boardwalk | The Direction of Intention

Take A Second Pass [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on August 16, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative

It was the second time we’d walked the loop. The first was many months ago in another season. Though the path was the same it felt as if we were walking an entirely different trail. This time, instead of seeing across brown and yellow winter marshland, we walked through a tunnel of tall viridian reeds. Not able to see the landscape, I looked up through the green at a rain-threatening sky. If our first hike on the boardwalk felt like a discovery, the second pass seemed directed.

The second pass. In life it’s called a memory and it is never the same as the original walk. To begin, it is viewed from a different season. Time alters details, rearranges events, begs questions. The second pass is made with a different purpose-in-mind. To re-view. It is directed, replayed, questioned, run forward and backward. Different endings are tried on for size. Different beginnings, too. Destiny or accident? Did that really happen?

Plotting backward through memory provides ample sense-making. Event chains, choices, that lead to this place, this day, this story called life. Looking forward from the current first pass, this present walk, there is a wide open vista. What if I stepped off the path? Is there a path? It’s all discovery though we rarely experience it that way. The routine of the day or the master to-do-list obscures the newness of each and every step. Same-old-same-old is a sorry reckoning.

Kerri and I are having an ongoing conversation about how quickly and dramatically life can change. Just when you think you know what the day holds a strong wind huffs and puffs, forever altering the arc of your life. The tiniest of choices hold the seeds for the most profound changes. The boardwalk suddenly disappears. Or the opposite, when you are lost and least expect it, a boardwalk magically appears. In a flash a path seems certain.

And, isn’t it awe-some that we are capable of twice-storying this grande life adventure? Giving to each step a meaning and shape the very moment we take them. Giving to each step a different meaning and shape, over and over again, on the return loops, the second pass. Memory.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE BOARDWALK

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Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Metaphor, Story | Tagged: accident, artistry, boardwalk, chain of events, change, choices, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, destiny, direction, discovery, fate, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, meaning, meaning making, memory, Random, story, storying, studio melange, the melange | 1 Comment »

Read The Walk [on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on September 7, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

Between the morning rehearsal and the evening wedding, we had several hours without commitments so we did the thing we most like to do. We walked. It was a gorgeous September day. We were in Milwaukee’s Third Ward, a miracle of reclaimed and converted warehouses, shops and condos that line the waterway. We followed the Riverwalk, Kerri snapping photographs, ambling our way to Lake Michigan.

It’s odd in this age of pandemic, to be in a city on a beautiful weekend day. The rules of engagement are different. The rules of enjoyment are different. Be out in the day but avoid the crowds. There was an art fair, a crush of people, so, as artists, normally pulled toward art gatherings, we walked the other way. In years past we would have waded in to the fray, talked to the artists, enjoyed people enjoying art.

Instead, we found a bounty of art on our walk. The shadows playing on the walls. The flowers. The finials. The sculpture. Everywhere we looked we found riches of intentional design. People dedicated to creating beautiful spaces had a field day re-imagining what had once been an industrial wasteland on the water.

Chiseled into the the boards upon which we walked was a narrative history of the city. We stepped on top of important dates of the Civil War. We walked across innovations, breweries arising in a city of beer, World Wars and the changes they wrought. Sports victories. We walked across the story of a previous pandemic, a hundred years ago. A few thin boards, markers of a tragic toll.

For a moment I stood and watched the kayaks paddling, the pontoon boats cruising the channel, the diners seated beneath umbrellas, the strollers, like us enjoying the day with no destination calling. Full moments in lifetimes that someday might be told in a few thin boards of narrative highlights.

I wondered how many people, how much dedicated action, it took to make this moment beautiful and possible. The architects. The artists. The artisans. The craftsmen and women. The laborers. The florists, The gardeners. The shopkeepers. The waiters. The chefs. The suppliers. The mail carriers,…Dreamers all, stretching back through time. Interconnected and interdependent in ways that only few recognize.

That’s the challenge, isn’t it? Were I to chisel the story of our pandemic in a boardwalk, or create a sculpture meant to capture our moment in narrative time, my theme would be interconnection and interdependence unnoticed. Unmasked. A myopic madness, a messy delusion of every-man-for-himself, a sure-fire way to perpetuate a pandemic or warm a globe.

There is, of course, no evidence for life thriving in a vacuum. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence, apparent on a stroll in a city on a beautiful sunny September day, killing some time before a wedding, that it takes all of us, every last life, to thrive. An artist needs an audience. A developer needs a supplier. A doctor needs a patient who wants to be healthy. Who wants to do more than survive. Thriving is, after all, a group sport. A careful reading of the boards tells a very specific tale: no one does this walk alone.

read Kerri’s blog post about OUR WALK