Look-At-Me-Look-At-You [David’s blog on KS Friday]

It struck me that as the crowd gathered to watch the family of foxes, the foxes, in turn, gathered to observe the rabble of humans. Look-at-me-look-at-you. I wondered if they thought of us as wild, uncultivated. I know they were delighted that a makeshift fence stood between us and them.

The mother fox leapt onto a stone and seemed to pose for photographs but I was certain she was drawing attention away from her brood. Look-at-me-not-at-them. She knew how to make her frolicking children disappear. And they did. Once safe, she stepped off her platform, no rush, and also disappeared.

A local woman walking her dog saw the crowd and asked, “Is it the foxes?” I nodded. “Thought so,” she said and nonchalantly continued on her way. A family of foxes in the center of town. Nothing new. For her it happens every day. For us, passers-through, it was a surprise. A delight. A family of foxes have never rollicked on our street at home. I may never see this again. She will see it again on her stroll tomorrow, just like yesterday. Thus, the power of perspective.

I read that foxes are observers. They easily meld into their surroundings. They vanish so they can watch. So they can see. “If Fox has chosen to share its medicine with you, it is a sign that you are to become like the wind, which is unseen yet is able to weave into and through any location or situation. You would be wise to observe the acts of others rather than their words at this time.”

Tom Mck told me that as he aged he felt that he grew invisible. I feel much the same way these days though my encounter with the foxes has made me realize that I have mostly lived my life as an observer of others. Like the wind. I much preferred coaching people over the phone: I could listen purely – no negotiating of image – and easily hear the message behind the words. Perhaps I have not grown invisible but am only now fully realizing the truth of one of my gifts. Weaving through any location or situation: Look-at-me-look-at-you.

Every Breath/As It Is © 2004 Kerri Sherwood

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Enter And Listen [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

A Haiku for You

A forest critter,

Gnome, Leprechaun or Spirit,

Tree Dweller, Heart Door.

Sometimes I want to believe in magic. I want to think there is an angel at my side. I want to sit in the certainty of Rumi, knowing without doubt that the entire universe, the whole of infinity, is tipping in my favor.

Sometimes I want to know what tomorrow will bring. No surprises. I want to know that the good people will win over the rage-mongers and truth-spinners. Just like in the movies. I want to know that perseverance will inevitably meet ideal circumstance and all will be well in the end. I want to be at the other end of the week so I can tell the story of what happened, the story of stamina and fortitude fulfilled.

Sometimes I want to know that the eagle flying by at just the right moment or the hovering hawk or the owl hooting outside my window at midnight is bringing me a message: we’ve got your back. Fear not. Take another step. From our height we can see the meadow, the sun and tall grasses. We can feel the hope, breathe the calm.

Sometimes when she spies a heart-shape and kneels to capture it for her collection, I want the gentle spirit, the gnome or sprite living in the tree or residing in the leaf shaped like the symbol, to make themself visible to us and affirm that there is meaning in the mystery, that in this life there is more sense than we can possibly imagine. There is reason. A reason. Yet, I already know what it would avow if it allowed us to see it: the meaning of the mystery is always found right where we knew it would be, where we know it to be: in the heart. Our vast open hearts. We do not need to seek it or wish for it. We need only enter and listen – more than just sometimes.

read Kerri’s blog about HEART DOOR

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Travel Together [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

There are two phases. When I was younger, phase one, I thought everything I had to say was of vital importance. I thought I could help-the-world so I needed to be heard. And, I worked hard to be heard. Don Quixote. “A man of questionable sanity.” Now, each day, I open my site analytics and am astounded that anyone finds value in anything I have to write. Phase two in a nutshell: I am having a conversation with myself and am more and more certain that I know nothing at all.

Not knowing was once a fear. Something to mask. Now it is a certitude. A given. In fact, it is now something of a north star.

I am grateful beyond measure that you-out-there are reading this travelogue of my wandering mind. Truly. I am astonished that you actually choose to spend a few moments of your day with me. I know nothing of real value to share.

And then I remember. Each night Kerri and I watch videos made by through-hikers. Each hiker starts their journey alone and inevitably, through happenstance, finds their travel family. Each hiker-tale carries the same revelation: the real value of the trail is found in the people who walk it with them. No one cares what their companions know or do-not-know. They care that they walk with people of like mind, people who care for them as much as they care for the others in the group. They listen to each other. They create safety together. They laugh. They support. They share.

Although you show up on my screen as a number beneath a bar chart, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t possibly be reduced to a statistic. You are my travel companion and I am, in a small way, yours. Sancho Panza both directions. I hear you when your number pops up on my screen; I know that you hear me. It matters not what of my mind-rambling finds letters and words as long as they fly through space-time and find you. As long as your response, as small as a single click, finds me.

And that’s the healing part of the story. Always. I see you/you see me. I hear you/you hear me. I watch for you/you watch for me. It has very little to do with what we know and everything to do with what we experience together.

read Kerri’s blogpost about BEING HEARD

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buymeacoffee is a gratitude. nothing more, nothing less.

