Let Owl Guide You

Posted on April 8, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
With the guidance of an elder, I made this medicine shield years ago.

With the guidance of an elder, I made this medicine shield years ago.

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. . . . Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” Carl Jung

For a few disconcerting moments, I thought the crows had followed me across the country. You will remember that while living in Seattle, I was plagued by crows. They swooped me on a daily basis, picking me out of crowds for a sneak attack. I came to the conclusion that they were trying to wake me up. According to Crow Medicine, crows are an omen of change. When crows are around, something special is about to happen, consciousness is about to change and dis-ease will be dispelled. Since we can only connect the dots backward I can now say with great confidence that I took the medicine and it worked. They hammered me on the head for months before I stepped into the void and allowed new forms to emerge. Needless to say, I have a love-hate relationship with crows.

Yesterday afternoon our backyard was a festival of crows frantically barking. It brought back visceral memories and I went on high alert. As it turns out, the crows were focused on our owl and not me. I haven’t heard the owl since autumn and had forgotten that we have an owl in the backyard. I was happy that the owl was back. The crows were not happy as owls are great nest robbers and also, if hassled excessively, will make a dinner of an adult crow.

A detail from my shield. Owls have been with me for a long time. The owl is the top symbol.

A detail from my shield. Owls have been with me for a long time. The owl is the top symbol.

Last fall I googled Owl Medicine when the owl hooted above my head almost every night. I learned that, as a totem, Owls have great intuition. They follow their instincts. They see clearly (meaning they cannot be deceived). Owls see what others cannot. For instance, Owls see into the inner life of others; generally, they know more about a person’s inner life than that person knows about him or her self. This is why people do not sit next to me at parties! Also, owls are fierce warriors if something dear to it is threatened.

What a fantastic collision of bird archetypes for the crows and the owl to return to my world at the same moment. The owl was mostly indifferent to the incessant crow barking and attacks. There was no contest. In the evening the owl flew away to hunt and I wondered if there might be one less crow barking in the morning.

Both owl and crow are harbingers of change. They both speak to a comfortable relationship with the unknown and an attraction to the mysteries of life. I laughed when I re-read the symbols as I’ve lately been preaching through my book, The Seer (owls and crows are both seers) to cultivate “not knowing” as a necessary step on the path to health and creative vibrancy. In the practice of “not knowing,” one learns to see.

Later in the night, while driving back from Chicago, Kerri and I were talking about the extraordinary and meteoric changes in our lives this past year. She encapsulated my crow and owl commentary when she said, “We make plans according to what we know. It’s what we don’t know that changes us.” Her thought reminded me of another Carl Jung quote. He famously wrote that, “Religion is a defense against a religious experience.” Just so, a life plan is often a defense against a vital life. Adventure and discovery are never in the direction of the known. When you pay attention to the symbolic crow hitting you on the head you can also rest assured that when you step into the void there will always be an owl waiting to guide you.

title_pageGo here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, Seeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

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Stalk The Story

Posted on February 27, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative

title_pageLast year I wrote a book and only recently got around to publishing it. One of the many benefits of waiting several months to publish is that I forgot what I wrote so, in preparing to publish, I got to read my book as if someone else wrote it. I got to discover my own book!

Now that the book is out in the world I’m receiving lots of requests to talk about it or coach to it. The requests are driving me to read it again and again – only through a different set of eyes each time. The question I’m asking myself is this: What is teachable beyond the obvious? I end each chapter with exercises and ideas but the real teachable moments happen within the story (just like life!). Here’s a “for instance” tidbit from the book:

When a story stalks you through your lifetime you inevitably learn some things about stories; you unwittingly stalk them, too. One of the first things I learned was that the word “beginning” is arbitrary. An end is always a beginning. A beginning is always an end. What we call a beginning or the middle or an end is really a simple matter of our point of view. It depends on what we see.

We rarely recognize the teachable moments in our lives. They seem so distant or have become so wrapped in justification that we don’t recognize them as opportunities for learning. A teachable moment is often embedded in the story that stalks you. In the book I weave the story of Parcival through the main narrative because Parcival gives his voice away. The main character of my book gives his voice away. He invests in the idea of what he should be and, so, loses sight of who he really is. He betrays himself. I’ve yet to meet a person who hasn’t given their voice away or lived from an image (a “should-do”) instead of honoring their “I-want-to-do.”  A moment of self-betrayal is a story that will stalk you all of your life. It will follow you until you reclaim your voice. And, the capacity to reclaim voice comes from a lifetime spent stalking the moment of self-betrayal. It’s a life story loop.

