An Experience [David’s blog on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on September 17, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is “art.” ~ Susan Sontag (via The Marginalian)

It was within a meditation on silence that Susan Sontag wrote this thought. With planes and trains and automobiles, with cell phones and 24 hour news cycles, with weed whackers and garbage trucks and sirens, with podcasts to plug into and streaming on demand…opportunities for silence are rare, indeed.

All of my life I have retreated to my studio to “get quiet.” I’ve learned – and it seems to me a no-brainer -that there is a direct connection between silence-of-the-mind and presence. And, the experience of ‘something-bigger-than-me” can only happen in the present moment. It’s a direct experience, not an abstraction.

Marion Milner – under the pen name of Joanna Field – wrote that happiness cannot be found in the narrow focus of purpose because it lives “out there”, it promises fulfillment somewhere in a distant imagined future. It’s only in the broad focus of the senses that happiness can be found because it is immediate. Happiness is only possible/available/accessible in-the-here-and-now. It’s an experience, not an abstraction.

Art brings us into the present moment. Art has the power to break through isolating mental abstractions into the shared space of experience.

Joseph Campbell wrote that our endeavor in meaning-making is the opposite of our distant ancestors. For them, meaning was made (or found) through the group. We are tasked with finding it within ourselves.

“It” is never found in insistent preachers or rule-books or exhibitions of righteousness. These are the noisy aspects of the narrow focus erected on a platform of “should”.

If “it” is to be found, if “it” is to be experienced, inner silence is the threshold.

Take a walk in nature. Become captive to the color of the leaves. Entice the quiet found in the studio. These are the secrets of the composer whose music lifts your spirit, the poet who stirs your humanity, the dancer who challenges your idea of what’s possible…all bringing you into the dazzling present moment. It’s a place the artist knows well, an experience beyond words.

read Kerri’s blogpost about RED LEAVES

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Puff, Puff, Poof! [David’s blog on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on July 3, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

“But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.” ~ Alan Watts

I recently read an outrageous statistic. The average American by age 20, across all available media, has seen one million commercials. I can’t confirm it but a quick consult with the oracle Google, produced some equally eye-popping numbers. Regardless of the actual number, we are awash in advertisement. My favorite synonym for advertisement: puff (British, of course).

In my recent foray into software development I read that 90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years. My particular favorite phrase describing data: units of meaning.

We are living in an angry time. It’s a vicious circle: our units of meaning are often – if not always – absent of context or continuity, rendering them isolated. They’re like asteroids hurtling through space.

People seek meaning. It is a uniquely human activity. Meaning-making requires context and continuity. Our ‘puffs’ would have us believe that we will certainly find meaning and connection if we buy what they are selling – but we soon realize that what they are selling, relative to meaning, is just that – a puff. Like me, you will never find lasting happiness in a new car or your identity in your brand of blue jeans. Perhaps you will experience satisfaction for a fleeting moment – which is roughly the lifespan of a unit of data-meaning. Is it any wonder that we are angry and grasping at any ole’ context that conspiracy theories and propaganda might provide? Anger is an expression of fear, and the fear: that we are hurtling through life without meaning.

“And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.” ~ Alan Watts

The lesson of our times (and past times): there is always a populist grifter ready to exploit anger and ignorance, making promises of meaning-fulfillment pulled from an imagined past like a rabbit from a hat. A political puff.

Sometimes I think this is why Kerri and I walk on our trails. To get quiet, to unplug from the incessant info streams, the madness of news-delivered-like-a-commercial. Puff, puff…poof. To re-enter substantial and lasting context. In nature, in the cycles we participate with and experience, we regain – and rejoin – continuity. We stop hurtling through our lives grasping for ‘puff’ fulfillment or trying to make sense of nonsense. We stand in something more tangible. Eternal.

“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.” ~ Alan Watts

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE LUSH DAY

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After All [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on March 15, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Food is the most primitive form of comfort.” ~ Sheilah Graham Westbrook

In anyone’s book, our circumstances at present are extreme. And so, we cook.

My role in the kitchen is sous chef and clean-up. Kerri is the master chef though she is generous and does not require me to address her as “Yes, Chef!” Dogga is the third member of our team. He is an enthusiastic taste-tester and also serves the role of floor clean-up. We are a good team. The simple action of cooking together is large part of our recipe for cooking-up-comfort. We love it.

The actual food that we cook is, of course, a huge part of the comfort infusion. We range from chicken soup to Kerri’s pasta sauce. Lately, we’ve been making grilled cheese sandwiches and, I’ve noticed, recipes that require mashed potatoes. Truthfully, we could probably strip everything else off the plate but the mashed potatoes are the essential. They are the epicenter of comfort. We have in the past made mashed potatoes all-by-themselves and feasted on an intentional mainline of food-cheer.