Listen [on saturday morning smack-dab.]

Sage advice someone, somewhere, offered to Kerri: sometimes there’s only one way to get through it and that’s to go through it. No resistance. Turn around and see it, feel it, experience it. All of it.

Once, long ago, I emailed my friend Rob and wrote that I felt like I was lost in the forest. He wrote back that sometimes, when you feel lost, it’s best to sit down, smell the pine, and enjoy the birdsong. That, too was sage advice. Be where you are, not where you think you should be.

Identity crisis is a misnomer. Growth and change only feels like a crisis, mostly because it requires letting go of “the knowns” and stepping into “the unknowns.”

My sage advice to myself, learned from too many experiences of opening my mouth when I had nothing of value to offer: if you’re lucky enough to attend to someone who’s stepping off the edge of their known world: listen. Quiet presence is better than loud comfort.

read Kerri’s blogpost about IDENTITY CRISIS

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Pause And Listen [on KS Friday]

A pause. Unspecified length. Fermata. It reads like poetry. I, a consummate non-musician, am learning and loving new musical terms.

We live in a world of noise. Too much noise. Too much talking. Too many screamers competing for our shrinking attention spans.

So much noise blocks access to the still small voice, the soul voice. That whisper-voice of inner truth never shouts. It is very hard to hear things-of-depth in a world so enamored with the superficial, so consumed by the marketing-moment. The breaking news. The voguish sale. The hip. The hop. The latest tweet. The newest outrage. Tik-Tok, Facebook, Instagram, spin-your-noggin-round-and-round.

This morning I’ve heard and read a thought surfing atop all the noise-feeds: we have to find a shared truth. Without it, we will enter the ranks of the failed states, if we are not there already.

Standing on the streets shouting at each other is guaranteed to further gape-our-void. Running deeper into fact-less-“news”-bubbles that spit blather 24/7 will send us deeper and deeper into banana-republic-status.

Our hope of unity lies in the fermata. The pause of unspecified length. Quiet.

It is from the silence that we might recognize that shared truth never pops out of its hole in the middle of a street fight. Truth stays clear of cacophony. It is in the silence that we have a slight prayer of hearing some truth.* We’ll know when we’re ready to share truth again when, out of the shared silence, we begin our conversation with some form of this simple question: “What did you hear?”

[*this highly idealistic and slightly naive thought assumes the restoration of respect for facts & science in all parties, a shared baseline for all inner-listeners]

read Kerri’s blog post on FERMATA

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Stand Still [on KS Friday]

right now songbox copy

Dense fog. After days of storms and turbulence, the lake was still, glassy. Quiet. DogDog and I stepped into the early morning. He pulled me toward the lake. A heron, startled by our arrival, took flight. We were startled by the heron – or I was. Time stopped. It circled and disappeared into the fog.

DogDog sat and I stood very still. Another heron lifted into flight. We listened to the morning sounds muted by the fog. There was no place else to be, nothing else to do.

The heron surprised us into presence. For a few glistening moments. Right now.

 

RIGHT NOW  on the album RIGHT NOW is available on iTunes & CDBaby

 

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right now/right now ©️ 2010 kerri sherwood

Chicken Marsala Monday

A Chicken Nugget from the melange to help you start the week

MASTER trytoseewhattheysee WITH EYES jpeg copy 2

I appreciate the Chicken Nuggets – especially today’s – because I know the back story.  Without knowing where these drawings with words came from or why we took the time to develop them, they could be tossed off as so much fluff. A nice sentiment. But.

What is it to stand in another person’s shoes? To understand the feelings of another? An other. Not me. Nice sentiments are rarely easy when put into practice.

There is a direction in Empathy. It is a reach toward an other. To reach out. To reach across a boundary, seen or unseen.  To try. The direction is important to grock. ‘To understand’ is a fundamentally different thing, a radically different direction and intention than ‘trying to be understood.’ It suggests an openness to possibility, a willingness to consider. A shedding of the armor. It unlocks the magic of “what if….”

There is a big drum banging the opposite narrative – closed doors, closed ears, closed eyes. It is easy to believe that we-the-people are incapable of listening, that we are unwilling to consider and are only adept at shouting each other down. Putting each other down. Closing off. Closing down. But.

Take a walk today. Count the moments of generosity that you see. Count the times that others reach. Count the times that you reach. You might be surprised how different your actual experience is from the prevailing narrative. Human beings are, for lack of a better analogy, a pack animal. We run together. We die when we close-off. We wither when we turn in. No human being, if we are honest with each other, knows who they are absent of relationship with others. We know each other together. Reaching is what we most naturally do. We reach when we see others hurting.  We open doors. We run into burning buildings, not for ourselves, but for the sake of others. It is infinitely more common to reach than to withdraw. Fear may demand a narrative of opposition, of irreconcilable difference, of standing alone in singularly righteous shoes. But, to believe it, you’ll have to close your eyes. You’ll have to disappear in the corridors of your busy, busy mind.

