dysfunction | The Direction of Intention

Our Roots [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on August 21, 2026 by davidrobinsoncreative

Kerri snapped this morning. “How can they support this…cruelty!” she cried. “They” are among those we call family who adamantly embrace the inhumanity of the current administration; those who vote for the cowardice of the republican congress, the enablers of the ruthlessness and corruption. Those who consider themselves righteous.

“Clocks, for some reason or other, always seem to be marching, and armies never march to anything but doom.” ~ Alan Watts via The Marginalian

This was the sentence I was reading when she snapped. I admit that I grew irritated. This is a conversation we’ve now had a thousand times and I was not ready to have it yet again. It is a conversation that only marches to doom. Loss. I suppose it’s like grieving a death; it’s not one-and-done. We lose people in pieces, again and again and again. Sometimes the grief jumps out of the forest. An ambush. Kerri was waylaid this morning.

Every story needs an antagonist. How painful and confusing is it when the antagonist captures the heart and mind of someone you love? “How can they support this…cruelty!” she cried. In the previous nine hundred loops through this despair I’ve found flimsy justifications: “They are in the Fox News bubble,” I say, or, “They don’t really know what they are supporting because they are being told that you and I are the enemy.” I gave that up a hundred loops ago. I have no more excuses to make or rationales to offer. Those are the tools of the third child, the peacekeeper-at-all-cost.

There is no excuse. There is no rationale. There is no common ground here. The word “family” has crumbled. We distance ourselves because we want nothing to do with this level of depravity, this dedicated ignorance.

When I was in my twenties I placed the Rocky Mountains between me and my family. I had to know who I was separate from them. My mental, physical and spiritual health required distance and disconnection from dysfunction as the only route to know myself as healthy. My Rocky Mountain Rule was life-saving but required a great deal of grief. I spent hours staring into the ocean. I spent years walking the shores of The Puget Sound.

“I think this is why I love the ocean. It’s the most difficult part of nature to mess up with emblems and symptoms of man’s dissociated consciousness. It’s an environment in which the awareness of our roots can awaken, in which space (so real because of the light and color) can be seen to be joining things instead of separating them.” ~ Alan Watts

Kerri is experiencing her version of The Rocky Mountain Rule, as are many, many, many people across this nation. In separating themselves out, they are finding themselves, joining themselves. In distancing herself from this level of depravity, in placing a metaphoric mountain range between her and those who share ancestral blood, she is finding and affirming the very essence of what she believes.

In arriving unequivocally at, “I am not that,” one steps solidly onto unambiguous ground of self-actualization, “This is what I believe.” And there is no going back over the mountain. The cry, “How can they support this cruelty!” is not about “them” at all. It is a cry of love as a north star, a rejection of institutionalized hate. It is a cry of humanity refusing to enable the selfish inhumane. It is a cry filled with the grief of loss, and the utterly profound recognition of the inseparable nature of moral conscience. It is empathy that cannot ignore the pain currently being gleefully inflicted upon others. Their pain is her pain. Her pain is their pain. A joining, “…the awareness of our roots.”

Kerri’s legacy is available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blogpost about FAMILY

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Offer The Chair [on Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on September 8, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Indeed, the effect of the forum is all the more powerful if it is made clear to the audience that if they don’t change the world, no one will change it for them.” ~ Augusto Boal, Games For Actors And Non-Actors

Many of my pals in the theatre turned their noses up at me when I began doing work in corporations. They thought I was yet another theatre artist doing improvisation-games with the terminally neck-tied. I was not. My work was more in the tradition of Augusto Boal than Keith Johnstone. Some of the best plays I’ve ever facilitated, some of the most profound pieces of theatre I’ve directed and witnessed, happened in board rooms, classrooms or conference spaces. Here’s how I know: the actors and audience were one-and-the-same. Their play was personal. When they left “the theatre” they did not leave the nice story behind and end the evening with a cocktail. They were disrupted. They had seen something that could no longer be ignored or deflected. The hard work was about to begin.

People yearn. People entrench. People plant their flags and claim the most ridiculous territory. I’ve seen teachers come to blows over an overhead projector. I’ve seen lawyers undermine colleagues to gain dominion over a swiveling chair. And, the chair or the projector are never really the issue. The issue is usually an abstraction. Pecking order. Boundaries. Alliances. People have killed each other over a pair of shoes. It’s not the shoes but the status the shoes represent. Abstraction and illusion.

People are generally unconscious about the reasons beneath their passions. I’ve met a score of dedicated meditation practitioners who meditate to control their thoughts rather than realize them. Once I led a group of teachers through the ritual they enact each morning before the arrival of their students. The question was, “What are you preparing to do in your day?” Their answer was unnerving and revolutionary: they were preparing to control the kids. Teaching and learning were secondary.

We are witness to a country-wide communal piece of theatre, an unconscious play. The issue is not the mask. The issue has never been the mask. The issue is, I suppose, people feeling out of control, imposed upon. Fearful. They are, with their bare faces, making a stand. Drawing a line in the sand. That “no one can tell me what to do” might as well be “I am losing control over my life.”

And, as is always the case, as with the office chair and the overhead projector, refusing to don the mask does not really address the real issue, it merely deflects it. The energy and action is focused on non-sense. And when non-sense rules the day, the action taken actually brings about the thing-most-feared. Loss of control. The pandemic continues, the children are being taken, the economy suffers, the community fractures. It’s a lengthy list.

The lesson in the office chair wars and the overhead projector games is always the same. No one wins. Everyone loses in a toxic tug-of-war. The chair might be yours today but it will be theirs tomorrow. The game only ends when one of the players offers the chair to the other or the projector becomes a reason to share. The same will be true of the mask wars. People will die, the pandemic will continue until the mask becomes a generosity. Then, low-and-behold, the virus will abate and real control over our destiny will be within our grasp.

I hope that, like the lawyers or teachers who were brave enough to walk into the real story, to stand face-to-face with a dysfunction, that we meet our story and ask, “Why would so many sacrifice so much over a little piece of cloth?” An overhead projector. A pair of shoes. A chair that swivels…

read Kerri’s blog post about MASKS