artistry | The Direction of Intention

For All Humans [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on May 5, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

I read that Cinco de Mayo, in addition to being a celebration of Mexican heritage and culture, serves as a reminder of Mexican resistance and resilience in the face of adversity. That makes this Cinco de Mayo a uniquely potent and particularly relevant celebration. With Mexico demonized and under assault from this current administration, it is more important than ever to uplift and honor Mexican heritage. Honoring Mexico on this day serves as an act of resistance to the bully xenophobic Republican agenda.

It also serves as a reminder that this nation – in reality – is a celebration of many ethnicities. We are a cultural crossroads. That is precisely what makes America great. We need not go back to some imagined fantasy-past. Our strength in this democratic experiment is our capacity to reinvent ourselves, over and over again.

The bumper sticker reads, “Equality hurts no one.” Too true. Equality is the ideal, the guide star at the very center of the Declaration of Independence, the driving force behind our capacity to re-imagine ourselves. It is the promise that allows us to intend a nation comprised of many races and ethnicities, a people capable overcoming their small tribal imperatives to create a more perfect union. In the ideal, our differences are what unite us. Our differences are our strength. In our nation, as in nature, our diversity is – and always has been – our secret sauce. Our superpower. It is the unique source of our innovation and our capacity to adapt, change, and grow.

More importantly, equality-in-diversity is the magnetic north of our moral compass. It informs our national conscience. Human beings, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation are afforded equal protection under the law. Equal rights. Human rights. An intention to foster equal opportunity for all. A celebration of humanity in all its rich multiplicity.

We can only hope that this current Republican attempt to scrub the nation of color, to force lock-step uniformity, is the last gasp of a dying white supremacy, the final whimper of Manifest Destiny. Change – real change – is always preceded by a frightened step backwards.

Today, more than ever, it is important to celebrate the resilience and resistance of Mexico, a day of triumph over a brutal suppressor. A day of recognition of the great spirit of Mexico, one of the many deep flowing currents of courage that forms the powerful river known as the United States of America, a nation of diversity that intends equity and inclusion – for all humans.

read Kerri’s blogpost about EQUALITY

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Filed under: Identity, Merely A Thought Monday, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, Cinco de Mayo, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, DEI, democracy, Diversity, equality, equity, humanity, inclusion, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, multiplicity, resilience, story, studio melange, the melange | 1 Comment »

The Epicenter of Dumb [David’s blog on saturday morning smack-dab]

Posted on May 3, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“The message here, girls, is clear: yes, if you marry the son of a billionaire, you too can have the life of a medieval peasant!” ~ Van Badham, The Guardian

If you wonder how far down the rabbit hole* we’ve gone, you need look no further than “MAGA Republicans marking Women’s History Month by pushing a bill that could block millions of women from voting just for changing their last name after marriage.” It’s called the SAVE ACT. Restricting a woman’s right to vote was a top priority of the Republicans and the new administration.

Here’s all you need to know: “In every presidential election since 1996, a majority of women have preferred the Democratic candidate.”

So, welcome to the Womanosphere. Branding servitude, scrubbing the 19th Amendment. Moving women back into pre-Civil War times. Apparently greatness necessitates a glossy paint job covering over women’s suffrage.

I suppose I can understand why white guys with big tires on their Silverados voted for this dangerous nonsense. I will never understand why women, people of color, veterans…or anyone with a half a brain, a sliver of heart, or a remnant of moral compass thought this Project 2025 march-to-authoritarianism was legitimate or remotely a good idea. The elimination of Constitutional and Civil rights, the gleeful resurrection of segregation, a broad brush white-washing of our history. The devaluation of women.

I’m dumbfounded. I’m staring at the very epicenter of dumb. It is brutal. It is dark. It is ugly.

I’m going to go make Kerri a sandwich.

*“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is often interpreted as a symbolic journey of growing up and facing the uncertainties of life, particularly during adolescence. (AI Overview). In other words, MAGA world refuses to grow up and face the uncertainties of life – like free and fair elections. It’s apparently easier to rig the elections, throw up obstacles to voters, than it is to come to the table with honesty, with ideas to legislate that serve the greater community. They are swirling in perpetual adolescence; stunted growth. The Womanosphere (insert eye-roll) is just the latest jaw-dropping example.

read Kerri’s blogpost about the WOMANOSPHERE

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Filed under: smack-dab | Tagged: 19th Amendment, artistry, civil rights, constitutional rights, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, dumbfounded, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, SAVE act, smack-dab, story, studio melange, suffrage, the melange, voter rights, womanosphere, Women's Rights | 4 Comments »

Our National ABOUT Page [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on May 2, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

This quote by Reynolds Price has been on my ABOUT page since I began blogging:

“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to us – second in necessity after nourishment and before love and shelter.”