My theory of comfort food is paradoxical (and obvious). Comfort food takes you back in time. Kerri’s mom made comfort-mashed-potatoes so they are a direct connection to Beaky. Comfort food also drops you into the present moment. The delicious fulfillment of warm expectation. There’s nothing like taste and smell – a happy dance of two senses – to pull everything into the right-here-and-now. And in this moment, wrapped in a yummy warm blanket of tasty comfort, all is well. At least for now. And, in the end, it makes us realize that this bite, this moment, is all that we have. Things are not so bad after all.

right now/right now © 2010 Kerri Sherwood

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

read Kerri’s blogpost about MASHED POTATOES

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Unbridle Your Enthusiasm [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on February 6, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

In our house, no single question evokes more genuine excitement than, “Do you want to go on errands?” Vertical jumps. Full body wags. Circle zoomies. Finally, a “sit” so we can clip on the small leash that we call his necktie. He gets gussied-up for errands.

Last week Kerri wrote that our bar of contentment is low. It’s true. We don’t need much to feel fulfilled. A walk in the sun. A good cup of coffee. Cooking together. Laughter with friends. Life reduced to the moment.

We recently had a significant-morning-conversation about our egos. We discussed how these past few years have lowered the bar on our self-images. “I’m not all that,” she said, summing it up.

Quinn used to say that, “There are six billion people on this planet and you’re the only one that gives a damn about what you think.” Or how you look. Or what you feel. The other five-billion-nine-hundred-ninety-nine-million…are more concerned with how they look and what they think and feel. You are not the star in their movie. He was a terrific perspective-giver.

It’s a powerful day when you realize that you are not all that. It’s a powerful day when you realize that you are the single steward of your gifts and like any other gift they are meant to be given with no regard to how they are received. Your job is to give your gift. It’s an especially powerful day when you realize that your gift is no better or worse than any other person’s gift. It is just uniquely yours. It is not better-or-worse-than.

When the measurement falls off, when the ego takes a much needed belly punch, then the fun really begins. Flow. Love of what you do and who you are. A giddy return to child-eyes. A low bar of contentment means more and more contentment. Paint to paint. Play to play. Unbridled enthusiasm at the simplest of things. Like full body joy when going on errands.

read Kerri’s blog about ERRANDS

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buymeacoffee is a low bar of contentment offered to the artists tilting at the rowdy windmills of ego.

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See Your Choices [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on November 21, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

He began with silence. He looked them all over, one fox at a time, and his eyes looked deep into theirs. Lucy wanted to hide when his eyes came to her but instead she fell into his gaze. He seemed to be listening. Then, he made up his mind, and in a voice that was both powerful and quiet, he said, “Words are strong magic, misused they are tragic, but handled with care they bring insight and good cheer. So listen, dear friends, listen with care.” ~ Lucy & The Waterfox

“Choice” is a very powerful word. Perhaps one of the most powerful.

Lucy was a story I told many years ago at a conference of healthcare workers. Actually, it wasn’t the primary story; it was an addition. The organizers asked if I had a second story in my bag o’ tricks and I’d just written Lucy.

After the conference I illustrated and self-published it. It was the early days of self-publishing so the layout is wonky. I’ve never really liked how the book looks. I’d turn Kerri loose on it if we were bored and didn’t have other things to do. We’re not bored.

Lucy makes two choices in the story. The first is to hide her special talent. To conform. The second is to own her special talent. To take flight.

She achieves both choices through the intervention of others. The first choice was made with the help of social pressure; who doesn’t want to belong, to fit in! To conform. This choice nearly kills her. The second is made with the help of a storyteller, a role model. Who doesn’t want to fulfill their passion! Follow their bliss? This choice fills her with life.

I’d write a sequel but it’s already imbedded in the first book. What happens to Lucy when she chooses the left hand path? She becomes, as all artists do, the carrier of the story, the mythologist and mythology of the pack.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like a choice. To hide your fire. Bend to pressure. To burn brightly. Follow an inner imperative. Yet they are choices, both.

“Lucy was a red fox who lived as other red foxes do, playing in the fields and forests. But Lucy had a secret. She could fly. Not a run-and-jump-to-this-rock kind of fly. No! She could fly like a bird…”

read Kerri’s blogpost about CHOICE

Lucy & The Waterfox © 2004 david robinson

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Watch The Dance [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on January 19, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

It was once a guilty pleasure. After a snowfall, through newly plowed streets, I’d tie on my red Nike shoes and go for a long, long run. In Colorado, the sun and the cold air play well together. Atmospheric sweet and sour. Run toward the sun in the snow quiet. Sensual pleasure. I’ve never felt more alive than during those treasured runs.