What are the stories that stalk you? The answer to this might not seem immediately apparent but if you take a moment and reflect you’ll likely come up with a moment (or several) that has shaped or continues to shape your life.

A moment of betrayal and a moment of reclamation might make a tight little beginning-middle-end story or might represent two beginnings or two ends, depending on how you decide to see it. Wounds are often opportunities for growth. Triumphs are often the beginning of a new chapter. We grow. We learn. We story and re-story ourselves. We give pieces away and reclaim them later. What’s important is that we learn to see our dance, capture the moment, and grow.

Go here to get my latest book, The Seer: The Mind of the Entrepreneur, Artist, Visionary, title_pageSeeker, Learner, Leader, Creator…You.

Go here to get hard copies

 

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Wake Up

Posted on April 18, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

770. 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 night I had dinner with a dear friend. We had not seen each other for months and had lots of ground to cover, lots of stories to tell, and lots of changes to report. We talked of our losses and our discoveries. We waded into our fears and confusions. We challenged each other to reframe certain parts of the story. We laughed.

I can’t remember another six month period in my life that has been this dramatic in terms of change and growth. Certainly there have been other periods of change – relationships ending or beginning, career pivots, moving to other parts of the country – but nothing that compares to the most recent period. And it continues. It is as if I am standing in a still center and watching the universe weave a new web around me. The old fibers are falling. Space is cleared. The new web fills the emptiness almost immediately.

A few days ago I began class by leading a meditation. It was a seed meditation. It began with a focus on the breath, the breath cleansing and clearing space for a seed, the space cradling the seed (each person was the seed), there was warmth and rest and protection. Finally there was impulse, a new form, a tender shoot cracked from the seed, pressed through the soil, broke through the crust and found air and the sun. And as the tender shoot drank the rays of the sun and grew toward the warmth, the seed sent roots in the opposite direction. There was growth in two directions, root fingers reaching deeper into the earth, plant tendrils reaching higher toward the sun, both drinking from life to come alive.

In talking with my friend I realized that the meditation perfectly described this period of change. The seed, asleep for so long, has cracked open and there is growth in all directions, deep roots reaching for warmth and stability while new vibrant stems lift and reveal leaves capable of absorbing more and more light, producing more and more growth. Life feeding life. Our discussion at dinner was not really about rapid change. It was about waking up. It was about refusing to sleep through another day of this lifetime. It was about drinking from life in order to return nutrients to life. It was about following the deep natural impulse to crack open and grow.

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Call Your Name

Posted on February 4, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

It is not lost on me that I’m unable to get back to Seattle. The initial flight delay set off a ripple of stand-by lists with actual guaranteed seats on planes 2 to 3 days from now. I waved the white flag, let go of what I thought was so important, and decided not to spend 3 days in airports. Instead, I went on a road trip. I made a run for Omaha, renting a car and driving seven hours, into and through a white-out-snow-blowing-so-that-I-followed-the-tail-lights of the car ahead of me because I literally could not see the road. I talked with friends on the phone while I drove. I had hours of silence and quiet. I saw a part of America that I don’t often see because I fly over it instead of drive through it.

When I looked at the ticket agent and said, “I’d rather not wait in the airport,” she thought I was nuts. How could I make the decision to walk away? She said, “But, we can’t change and itinerary, we can’t transfer your flight to another city. You’ll have to buy another ticket.”

“That’s exactly right,” I thought. I would rather go off the reservation and drive, not knowing when or where I will find a portal into Seattle. Spending 3 days of my life sitting in an airport waiting for the smallest possibility of a seat on a plane seemed crazier than walking out of the airport and asking, “Well, what’s next?” I’ve spent too much of my life waiting for something to happen. I no longer have it in me. The ticket agent had a rule to follow and I realized that I did not. Rather, I have one rule and my rule is: don’t wait.

I have a mantra new to this year. It wasn’t a resolution; it just seemed to find its way in: Act. Try. Aim. In other words, practice what I preach: step into the unknown as a way of being, not as a once in a while activity. Act. I don’t need to know where I am going before I take a step. If something seems to take life from me, walk the other way. Try. See what happens. And then aim.

I now have a seat on a plane out of Denver on Wednesday. I will have driven or trained halfway to Seattle before getting on a plane. I’m having adventures, spending time with people I love, and not knowing what tomorrow holds. And, I am certainly more alive now than I would have been had I decided to sit and wait for my name to be called. “Isn’t it time.” I thought as I left the airport in my rental car, “that I started calling my own name.”

