Posted on October 23, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
The torrents of rain and tropical wind gusts paused momentarily to regroup, so we went out. She couldn’t wait to set foot on the dock. She needed – needed – to walk to the small pavilion at the far end. A shelter with benches and remembrance. Her memories called.
Many years ago I had a week all alone in my childhood home. I was writing my book and the empty house seemed like a perfect quiet retreat. Between writing sessions I walked. I literally felt pulled to revisit the places and pathways of my youth. I stood at the edge of the present and listened for the echoes of my past. It’s what she was doing as we slow-walked toward the pavilion: attuning to the resonance of her life.
Standing beneath the shelter, already drenched from the rain, the wind winding up for the next hard gust, she said, “I wrote a song here…” The story spilled from her in fragments and she reassembled the pieces. A small section of the puzzle came together.
The birthplace of a song. The birthplace of an artist. A tiny pavilion at the end of a dock. The place where a young woman composed music in her mind and left behind a bit of the song, a popcorn trail for an older woman to follow so that she might someday find her way home.
Posted on August 10, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
Bully (noun) – a person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.
Bully (verb) – seek to harm, intimidate, or coerce (someone perceived as vulnerable).
Our choice has never been clearer. We can follow the path of the bully. Or, we can follow the path of the servant. Governance by intimidation or government as service.
A bully is a bully. It is plain to see no matter how others contort themselves to try and explain away his ugly behavior.
A servant is a servant. It is plain to see and requires no explanation.
On playgrounds of all shapes and sizes, people play follow-the-leader. Help the vulnerable or hurt them? Our choice.
We took a mini-vacation. Two days that felt like a total getaway and, in those two days, we relaxed. Completely. Totally. On the trip home Kerri said that it felt like we’d been away for weeks.
We are not generally nap-takers but since arriving home, each day without fail, a tidal wave of exhaustion has rolled over us. In short, we have become champion sleepers. “We must’ve needed it,” she slurs, struggling to sit up, as we emerge from our daily knock-out nap.
“What just happened? What day is it?” I mumble, fearing we are modern day Rip Van Winkles.
I wonder, is it rude to nod-off atop the podium while receiving our latest gold medal?
We wrote a play entitled The Roadtrip. It is comprised of the many months of emails we wrote to each other before we actually met. Like Love Letters only with a happy ending. In it, as is true-to-life, Kerri is the wise character and I am the character without a clue. Note: the best part of being clueless is that you don’t know it.
If we were to write a sequel there would be less words and many more snacks. As the audience, you’d have to watch us eat. Kerri is a Twizzlers girl and I am a peanut M&M man. The snacking begins before we hit the end of the driveway. It doesn’t end until we arrive at our destination – and even that is a momentary pause.
There’s usually plenty of room in Little Baby Scion but you’ll not be surprised to learn that when we pack for a road trip, after the snacks are in the car, there’s barely any room for our clothes, which is a good thing because after all those snacks we can’t fit into our clothes.
Let’s just say that we have our priorities straight.
Wild Carrot. Queen Anne’s Lace. Throughout every season we find ourselves marveling at the aesthetic structure of the plant. The graceful curves and shapes. They inspire movement and floral symbols in my paintings.
Summoning the Oracle, Google, I learned that a common question asked is how to discern Queen Anne’s Lace from poisonous Hemlock. They are surprisingly similar in appearance. “Poison hemlock stems are smooth, while Queen Anne’s Lace stems are covered with tiny hairs…” The moral of the story? Check your stems.
The stem of the word ‘fascism’ comes from Latin and means, “bundle of sticks,” – the visual symbol evolved to include an axe at the center of the bundle, representing “a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government.” Elimination of opposing points of view is the stem of fascism.
“Fascism’s origins are…ultimately centered on a mythos of national rebirth from decadence.” You could find no better or clearer tag line for a fascist intention than Make America Great Again. You could not pen a better blueprint for the fascist overthrow of democracy than Project 2025. The forcible suppression of opposition. Political violence as a necessary means of national rejuvenation, the demonization of the “other”.
As demonstrated in their gathering in Milwaukee, the reds are now a perfect expression of their symbol: a bundle of tightly bound sticks in lock-step – with an axe hanging over their heads ready to eliminate any voice of opposition. It turns out, like their sycophantic VP pick, many of these men and women, who once called their supreme red leader “America’s Hitler” and “a wannabe dictator”, were right. Sadly, they lack the courage of their convictions. They fear the axe. They lack a basic grasp of the necessity in a healthy democracy for genuine voices of opposition.
Is it rule by-the-people-and-for-the-people or a fascist autocracy?
How can we discern democracy from poisonous fascism? Check the stems.
Open your eyes and look, really look. The red hats have wrapped themselves in the flag so they might appear like the Grand Old Party. They are not. To anyone undecided or confused or jaded, I can only offer this advice: it’s important to check your stems before you ingest too much fascist hemlock believing you’re dining on democracy.