Our yard is a miracle of shadow-play after the snowfall. Between the trees and the tall grasses that grow along the property line, the cool blue sways and dances across the ice-white canvas, a visual conversation between limb and wind. It can be mesmerizing. Sometimes it reminds me of Wayan Kulit, the shadow puppets of the Balinese. An epic tale told on the screen of our front yard. The lesson of Wayan Kulit: we are not substance, not really. Rather, we are passing shadows projecting our story onto the canvas of our minds.

The mailwoman told me that she adored bringing our mail during the winter afternoons. “The light on the grasses,” she said, “they knock me out.” We wait until spring to cut back the grasses for exactly that reason. The pink, orange and purple light of a late winter afternoon makes the grasses luminous. And the shadows they cast! A gentle blue waving, aloha! Greeting or parting? Longing or fulfillment? I’m never sure.

Sylvia Plath wrote in The Bell Jar, “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.” Staring out our front window watching the dance, the frigid air and sun at play together, I think she was right. What could possibly be more heartbreakingly beautiful?

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Color The Language [on saturday morning smack-dab.]

Posted on January 8, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

In the cartoon version of our life, Kerri cleans up my language. I never use the word “beeswax” when there are more colorful options available. I’m an artist. Color is my thing.

It’s hard to explain the inner imperative that drives an artist to spend their precious life composing or painting or dancing, even amidst the knowledge that heeding their inner call might never pay the bills. I know many, many people who’ve snuffed their artistry because it simply doesn’t make financial sense. They are now like boiled fish. The ‘”good living” that they make doesn’t replace the vitality-in-life that they ignore. Source is source.

I also understand that the answer, “Because I have to…” must sound childish to someone who has never operated out of an inner necessity or something more meaningful than making-money. I actually understand their eye-roll and less-than-subtle-but-always-predictable response about the need to “take responsibility…” They’re really saying, “Grow up.”

What I’ll never understand is the gap. For instance, Kerri’s music is all over the world. She is regularly stopped on the street or contacted by people who reach to tell her that her music moves them, touches their souls, makes their day, opens their hearts, calms their fears… And, then, she’s asked what’s she’s really going to do (for a living). Or, better, if she’ll play for free. Or why it bugs her that Pandora or Spotify make money – lots of money – on her music – and that is the reason why she is not. The gap between those two poles is…mind boggling. And, into the gap, the question is always dropped: What are you really going to do?

So, I paint the question with vivid colorful language because it makes my love laugh but definitely needs scrubbing before publication.

read Kerri’s blog post about BEAUTY

smack-dab. © 2021-2 kerrianddavid.com

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Be Like BabyCat [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on December 30, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

We had a difficult time choosing our Melange this week. The final week of the year is overwrought with reflection and, let’s face it, 2020 is not like any other year. There is too much. For the first time in our 151 consecutive weeks of writing, on Sunday night we published an almost empty slate; one solid decision and four placeholders. We knew our prompt for Monday because, well, it was Monday. The curtain was rising.

It is tempting in a year like no other to write about the tragedies, disgruntle-ments, mountains to climb and we’ve certainly done our share of that. The pandemic has merely served as a baseline to the other palette of poo that populated our 2020 experiences. As we rounded the trail on Monday we decided that filling-out the Melange week with DogDog and BabyCat might be the respite that we needed. Our boys keep us laughing. They bring us back to the moment, to the real stuff of life. More than once this year, lost in the stormy sea of my mind, I’ve joined the boys on the rug, ruffled ears and stroked chins – and in a matter of seconds I’ve been awash in the thought, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” They are wizards of transformation.

BabyCat is a study in contentment. Scratch that. He is a master of contentment. While DogDog runs circles through the rooms of the house or barks at imagined intruders, BabyCats seeks stillness and sleeps. While we wrestle with fears of the future or sort through the wreckage of our stability, BabyCat finds the most comfortable place in the house and occupies it. He is not ashamed of his inactivity. He revels in it.

I watch him. He is my first cat, an alien being, a mystery that I can’t help but study. Yesterday, as he moved from one nap into the next, I thought that, if BabyCat was an artist, he would be in a constant state of conception. He sleeps on his ideas with no imperative to actually make them happen. He loves an idea for its own sake. In that deep-state-of-fulfillment, he specifically and successfully rejects all forms of self-criticism. He is a hedonist, shameless in his love of pleasure, his ease of enjoyment.