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Die To The Past

Posted on January 21, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

683. 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, Diane and I talked at length about dying to our pasts. She shared a potent meditation image – looking from her grave and in death no longer being invested in the limitations and attachments that previously confined her life. Her fears no longer mattered. She let go of her past and in so doing opened the way for growth and a new relationship with her future.

In story cycles, a character must leave behind all that they know in order to step into unknown territories. It is the movement away from the known, the comfortable, and the safe that is the metaphoric threshold to adventure and transformation. Leaving behind what you know is “story language” for dying to your past. Frodo will always return to the Shire but he will be a greatly changed. The Frodo that leaves on the adventure is not the same Frodo that returns. He knows too much about middle earth and himself to resume his former identity.

The caterpillar’s body does heroic battle resisting the cell replication that will eventually bring re-formation to a new way of being called butterfly. The caterpillar’s body reads the sweeping tide of change as cancer and fights back. This classic struggle within the caterpillar’s body of change meeting the conservative impulse ends when the resistance ends; the caterpillar can fight no more and surrenders the struggle. The imperative for change overwhelms the old identity; the caterpillar’s body releases the known and collapses into mush. Only then can the new form materialize and the new form is beyond the caterpillars capacity to imagine.

Diane’s meditation, Frodo’s journey, and the caterpillar’s process of transformation are the same metaphoric image. Each had to die to the past to step into the possible. The lesson over and over again, whether in story cycles, nature or human transformation, is that the new identity will always be greater than our wildest dreams. The only requirement is that we surrender the struggle, leave behind all that we know, experience the little death, and take a step.

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i.magine

Posted on January 18, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Skip told me that the innovation of the app store changed the world. We can design our access to information, we can design how we locate and inform ourselves in our daily travels, we can customize how we organize, shop, play and how we connect with our friends. We can design our products before we purchase them. Our options have options.

We look more at our screens than at each other.

In the age of the app the user is not necessarily the customer, the seller is not necessarily the producer. Our buying habits and travel patterns and preferences and impulses are tracked and sold and re-tracked and resold. Advertising is personalized to our computer-generated preferences. The impersonal identifies the personal.

Any 12 year-old with a modicum of computer savvy can construct an app and enter the marketplace. Access to information, to communication, the modes of creation and sharing have never been this limitless, varied or non-local.

Above all, it is fluid, ever changing in form, always expanding. The single most important skill in this geography is how to tell the gold from the dross. What has merit and what does not? Often, the answer to that question is personal.

Design. Options. Personal. Access. Limitless. Fluid. Ever Changing. Ambiguous. Shape shifting. Self-Organizing. Self-Directed. It is an infinite space. It is a way of being.

This is the world that exists right now. I just had a conversation with Sylvia about organizational culture change and the pressures all systems are experiencing to adapt to this changed world. It is a culture change, a perspective shift. Imagine what our education system might look like if it understood the world that existed today – not to mention the world that our students will live in and navigate tomorrow! Can you imagine it?

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Sit With The Tsunami

Posted on September 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

565. 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 have lately been craving coffee. Dark and sweet, I find myself staring out the window dreaming of my next cup. This is a phase. Coffee for me is like comfort food. When great change is in the wind, when I am feeling off center or the tsunami coming, I crave coffee.

It is possible to drink too much. Once, while in college, a doctor looked at my finger nails and told me I was close to poisoning myself with caffeine. I wondered why my jaws were always so tight, why I couldn’t sleep at night, and why people thought I was intense. Hours at the drafting table with endless pots of comfort brewing did a number on me. I was always off center when I was younger so I lived on comfort food. It was a great day when I learned that center was something I create, not something I drink.

Now days, when the craving comes, I know enough to brew an especially dark pot, make a cup good and sweet, and take my chair to the beach, and welcome the tsunami. I need do nothing else but welcome what is coming. No running around, no panic story, no avoidance techniques and especially no escape fantasies. Sit, sip and welcome the new. Comfort food is supposed to bring comfort, not evasion.

I read somewhere that when faced with discomfort we will distract ourselves, we will clean the dishes, vacuum the house rather than face our dilemma head on. I’m learning that these distractions are an early phase of the coming storm, necessary preparation, creating readiness, so that when the coffee craving comes, there is nothing left to do, nothing left to clean, but sit in a nice chair, sip the sweet dark brew and enjoy the transformation.

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