“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.” ~ Helen Keller
A mile to the west it is 75 degrees and sunny. Here, by the lake, it is foggy and 10 degrees cooler. The inland heat meets the cool lake water and produces a layer of thick fog. Standing on our front porch we cannot see the end of the street.
It is quiet in our pocket of fog. Today I welcome the protective solitude it inspires. It provides a magical respite from the happenings of the world. Fog brings permission to unplug, some breathing space from the news of the day. Sitting on the back deck I imagine that we are on the shores of Avalon, disappearing into the mist, becoming invisible to the rest of the troubled, enraged world.
In the Arthurian legend, Avalon is a magical, mystical place. It is symbolic as a place of virtue.
Virtue requires vision. Choose any adjective that describes virtue – goodness, morality, integrity, dignity, honor… – all serve a clear ideal. A vision. A vision based on the capacity to discern between right and wrong, truth and lie, service and exploitation. A vision that follows a steadfast moral compass.
By this or any standard, our current leadership has sight but no vision. The milksop Republicans in Congress play cowboy while sacrificing themselves on an alter of greed. How else do we make sense of their dedicated impotence in the face of the worst constitutional crisis in our nation’s history? It’s a crisis that they could stop in a day if they honored their oath to the Constitution. If they did their jobs. The Republican president sells the national soul to the highest bidder, personal profit the glutton-master he and his peers serve. A fall from grace, our isle of vice is not disappearing into a fog of uncertainty, rather it reveals itself in the harsh light of moral indifference, it adorns itself in a festival blanket of foxy-lies producing angry maga-followers awash in a cultish brain fog. Sight without vision.
There is nothing mystical going on here. The unprincipled disavowal of ethics, the blatant bribery and unbridled greed, the hard right turn away from truth and democratic ideals – all happening in plain sight – renders us worse than blind.
Is it any wonder I welcome the fog and imagine myself disappearing into the quiet of the mystical island, a sanctuary symbolic of virtue?
If you take a peek behind the curtain here at The Melange International (parent company kerrianddavid.com), you’d find a big bag of chips. More specifically, Costco Kettle chips. The bag is bigger than a mattress though we somehow manage to eat our way through it in…an unspecified very short span of time.
Taking another chip from the bag, Kerri exclaims, “These are bad!” which actually means they taste good but are not healthy. I remind her that mental health is just as important as physical health and the salty chips never fail to make us smile. And, these days, things that make us smile are very important, indeed.
And then there is this: Costco is one of the few companies with spine in a nation gone rubber-chickeny. In the face of an all-out assault on DEI, an attack on basic sanity – not to mention a scrubbing of history, Costco refuses to surrender their moral center and chooses, instead, to exercise their integrity. Our dedication to buying monster bags of chips from Costco is our way of supporting one of the last vestiges of courage and goodness in our nation.
Each chip we eat is a small “thank you”.
“Shall I refill the bowl?” I ask, already on my way to the gargantuan bag.
“Why not!” she says.
There’s no end to our gratitude. We delight that our love of salty snacks is one small way to support and celebrate goodness and courage. At least that’s what I tell myself.
Posted on February 14, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
It’s rapidly becoming folklore week at The Direction of Intention. I blame The Brothers Grimm for inciting a deeper dive into their collection of ancient tales. I somehow missed – or forgot – that the moral of the folk tales is to honor your commitments. Take responsibility for your actions. The stories are driven by transactions-gone-awry. The daughter makes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin: she will give him her first child if he will save her and spin straw into gold.
In another tale, The Pied Piper is hired by the people of Hamelin to save the town from an infestation of rats. He plays his magical flute leading the rats to the river where they drown. Since the town is no longer overrun with rats the leaders decide there is no reason to honor their commitment. They refuse to pay the piper. The Piper once again plays his magic flute and leads the town’s children away. The children are never to be seen again.
Honest dealing. Gratitude. Consequences of actions and choices. Morality tales are told – and have been told across cultures and generations – to instill in the young and affirm in the old the necessity of a moral center. When the moral center collapses, the consequences are far worse than imagined.