Since I already know what I am about (mostly) I rarely visit my ABOUT page. I’d all but forgotten this quote was a constant presence on my blog. It is the flag I planted, as much for myself as for others, so I might always have a north star, a way to locate and find my way HOME. I carried it in my pocket long before I enshrined it on my site. I remember typing it into the little “about” box – it felt like a declaration.

Lately the quote has been poking at me. It wants further consideration. It has renewed relevance in our current circumstance.

The disparate bubbles that we occupy, MAGA and WOKE, are stories. Although the characters are different in the respective bubbles, the overriding story is the same: there is a threat to our way of life and the threat is the other bubble.

Although I believe the MAGA bubble is filled with dangerous fascism, they believe the WOKE bubble is socialism run amok. Occupants of both bubbles follow their news-of-the-day as if it was essential, true. Both narratives fuel the division. Both bubbles tell the tale of a heroic fight for good over an evil villain.

This is the third time in our history that these bubbles have formed; irreconcilable narratives housed under a greater umbrella-story, ironically called The United States of America. Robin Diangelo wrote the story of white supremacy requires black inferiority. Conversely, the struggle of equality-for-all is pitted against the story of white supremacy. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the combating sub-narratives: the Manifest Destiny story of god-given superiority (MAGA) with the All Men and Women Are Created Equal (WOKE) story. Our national narrative, our essential umbrella story, is of this struggle for identity: superiority for the few or equality for all. So, here we are.

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to us because stories are the glue that hold us together. Stories are essential because they define “belonging”. In a nation of immigrants, with a long history of bloody fighting over this question of belonging, what might it take for us to recognize that this fight is the greater story that defines us? It is the legacy we perpetuate in our grappling; it is the trace we leave in time. When will we see that the loss of freedom, the collapse of love and shelter is the cost of our shared narrative of seeming irreconcilable difference?

We’ve built our house on a volatile fault line.

However, there is a greater narrative available. It has been on our national ABOUT page since the beginning of our nation. It is our motto, our north star that will guide us HOME. It is printed on our currency. What might it take for us to rise above the bubbles and embrace the story at the center of our rhetorical ideal? What might we need to reconcile to live fully the nourishing story of e pluribus unum?

[this may be my favorite piece by Kerri. If you’re feeling angst or overwhelmed, do yourself a favor: take a short life-break, close your eyes and listen]

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blogpost about TRACES IN THE SKY

The Storyteller emerges from the forest.
Lucy & The Waterfox
http://www.kerrianddavid.com

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Filed under: Identity, KS Friday, Story | Tagged: artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, e pluribus unum, equality, fascism, freedom, identity, info bubbles, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, MAGA, Manifest Destiny, Robin DiAngelo, story, studio melange, the melange, white fragility, white supremacy, woke | 1 Comment »

This Storm [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on May 1, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

It seems our weather forecast is regularly filled with dire warnings. Violent thunderstorms. Hail. Tornadoes. We watch the radar as the angry colors move across the map, headed in our direction. So far we’ve been fortunate. In the final approach, the irate clouds veer to the north or break to the south. Sometimes they split and go around us. We catch the margins of the storm, the distant booms, the lesser winds.

After dinner we sat on the deck with 20. Earlier in the evening it was too cold to sit outside, the temperature by the lake was 10 degrees cooler than inland. When I stepped out the back door to cover the grill I was taken aback. It was warm and humid. We relocated outside and marveled at the odd shape and weird color of the clouds. We knew a storm was on the way, the warnings were apocalyptic, but our radar watch confirmed that, once again, it would mostly miss us. Kerri took photographs. 20 and I giggled, lapsing into middle-school-boy humor.

The weather forecast mirrors the augury of our nation. Climate change. Culture change. Waves of anger roll across the land in phallic-shaped storm clouds. We hunker down and monitor the radar. We watch the day’s news for the latest devastation, the senseless chaos, the mean-spirit that blows away our democracy.

