the time go?” she asks, looking at her hands.
We’re all adults now. Well, even staring into the eyes of that dude who stole my voice, I’m cautious about claiming adulthood. I feel as if I stepped into a time machine that thrust me forward in time. I remember myself in footie pajamas as if it was yesterday. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that it’s in the last few laps that you understand the race is all in your mind and the real juice of life is in enjoying a body that can run. Or feel. Or sense. Or love. Or dance. Or hold the hand of the one you adore.
The advice I’d give to our children is the same advice I’d give to myself (and I’d do it, too, if that rat-bastard hadn’t stolen my voice!), “There’s no hurry. This race is not run on a line. It’s a circle. You’re not really getting anywhere more important than where you already are.” It’s a time machine to now.
Posted on January 25, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative
“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I only believe in pleasures.” ~ Ira Glass
Among other things, covid has been a great disruptor of our patterns. Our life today barely resembles the life we knew two looooong years ago. Yesterday, while driving through the farmlands en route to buy a loaf of bread at Simple Bakery in Lake Geneva, Kerri said, “It’s all so weird.”
Among our new patterns is more appreciation of our time. We are less willing to stuff our day with things to do, rather, we’ve established a slower rhythm and points during the day to stop, sit together, and savor the events of the day. It began at the onset of the pandemic with our covid-table in the sunroom. A place to sit and watch the sunset at days end. Soon, there were snacks. And then a glass of wine. It became a ritual. Now, there is nothing more important in our day than to meet at our table. Talk. We call friends and family from the table. Dogga leads the way. He meets us there, positioned just behind our chairs with his bone or a few mauled toys. Sometimes we sit for hours – far beyond sunset. We eat our meals there.
We’ve also established patterns of anticipation within our patterns. My favorite, the silliest but most effective, is french fries for snack. There’s nothing more satisfying on a cold winter evening, than hot salty french fries. We make sure that it’s not a common, every night affair. We save it for the tough days or as a surprise. “Is it french fry night?” Kerri hops and claps in anticipation when she notices that the oven is preheating. Yes. Oh, yes.
The new pattern, of course, is not the table or the fries. It’s the decision to make moments special. We decided amidst the pandemic, the broken wrists, the job losses, the civil unrest, the loss of family and friends, to make lemonade from this time of abundant lemons. We decided to accent the pleasures. To walk slower. To meet our days, not with a list of things-to-do, but with the intention of making a most savory day from the ingredients found in our pantry.
Pattern disruption. Within the hard breakdown of the known, the loss of the comfortable, we are fortunate. Many times, sitting in our sunroom, the happy-lights reflecting in the windows, Dogga quietly behind us chewing his bone, Kerri says, “I love this space.” I nod my head. Me, too. The literal and the metaphoric.
The Direction of Intention 