We’ve placed a coneflower sculpture in the garden. We can see it while doing dishes, looking out of our kitchen window. I’ve always loved our little coneflower but in the past month I’ve grown to appreciate it as a reminder, a daily nudge to stand closer to love than I do to fear. Coneflowers are symbols of resilience and strength.
The collapse of decency. The disregard for morality. So many toxic and ill-intended transactions swirling around us. It is only a matter of time before the Piper demands payment. Folklore meets the news of the day.
The coneflower reminds me that this too shall pass. Resilience. Out of the now-inevitable loss-of-our-children will someday arise a renewed commitment to responsibility to the common good. A moral center, after all, is nothing other than attentiveness and concern for the needs of others, and a dedication to ourselves to walk in this world with integrity decency, fairness, and an internal compass – reinforced by the stories and symbols we’ve inherited – that serve as constant companions showing us the way.
Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora
Divemaster Terry’s teaching was based on a simple principle: get neutral. In neutrality, there is no struggle. There is no fear. There is surrender to the movement of the ocean. The water cradles the diver.
The point? In the absence of struggle and fear, in the surrender to the natural movement of “something bigger,” only then is it possible to see. Only then is full awareness available beyond the control-story. Only then is it possible to experience the grace in the dive. To become.
Divemaster Terry was an artist. All the world was his studio. Every moment was his canvas. He was teaching me the essential lesson in artistry: surrender to the greater movement of the ocean. Flow with it rather than fight it. To fight the ocean is folly. And dangerous.
I thought of him as we harvested our peppers. We’ve never grown peppers before so this was new territory. Anything in the garden is relatively new territory. We do not know what we are doing. Our gardening is the equivalent of listening. She was giddy when she harvested the first peppers.
I recognized it. It was the same giddiness I felt the first time I understood – and lived – Terry’s lesson, “get neutral”. My eyes opened. My heart opened. I was inside the miracle, moving as the ocean, seeing without the obstruction of a story.
She plucked the first vibrant red pepper. For a moment she held the whole living earth in her hands. Eyes open. Heart wide open. No separation.
“Take time to see the quiet miracles that seek no attention” ~ John O’Donohue
‘For in the end, he [Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” ~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death
The water rises.
Last week, at dinner, disconcerted by the headlines, 20 asked if I could explain the politics of our day. “Entertainment,” I thought, but did not say. We – the community – talk about politics – the news of the day – as if it was serious business – because we want it to be – we need it to be – but we seem mortally blind to the emptiness of the chatter. Song and dance. The purpose, after all, is not to inform us but to keep us hooked.
It’s not an insignificant question to ask, “What is the reason for being?” We seem puzzled by our purpose or at least conflicted, as made apparent by our insatiable division. My theory is that our division is a distraction, it’s an old colonialists trick, baked into our national dna. A magician’s sleight of hand. There’s no better way to control a populace than to divide them. A people united – and not distracted – demand purposeful and responsible governance. Honest discourse. They demand it of themselves, too. They live from and in-service to a cohesive and shared narrative. The deep root of integrity. Purpose, after all, when clear and meaning-full, is always about others; it is always about service to the community. The betterment of all.
“You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.” ~Paulo Coehlo
Sometimes it takes a storm blowing through to make you realize what has value and what does not. The tornado takes the house, scatters the possessions, but the family is safe. No one is harmed. The wind takes the clutter and leaves a certain clarity.
I once knew an accomplished artist who lost his life’s work in a house fire. What I assumed would be tragic, for him was an opportunity: “I’m alive,” he said, elated. “Now I have a completely clean slate and can discover my work all over again.”
The storm comes. The veil falls. The Great and Powerful Oz is nothing more than a man with levers and illusions of grandeur hiding his real face behind a curtain. Dorothy suddenly knows without doubt what is true and what is fabrication. It’s quietly liberating.
She watches The Great and Powerful drift away in his hot air balloon and clumsy illusion. Dorothy realizes that no one can give her what she already possesses, an integrity of purpose, a vibrant spirit, surrounded by honest people who love her in a place she calls “home.”