Sitting on the deck, we acknowledged that we are collectively holding our breath. We know that there is no avoiding this retribution storm, this oligarchic money-grab. The fight that’s coming will not veer. The fight is already here. The fascist winds have arrived. We stock up as we do for any swelling tempest. We prepare our go-bag as we did during the recent riots. We reassure each other that sense and sensibility will ultimately win the day. Decency will return. And, in the meantime, the warning sirens blare. We do what we can to fight the rising autocracy. We do what artists do.

Coming Up For Air (sketch), mixed media on canvas

read Kerri’s blogpost about the STORM CLOUDS

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Filed under: Art, DR Thursday, Metaphor | Tagged: artistry, augury, autocracy, chaos, climate change, culture change, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, democracy, fascism, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, storms, story, studio melange, the melange | 1 Comment »

Mutually [David’s blog on Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on April 30, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet. The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.” ~ Carlo Rovelli via The Marginalian, April 27, 2025

The tree stands beyond our back fence, its limbs spiral and twist, sculpted by time and the force of the winds roaring off the lake. Looking at her photograph, a silhouette against an evening blue sky, I remarked, “It’s a Jackson Pollock painting.” She looked again at her photograph through the lens of my remark, nodding.

Nature sculpts the tree that catches the photographer’s eye, her photograph invokes images of a drip painting. “…interaction is the fundamental reality of the universe, that there are no entities as such…”

We do ourselves a great disservice ignoring interconnection in service to our separation.

It’s human: we need to make sense of things so we compartmentalize. We object-ify, detaching tree from time and wind from photographer, assigning all to discrete little box-identities, placing emphasis on the noun rather than on the interplay, the intertwining verb. In our minds we stop the motion, sever interrelationship into distinct pieces, so that we might convince ourselves that we have a grasp on “reality”. In creating objective “reality” we blind ourselves to the greater mutuality.

Science dissected the world-body into parts which led to the smallest objective part, called a quantum, and discovered it’s a slippery devil, energy, that can only be described subjectively. It can only be known through its relationships. Mutuality.

I’ve yet to hear an adequate definition of the word “woke”. Maga world flings it liberally and with sharp derision to describe all manner of “progressive” ideals, yet stutters when asked what it means. It’s an umbrella term, a catch-all, like the grainy photograph of the Loch Ness monster, shaky proof of something to be feared but mostly unknown. In fox land, this Loch Ness monster is called “socialism”.

To Maga world I offer this definition of Woke: greater mutuality. Woke, like a quantum, cannot be objectified just as compassion cannot be fully defined. It can be experienced. It is an energy, connective tissue.

Woke flies the flag of equality. Woke understands that the suspension of due process for any single person is the suspension of due process for all people. Woke understands that prosperity reserved for the few means poverty for the many. Woke intends shared prosperity, an equal playing field, helping hands. “Float all boats” is a Woke ideology. Woke is not a hand-out, it is a help-up. A moral center – also known as mutuality – is Woke; we can be our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper or we can be their persecutor. Keeper or persecutor: both describe a kind of relationship.

Woke is what defines Maga just as Maga is now clarifying Woke. Maga desires separation. It strives for elevation above others; legislated privilege. Woke desires equality. It strives for a more perfect union: legislated inclusion. The promise of possibility.

We do ourselves a great disservice: we are neither red nor blue. We are not conservative nor progressive. We are not Woke or Maga. Those terms are boxes that ignore the fundamental truth of our – or any – nation. We are interconnected. We are a relationship.

Remove environmental protections and all of the air we breathe and the water we drink will be polluted. Remove election watchdogs and all of our elections will be corrupted. Remove a commitment to truth and lies will define us and pull us apart.

After all, Maga is a made-up-media term just as is Woke. They are boxes meant to give us an enemy, the illusion of separation.

Democracy is not a “thing”, an object. It is a movement, a quantum. We know it by our interactions as defined in our Constitution. We know it as a place where bridges meet. Where people from many places come together.