Today, do what is most natural. Open your eyes. Reach out. See what they see.

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try to see what they see ©️ 2016 david robinson & kerri sherwood

 

 

Spare A Moment

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

Once while in Bali I watched a rooster pick a fight with itself. The rooster saw his reflection in a big screen television and prepared for battle. I thought of that rooster today when I watched a woman screaming at her reflection in a storefront window. She was picking a fight with herself. She pointed at her reflection, shouted profanities, lunged forward and dropped back in a defensive posture when her adversary seemed to lunge at her.

It seems like a sad and lonely image unless you consider how often we wage war within ourselves. The woman at the window was simply expressing outwardly what was happening internally. If we did that, if we gave expression to the internal separations and subsequent battles, we’d be called crazy. The woman at the window lacked an editor. Her desperation was hidden no more. In a sense, she was more authentic than those of us who gave her a wide berth. Without an editor she was dangerous. None of us wanted to be mistaken for her reflection.

After help arrived for the woman I continued across town watching the many things we do for attention. Isn’t that what the woman wanted from her reflection? Wasn’t she looking for someone – internal or externally – to pay attention, to afford her a kindness? The young people raising money for the ACLU asked if I had a moment. The man carrying the large sign that read “How Do You Know Jesus” asked me if I had a moment. The woman who wanted some change started the conversation by saying, “Sir, do you have a moment?”

Everyone wants a moment. Everyone wants to be heard. In a city, with so many sounds and billboards and buses and sirens and people, people everywhere wanting, wanting, wanting change, a signature, a kindness, a bus, a convert or a clear path, it is no wonder that we have so few moments to give. I can only hope, that if I am someday staring at my reflection in a window, that I have kind words to say to myself rather than a fight to pick. I hope that I offer my reflection one of my precious few moments and ask, “What do you need to say. I’m all ears.” I’ll be okay if I’ve learned to stop and listen.

Listen For The Funny

752. 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’ve spent the past few weeks drawing cartoons. The cartoons are part of a new collaboration. An amazing thing happens when you are responsible for scripting and drawing cartoons: you listen to the world with a whole new set of ears. I’m tuning into the ridiculous. I’m hearing the absurd. Yummy phrases cross my path and I net them like butterflies. I might not yet know how to use the phrases but I am certain there is a perfect scenario for every luscious bit.

I find that I am constantly scrambling to fetch scraps of paper to capture the phrases that I’ve heard or the events that I witness. Yesterday I had to borrow a pen and scribbled furiously on a sack from Office Depot. The sack now has weeks of good material scrawled between the colorful decorative Office Depot pattern.

It is an exercise in intentional listening. I’m listening for and subsequently hearing things that are funny. Even in the most mundane conversations or serious meetings I find gems. I’m tuning into a world filled of comedians who do not know they are funny. Going into a coffee house is like climbing into a clown car. I am busting up at the most inappropriate moments. I’m certain there are people in my circle who now think I have slipped into madness. The more serious they become, the more funny they seem to me. Interventions will do no good. Take me into a room, strap me to a table and sedate me and I will find something funny in what you are doing. I can’t help it. It’s my job at the moment.

I encourage you right now – do not wait to begin drawing your own comic strip. Do yourself a favor and stop listening to this world with serious ears. Listen for the funny. There are clowns everywhere just waiting to feed you new material.

Walk Simply

699. 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 am an Aquarian and live in my head and at 30,000 feet. Practicality is not my strong suit. That makes the theme of my work this past few weeks most unusual: I’m discovering the sensible, the useful, the concrete.

This bizarre phase started a few weeks ago with the first few chapters of my book. I shared them with Megan-the-brilliant and she rolled her eyes and told me I needed to come down from the clouds. “Smaller steps!” she insisted. “Break your thoughts into bites that people can actually take!” I protested but she was right. So I set about trying to find ways to bring my balloon closer to the ground. “More weight!” my inner sociologist cried! “Less hot air!” my inner archeologist chirped.

I thought I was failing until last week while facilitating a workshop I went on a rant about the practical steps, the utter simplicity of steps in re-forming a culture of control into a culture of empowerment. It made sense to me, and much to my surprise, it made sense to those dear people on the receiving end of my rant. They got it. I achieved small steps! I achieved bite size thoughts! For the rest of the workshop I couldn’t help but wade into the sensible. Who was this man?

The book is now falling into place. I’m channeling a tiny model maker or a watch repairman. I’m giddy with detail. And, I’m recognizing the larger lesson is this: the philosophy, the ideas, the theory are easy for me, but to put them into action is what is now required. The bite size steps are really for me. If I can’t act on it, if the steps are too big, it is not useful to me or anyone who meets me at the crossroads. I’m a great witness, a studied observer, a world-class listener. And it’s time to walk simply. Or simply walk.