There were days in 2020 that pounded us into mush. If Kerri or I found ourselves in a fit of despair, without fail, in a matter of moments, BabyCat would crawl into our lap. He’d plop his hulking contentment in the center of our darkness, stop all movement, and purr himself to sleep, taking our despair with him into that netherworld. There are few more effective soul-balms than a contented cat on your lap.

Wizards of transformation. Contentment in a storm. No words necessary.

read Kerri’s blog post about BABYCAT

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Drop The Condition [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on April 27, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

suffer gloriously copy

Anyone who tells you that people are not fond of suffering has either 1) never experienced love or 2) never loved an experience. Kerri assures me that giving birth to her children was at the same time the most painful and most joyful experience of her life. It is why humanity, throughout its diverse cultural variations, all bandy-about some version of the phrase “unconditional love.” As they say, love is a sword that cuts both ways. Or, to use a weapon-free metaphor, love is a lemon, both bitter and sweet. All inclusive.  No conditions.

If we are lucky, we do what we love. Whether climbing to the mountaintop or walking the path of an artist, both come with a fair amount of suffering. They also come with an inordinate amount of elation. Moments of passing fulfillment. It is just as I have been taught: the secret to happiness in this life is to  do what you love simply because you love it. Walk toward your love and the suffering will make sense. It will make sense because the suffering-in-love is always transcendent. All inclusive.

Walking toward your love with an added layer of condition (i.e., it has to make money) and you lose what you love. It contorts or goes to dust.

The Buddhists have a phrase: joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. This world is filled with sorrow and suffering and injustice. To be fully alive is not to protect yourself from feeling the sorrows or from experiencing the suffering, but to stand in them. Participate. Engage. Drop the notion that life is an achievement and you will open to the full experience. Colors on the palette.

This is not an abstraction or a dose of idealism.  If you are not walking toward your love you are, in all likelihood, walking away from what you fear. With fear as a motivator, the natural destination is a fort. Separation. Self-preservation. Exclusion. Living in a fortress makes for a very small world, a narrow band of  experience, lots of rules and a multitude of dull and angry days.

We are living in a time of overwhelming challenge. This pandemic mountain is steep. There is undeniable suffering. Fear is being fed. Conflict nurtured. Division fueled. Fear drives people to gather at the governor’s mansion and demand to open the economy. In their blind-fear-madness the protestors rave about acceptable losses. The mind can be a dull angry fortress when the heart is lost in the conditional. Souls twist.

Love, on the other hand, brings nurses and doctors, after attending to the sick and dying, to stand silently in the midst of the fear protestors. Their message is simple. Go home.

Do not doubt that these nurses and doctors are suffering, climbing a very tall and dangerous mountain, but it all makes sense because their love is without condition. They are asking all of us to do no more than think of the suffering of others. They are. Love without condition is simple. All inclusive. No loss is acceptable.

 

read Kerri’s blog post about SUFFERING GLORIOUSLY

 

southport sand heart website box psd copy

 

 

 

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Inhabit Someday [on KS Friday]

Posted on April 17, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

that morning someday 1 copy

My life is nothing like what I imagined it would be. I had ideals and visions, hopes and dreams. Yet, here I am.

One day I awoke with the realization that I was spending an inordinate amount of my life wanting to be somewhere else, someone else, in a place I called “fulfillment.” In other words, I was giving away my day – my happiness – for an illusion. I spent that entire day paying attention to where I was. I didn’t have to try. I had to allow. You’ll not be surprised to learn that my day was extraordinary. An outside observer would have commented that nothing happened but they would have been…mistaken.

I painted for the pure pleasure of doing it. And breakfast (OMG)! I smelled coffee. I walked in the sun. I held my wife’s hand. I fixed again the perpetually broken handle on back door. I sat on the raft and wrote. I read aloud what I wrote (as we used to say, “tasting the words”). I laughed. We laughed. I played with dogga in the backyard. I listened as Kerri played the piano. She sang! We cooked dinner together. Sipped wine.

In fact, my day was much better than my imagined fulfillment because, well, it was actual fulfillment. True, I was not Leonardo Da Vinci, I had no Oscars on my shelf, and my financial situation was the stuff of comedy.  Yet, in fully inhabiting my actual moment, I was surprised at how little those other things mattered. As Quinn might say, my wall of respect had nothing on it and I couldn’t be more pleased.

My life is nothing like what I imagined it would be. It is so much better. That Morning Someday, I’ve learned, is nothing (quite literally nothing) if not today.

 

THAT MORNING SOMEDAY on the album BLUEPRINT FOR MY SOUL is available on iTunes

 

 

pumpkinfarm website box copy

 

that morning someday/blueprint for my soul ©️ 1996 kerri sherwood

Filed under: Awakening, KS Friday, Love, Seeing, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

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