Whether Maga or Woke, we will feel the loss of democracy equally just as we feel the disintegration of our values, our shared narrative, our aspiration for justice-for-all; mutually.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE TREE

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Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Identity | Tagged: artistry, Carlo Rovelli, compassion, connective tissue, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, equality, interaction, interconnected, interplay, interrelated, intertwine, Jackson Pollock, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, mutuality, objectivity, quantum, relationship, story, studio melange, subject/object, The Marginalian, the melange, woke | 1 Comment »

Hearts In The Sky [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on April 29, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

Today we light a candle for Beaky. Today marks ten years since she passed. When looking for the right photo for this observance day in the Melange, Kerri thought this one was perfect. A heart in the sky. Since Kerri and I met late in life, I only knew Beaky for 18 months though I feel as if I knew her for years. She was a warm, bright light. On more than one occasion, even while in great pain, I watched her uplift the spirits of her caregivers. The patient healing the healers.

She gave me essential lessons in being human. She could have taught our present world a thing or two about kindness, about what really matters; about creating a better world.

Although I never met him, I sometimes have conversations with Kerri’s dad. He was quite the handyman. I am not. When faced with a home repair that seems out of my league I regularly say, “Okay, Pa. Give me a clue.” To date he has never failed me. I’ve fixed the washing machine, the stove, the refrigerator, broken chairs and a table; I’ve plugged a hole in the wall, stopping a flood in the basement. Mostly, his clues are cautions to slow down. He reminds me that I can do anything if I take my time and do not rush. I do, however, have one small gripe with Pa’s advice-giving: when I am in the doghouse with Kerri and in desperate need of a repair, when slowing down seems dangerous, he is noticeably silent. I imagine him laughing, his silence saying, “I’m staying out of this one.”

We spent the past few days cutting back the grasses, raking the leaves, cleaning up the yard, replanting the front garden, repairing and filling the pond. Not only were we taking care of our sanctuary-home but I felt as if we were preparing for this day of remembrance. Cleaning out the old. Opening space for the new.

The work brought to mind a sweet memory: in college, my work-study sent me to the rose garden to help Brother Patrick tend the gardens. He was a quiet man, a gentle soul in the twilight of his years. The day was New Mexico bright and warm. I followed along behind him, digging a hole when he needed one dug, gathering the leaves and branches from his pruning. There was no rush, no thought of “getting it done”. He worked to enjoy the work and when I fell into his ethic, when I let go of the idea of working for achievement, he looked at me with bright eyes, as if there was nothing better on earth to be doing at that moment, and said, “This is good for the heart and good for the soul.”

Lighting a candle for Beaky. Communing with Pa. A moment of appreciation for Brother Patrick. I am filled with gratitude for the life lessons that continue to come from my very wise elders. Hearts in the sky.

read Kerri’s blogpost about HEART IN THE SKY.

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Filed under: Family, Gratitude, Love, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: advice, artistry, Beaky, being human, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, elders, go slow, Gratitude, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, kindness, remembrance, sanctuary, soul, story, studio melange, the melange, wisdom | 1 Comment »

The Constant [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on April 28, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant—the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter

One of Kerri’s nicknames is math-girl. She has a freakish capacity to do math in her head. No mad pencil scribbling on paper is necessary. No calculator required. She pretends to dislike adding the grocery bill faster than the store scanner or scrutinizing the taxes for minute errors but I know, deep inside, she gets a charge out of it. 20 and I regularly raise our eyebrows and ask, “How does she do that?” I’ve learned to never disagree with her when numbers are involved. I am wrong 100% of the time.

When she saw the Pi cloud in the sky she was ecstatic. It was like a visit from an old friend. An affirmation from this grand old universe.

She told me that she likes Pi because it represents a constant. A constant is something that stays the same, something that you can count on. It also refers to a quality of movement: ceaseless repetition, something that happens without pause. Or, my favorite definition of a constant: loyal or steadfast, as in a good friend.

Her comment about constants brought to my mind Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

It is a poem for our times. The cycles of history, the widening gyre, and the chaos that ensues when one epoch is ending and another is about to begin. Aren’t we now witness to a center that cannot hold? Things fall apart. Anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Here we are. Chaos is the constant. The world is flipped upside-down. A birthing pang? The caterpillar goes to mush before it reconstitutes into a new form; a butterfly.

Of course, this is me, searching for some sense to be made in the march of the oligarchs, the rape of the nation. The worship of the cruel, the elevation of the vapid. We can only hope that this is the natural progression to mush and that someday, somewhere out there, a butterfly will break from its cocoon, dry its wings, and step off the branch to restore decency, sense, and beauty to the world.