Kerri said, “Look at that shadow! It makes me think of the collar Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore with her robe!”
Ruth’s collar was not my first thought. I went straight for Spirograph. The colorful spiral drawings made possible by the magic of plastic rings and wheels.
I suppose most people would have their moment of shadow association and move on to other topics but not us. Our association led to another association: what might Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s collar and a Spirograph have in common?
The artistry of mathematics. Action scribed from a center of integrity.
The Notorious RBG once said, “I am optimistic in the long run. A great man once said that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle, it’s the pendulum, and when the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it will go back.”
The colorful line scribes an arc all the way to the edge of the ring and then, in perfect pattern form, scribes an arc across the board to the other side. And again. And again. Until a beautiful pattern, a brilliant complex roulette is formed. A single line that, at its inception looked random or out of control, running to the extremes, weaves – in the long run – a unified, inclusive, connected design.
Optimism in the long run. The symbol in a collar. The certainty of tides. The balance point found in all polarities. So much hope! A visit from RBG and a memory of a childhood toy. And, all of this from a single shadow cast on a dresser on an early spring morning.
Posted on December 1, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative
Get close and look. Really look. Raindrops on the screen. Distortions. Light bends. The shock of organic shapes colliding on a grid. “What do you see?” she asked.
Last night, somewhere in the vicinity of 2am, we were wide awake. We ate rice Chex and reviewed the stressors of the year. It read like a biblical plague. We laughed when we realized that there were/are so many stressors that we’d actually forgotten the local riots, the curfew, chaos. and murder that happened a few blocks from our home. “In any normal year,” she said, “that would have been the top of the list. This year it didn’t even make the cut.”
Get close and look. What do you see? Future PhD’s will apply their magnifying glass to our time and find the tail wagging the dog, the greater falling to the lesser. A political party cowering and conspiring with delusion. They would rather see the system fall than risk their power seats. A populace jousting over wearing masks in a pandemic. Many would rather their neighbor die than have their imagined rights restricted. Propaganda networks, posing as news, peddling fantasy as fact. They would rather worship at the altar of the advertising dollar and feed the division (division sells!) rather than hold fast to the mast of journalistic integrity. It’s all entertainment when the necessary is swallowed in a mouthful of superficial. Gossip and conspiracy are so much tasty sugar!
Rome fell when the chief-toga-team guarded their luxuries rather than attended to the essentials. Millions of people line up for food. The market soars.
Really, get close and look. Little miracles are everywhere. “You were plucked out of the snake-pit,” he wrote. “Get the water boiling and get out the corkscrew. It’s time to celebrate.”
We found wine by the front door. Twice.
“I will sit with you in the dark,” she wrote.
“Do you need anything?” they asked.
Slushy came with smiles. “We thought you might need this!”
“Stand above your circumstance,” he suggested.
A special delivery of vitamin c and zinc brought tears to my eyes. True friends emerge from the pack.
The boys join us on the raft every morning for breakfast. Dogga comes running every time tears fill her eyes.
The shock of organic shapes colliding on a grid, raindrops on the screen. Hard lines, soft shapes. “We’re very lucky” she said, stooping to take a picture of a pine cone, a fallen branch with wispy needles. The day was cold but the sun was warm.
“What do you see?” she asked, turning the camera so I could see her photograph. “Really look.”
Posted on January 14, 2017 by davidrobinsoncreative
“Our search for truth must be wide open, even when it takes us in directions we preferred not to go. This is the difference between propaganda and truth. Propaganda has a certain end in mind, and so it marshals and manipulates the ‘facts’ to support its conclusion. Truth weighs evidence, seeks proof, is appropriately skeptical of authoritarian claims, welcomes questions, and doesn’t fear dissent.”Philip Gulley, The Quaker Way of Living*
Kerri and I often read books aloud to each other. On cold winter days we sit beneath a blanket, Dog-Dog at our feet, BabyCat snoring by our side, sip coffee, and read. We like to discuss and compare perceptions, ask questions, and re-read passages for clarity or the simple poetry of the language. Sometimes we savor a book, moving through it slowly. Sometimes we devour a book and go back to reread especially potent sections.