I used to wonder how my elders could “just sit around and talk” – or not – and marvel at the appearance of the crabapple blossoms, revel at the appearance of some bird or another. “There must be something more interesting to do!” I’d say and silently huff, “I’ll never-ever just sit around and stare at stuff.”
Well.
We spent hours the other day watching the crow babies in their nest. The cardinals’ arrival always gets a rise out of use. The day the peonies bloomed was cause for celebration. Now I think, “The world would be a better place if people could just slow down long enough to notice all the miracles happening around them.”
Now I know. There is nothing more important or interesting to do than be fully present where I am.
I’m so glad that the younger version of me was so utterly wrong.
Kerri rarely buys herself anything. Shoes have to fall off her feet before she will allow herself to buy another pair. And so it was with her flip-flops. Meant to be worn for a single season, her old pair had seen several seasons. They carried her for many, many miles. The heel was so thin it was nearly transparent when held up to the light. It’s worth noting that our summer footwear consists almost entirely of flip-flops. Recently, on every walk, on almost every step, she’d grit her teeth or squeak, “Ouch!” She felt every pebble, every uneven crack in the sidewalk. She was the Princess-and-the-Pea of footwear.
I was stunned when we went to the Old Navy outlet to take advantage of their $2 flip-flop sale and she walked out the door with three pair! “Who are you?” I asked, deeply concerned that she was experiencing a severe medical event. She explained that she couldn’t decide so in an uncanny, unusual and unfamiliar act of self-care, she splurged and bought all three.
“Six bucks!” she told 20 as she was modeling her footwear-coup. “Six bucks!”
“Wow,” he said, “That’s incredible. Catching my eye he added, “That’s 20 cents a toe! Good job!”
She beamed. Three pairs of flip-flops and deep inner satisfaction – all for six bucks! Worth every single penny spent on every single toe.
Thriving in an unlikely and inhospitable place, this thistle served as a sign, a testimony to possibility, the rugged beauty available only through dogged perseverance. Stretching up through a tiny crack in a busy sidewalk outside aging buildings in a bustling city, these thistles stood nearly five feet tall. Their colorful flowering heads brought us to a full stop. We set down our knitted-brows and absorbed their vibrant pink and purple stick-to-it-ed-ness. “Gorgeous,” she said, reaching for her camera.
More than beauty-through-resilience, these hardy thistles spoke to me with the veracity of an oracle. As I watched Kerri take photographs, the oracle whispered in my ear “Both beautiful and prickly,” she said, “Her prickles protect her against herbivores and others.”
“Ahhh,” I sighed. A well-rounded plant, indeed. No shrinking violet could possibly survive in this environment, let alone thrive. Bloom.
For a moment I stood watching the passers-by. Few took notice of the gorgeous thistles. Some scurry-ers glanced sideways at Kerri cooing and snapping photos of what, I imagine, they thought of as weeds for someone else to pull. No time for beauty. No time for responsibility. On-to-the-next.
“I’ll bet those people think I’m crazy,” she said, tucking her camera inside her purse.
“Yep,” I agreed. “You are definitely more like the thistle than you are to the people passing-by.” She gave me a sideways glance but decided to accept the compliment.
I winked and whispered to the thistle-oracle. “All the time in the world for beauty. All the time in the world for responsibility. Nowhere else more important to be.” Beautiful and prickly. Resilient to the core.
I used to wonder how Emily Dickinson, living most of her life in the isolation of her family home, could write poetry so soul-expansive. Her world of experience was impossibly narrow yet her view into the human heart so broad and deep. I am no longer confused about the limitlessness available in a tiny garden. There is more life teeming in our small backyard than I can possibly comprehend.
It had been years since we gathered with the Up-North gang in our home. They commented that our yard was “zen”. It’s true. We’ve come to think of it as our sanctuary. A creation borne of Covid isolation, of necessity during the pandemic, we brought our full attention to the only place in the world that seemed safe. Our yard. Over long winter months, sitting at the black table in our sunroom, we stared into the backyard. We watched the patterns of the birds and discovered the nests of bunnies and chipmunks. We watched with awe the subtle changes of seasons and the play of light. We wondered how we could make our safe space more comfortable for us and amenable to the plants and animals. We dreamed. And slowly, throughout our isolation and beyond, we carefully attended to our peace-of-heart. Is it no wonder that we now adore sitting in our yard, daily trying to comprehend the abounding life within our eyesight?
Emily Dickinson wrote her poems from just such an expansive place. Lately I feel an affinity with her. More than once, lost in wonder, I have thought, “How can I possibly describe what I’m seeing and feeling?” I understand, like Emily, it’s not possible to capture, but isn’t that the artist’s job, the poet’s errand, to somehow express that which is beyond our capacity to grasp? To bring hearts and minds together through a poem or play or a composition, so we might together whisper, “Yes. It’s like that.”
The Direction of Intention 