Pie-in-the-sky? Or the constant?

read Kerri’s blogpost about Pi

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Filed under: Merely A Thought Monday, Metaphor | Tagged: affirmation, artistry, beauty, butterfly, chaos, constant, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, decency, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, Pi, story, studio melange, the melange, The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats | 3 Comments »

The Baseline [David’s blog on saturday morning smack-dab]

Posted on April 26, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

It is the challenge of our times: discerning what is real and what is not. We lack a baseline for truth.

Photographs used to be proof. Video and audio clips were once incontestable. No more.

We live in bubbles of outrage fueled by easy misinformation. Journalism has morphed into entertainment that amps-up the outrage. Fuels the division. Manufactured division is probably our baseline. Our shared truth.

As MM recently wrote, attributing some of our lack of discernment to, “a toxic level of the willing suspension of disbelief required for the mass consumption of “reality television”. After all, reality tv has nothing to do with reality. The act of pointing a camera at something changes the basic nature of the event into a performance. We behave differently on camera than we do off-camera. Reality television is not real just as “truth social” has nothing to do with truth. We are drowning in misnomers. We are lost in our branding.

MAGA world likes to point at 47 and call him a businessman. That, of course, is a role he played on television. In reality, off-camera, he’s driven his companies into bankruptcy six times. There’s an entire industry of media apologists and spin doctors dedicated to painting lipstick on this pig, committed to torturing cowboy-sense out of his dangerous nonsense, his incessant lies, his grift.

In the absence of discernment, conspiracy theories grow like so much mold. Many in this nation without question (or the capacity to question) swallow swill and call it sugar. Heavily addicted to outrage, fed a steady diet of an anger-drug by our media, we are rendered incapable of shared truth and impervious to common (shared) sense. And, sadly, fact-checking seems to take too much effort.

We eschew discernment.

We are in desperate need of Occam’s razor: “a guiding principle in logic and philosophy that suggests when faced with multiple explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one is usually the best. It emphasizes the importance of minimizing unnecessary assumptions or complexities when seeking an explanation.”

The simplest explanation: “from 1981 to 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.” The minimum wage hasn’t risen since 2009. Manufactured division, divided as we are in our media-fueled bubbles of outrage, keeps us easily distracted from our actual antagonists.

Perpetually seeing red prohibits us from seeing the rest of the color-sense-spectrum, prohibits us from discernment rooted in a baseline of shared truth. It’s a fact: 90% of us grow poorer and poorer as the 1% openly trashes our democracy to give themselves a tax cut and a guaranteed cheap labor force. Is it no wonder that we are outraged?

Outrage should be our baseline. Just not focused at each other.

read Kerri’s blogpost about REALITY

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Filed under: smack-dab | Tagged: artistry, baseline, branding, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, discernment, division, fact, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, misnomer, Occam's Razor, reality, reality tv, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | Leave a comment »

Ancient Oak Wisdom [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on April 25, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Oak may live for 1,000 years, although 600 may be more typical on many sites.”

It’s very possible that this oak tree is older than our nation. It stands in a field plowed and prepared for planting, visible from a trail that we recently explored. The trail passes through a stand of ancient oaks, gnarled and twisted with time.

There is wisdom in the oaks, something not found in our leaders who view the world exclusively through the lens of dollars and cents. Power people who play let’s-make-a-deal with the lives of others.

Even though we knew it was coming, even though it was a trumpeted intention in the fascist blueprint, Project 2025, the sale and privatization of our public lands for short-term profit has arrived like a surprise unwelcome visitor on our doorstep:

“Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands,” says Jennifer Rokala, executive director at the Center for Western Priorities. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum just issued an order ceding oversight of the Department of the Interior to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (which is not a government department at all)…”

The ruse is – of course – that our protected public lands, our national parks, are nothing more than waste, abuse and fraud. To the fundamentally greedy and terminally myopic, they are resources ripe and ready for exploitation. Destroying them, so the marketing spin goes, will not only save the nation money, it will make lots of money for the privileged few. And then there will be trickle down! (insert eye roll here).

Dollars. No sense.

“Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.” ~ Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American, April 22, 2025

It is shortsighted hubris akin to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Two monumental statues carved in the 6th century in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan, a holy site for Buddhists, a cultural treasure for the people of Afghanistan, a UNESCO World Heritage site, destroyed [by the Taliban] in 2001, “..so that no one can worship or respect them in the future” Fundamentalists. Nationalists. Ideologues.

Islamic or Christian, nationalist fundamentalism, rigid ideology, leads to the same end. Purblind action, senseless destruction for short-term gain. Violence enacted on people and culture. Suppression of the many so the few might profit.

Purblind (adjective): having impaired or defective vision. Slow or unable to understand. Dimwitted.

Like the Buddhas of Bamiyan, once destroyed, our public lands, our Grand Canyon and Arches and Bears Ears, our old growth forests, our Yosemite and Yellowstone and Glacier National Park and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, our protected ocean shelf ecosystem…once mined and drilled and developed, will never come back. Our national inheritance, sacred sites, reduced to rubble for profit so that no one can worship or respect them in the future.

Wisdom is the province of the ancient oak, borne of an acorn of understanding that grows beyond knowledge, beyond information, and far beyond the accumulation of data. It cannot be attained through fundamentalism nor through righteous nationalism wrapped in greasy paper-thin religiosity. It cannot be bought or sold or legislated. Wisdom transcends passing ideology since it takes time and perspective. Wisdom is an open hand, not a tight fist.

It takes no time and requires little in the way of perspective to recognize that the destruction of the sacred in the name of private gain is nothing more or less than the avarice of the purblind, the action of the profoundly dimwitted.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora (among others)

read Kerri’s blogpost about the OAK TREE

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Filed under: KS Friday, Metaphor, Perspective | Tagged: artistry, Buddhas of Bamiyan, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, fascism, fundamentalism, Heather Cox Richardson, ideology, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, National Parks, Project 2025, Public lands, Purblind, story, studio melange, Taliban, the melange, wisdom | 1 Comment »

The Spirit Of Play [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on April 24, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

In a fit of serendipity, while awash with an overwhelming feeling of loneliness, this morning I opened The Marginalian and found musings about loneliness:

“Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson groups all the possible lonelinesses into the three core kinds that pulsate beneath our daily lives and govern our search for love: the past-oriented loneliness of missing what once was and never again will be, the future-oriented loneliness of longing for what could be but has not come to pass, and what he calls “the profound loneliness of being close to God… The first two lonelinesses are rooted in time…The third kind of loneliness deals not with the temporal but with the eternal; it exists outside of time — like music, like wonder, like love.“[Maria Popova, The Marginalian, April 20, 2025]

Yearning for the past. Fear of the future. Disappearing into the now.

I’ve spent my entire life standing in front of an easel. The younger me was trying to get to something behind the eyes. He was reaching into the mystery to try to understand it. Paint was the means to get there. I miss that man. A later version of me became burdened with trying to get eyes to see what I had painted. He was trying to reconcile the inner pursuit of the mystery with the outer necessity of paying the bills. His valuation became wonky, sometimes confusing personal worth with sales of his paintings. His intention split. He questioned the price of pursuing the mystery. When the acknowledgment finally set in that he would never have pieces in museums or coffee table books written about his work, he struggled but soon realized his struggle was akin to a butterfly breaking free and shedding a cocoon.

Two kinds of loneliness. No one can go with you when you gaze into the past; sense-making what-was is a solo journey. Similarly, no one can accompany you into the cocoon or know what lies beyond.

I loved this phrase in the article: “…the existential disorientation of feeling your transience press against the edge of the eternal, your smallness press against the immensity…” That perfectly describes how I now feel standing before my easel: small.

Kerri sat with me in the studio. I have two tiny canvases sitting on the easel. As I was describing what I was intending she stopped me and challenged me to do something new. She challenged me to let go of what I know. She asked me to step beyond my comfortable place into the mystery. I knew she was right. I know it is the only way forward. That is why I miss terribly the younger version of me who didn’t know any better. He threw paint with enthusiasm because he didn’t know any other way. He lived each day on a new trail; exploring.

I heard Horatio in my head: “Paint crap!” he said, howling, a laughing Buddha. “Paint lots and lots of crap.” Stepping onto a new trail is lonely. And, that’s the point. There’s nothing like not knowing what’s ahead to open the eyes (and heart) to the greater mystery (read: possibility), to fill-up withwonder, to resurrect the spirit of play.