“Propaganda resists close inspection and must continually be defended. Truth welcomes doubt and skepticism; indeed it is best served by questions, suggestions, and corrections.”
I am guilty of burying my head in the sand. My move to Wisconsin came with an intentional unplugging from the news. I was tired of pundits shouting each other down. I was weary and wary of conversations with family and friends that seemed to be territory-guarding regurgitations of our news-channel-of-choice. I was using the language given to me by my news sources and rolled my eyes at the predictable language leveled by the “other” side. One day as I raged at family members to pay attention to how they were being manipulated by their news source, I thought that it was probably a good idea for me to do the same. At the time, unplugging, stepping out of the toxic stream, seemed the only option to clear my mind.
“The search for truth begins within the seeker, for if we are not honest with and about ourselves, we will find it impossible to be honest with and about others.”
On a recent trip to Indiana, Bill and Linda suggested a book for us, The Quaker Way Of Living by Philip Gulley. They read it with their church group and found it compelling, especially given our corrosive political climate and collapse of civil discourse. We bought it when we returned home and a few days ago started reading it together. We couldn’t put it down. It asks some powerful questions. It doesn’t pretend to have answers [that, I’ve learned, would be the antithesis of the Quaker Way] but it does speak directly to the quandaries of personal and communal integrity in a climate of self-righteousness, blame, and distrust. It is hopeful and funny and places the onus of creating a better world squarely on the shoulders of each and every one of us. It reminded me that burying my head in the sand is not very useful while also affirming that their are options beyond planting a flag in the sand.
“To say a person has integrity means several things. Most commonly, we mean the person is honest, that his or her word can be trusted…. But there is another level of meaning that has to do with the integration of our values and lifestyle. In that sense, to say we have integrity is to say the separate parts of our lives combine to form a unified whole. What we believe is consistent with how we live. Our beliefs influence the work we choose, the way we use our time and spend our money, the relationships we form and the goals to which we aspire. This integration is critical for inward peace.”
While reading, I’ve been thinking a lot about a conversation I had a few years ago with Jim Marsh, one of the people I most admire in this world precisely because he walks his talk. He told me of an issue in his community that had deeply concerned him and that he’d been grousing about for long time. One day he’d had enough and to move forward he recognized that he had three options: First, to stop complaining (he said, “to just shut up.”). Second, to move away. Leave. Get away from the source of his irritation. That didn’t seem like a healthy option. The third was to strap on his boots and do something about it. To act instead of complain. But, (and here’s the reason why I adore him) not to act against, but to work to create what he wanted. His responsibility was not to fight or resist. It was to create.
“We preserve our integrity and wholeness when we are aware of what threatens it and then choose to act deliberately and prudently when tempted. When we fail to do this, we disintegrate, creating a chasm between who we are and who we wish to be.”
I practice tai chi and had the good fortune to have, for a few years, a master teacher, Saul, whose teaching transcended the specifics of tai chi. He was teaching me how better to live. One day, while I was in a fit of resistance, he quietly showed me the power of looking beyond my “opponent” and placing my focus, instead, in the field of possibility. I understood (intellectually) that the opponent was always of my own making and my dedication to having an opponent (inside or out) would always pull me off balance. In other words, as long as I invested in resistance I would always pull myself off balance.
“Integrity isn’t conditional…There is a seamless nature to integrity that transcends situations and relationships. Integrity does not present one face in public and another in private. It delights in transparency, having nothing to hide.”
Now, with my head freshly out of the sand, I understand Saul’s teaching beyond my thinking (I’ve had a lot of time to meditate on things with my head in the sand) and, taking my cue from Jim, I recognize that I have three options but only option-number-three holds the promise of integrity. The best news: no one creates alone…
*all quotes in this post are from the chapter on Integrity from The Quaker Way of Living by Philip Gulley
The Direction of Intention 