A new era dawns./A chapter closes, fresh earth/forwards the story.
Bellaruth Naperstack often ends her meditations with the phrase, “…and so you are.” As cousin Kate guided us through the forgotten cemetery on the other side of town, she led us to the gravesite of my great, great, great, great grandfather and grandmother. The writing on the stone was nearly washed away with time. As Kate read their obituaries, Bellaruth’s phrase popped up in my mind. The summation of a life, punctuated by the survivors. The children and grandchildren. The next generation. And the next and the next.
It took me by surprise, this meditation on life. The phrase popping into my head was not a reference to the end of the lives of distant grandparents, but to me. “These are your people. This is your root.” They lead to me. I am the next chapter, the continuation of the story.
I was struck by how important it felt. How could something so routine seem like such a big deal! We used to do it all the time. Without thought. Nothing special. Now, it felt like a significant passage. A step toward “normal”: we took the train to Chicago.
Covid was the great disrupter. Daily patterns exploded. Social norms obliterated. It changed us in ways that we are only now beginning to comprehend. To this day – without thinking – if someone stands too close to me in the grocery store I adjust, creating distance. A dance of protection. That small adjustment away from someone is a titanic statement about how I approach social situations, about how I feel about being with others. Keep-them-at-arms-length.
In other words, I’m meditating on safety all of the time.
I don’t think I’m alone in my meditation. I believe the central meditation in my nation is safety – rather, our lack of safety. We wouldn’t be arming ourselves to the teeth if we felt safe. We wouldn’t be ripping at the seams or tolerating corrupt bullies or gobbling up conspiracies if we felt secure. People do not willingly plant their heads in the sand when times are good. In good times, people look up, people reach toward each other. Generosity of spirit engenders generosity toward others. A poverty of spirit engenders animosity toward others.
In other words, no one meditates alone. The big meditations are shared.
Of course, it is also true that people rarely make significant change when times are good. The gift of disruption is progress though the first phase is often nasty and necessarily looks precarious. I suppose we are in the nasty stage of change.
It was not so long ago that a gathering with friends began with testing to make sure no one was carrying the virus. Testing became the norm. It was routine. Am I safe? Are you? Do you remember washing your groceries or isolating your mail for 24 hours when we did not yet understand how the virus was passed? It fundamentally reoriented our experience of being with others.
I think about my safety when I enter a crowd. I look for exit routes when I enter the grocery store. And, last weekend, we stepped onto a train for the first time since the great disruption. It felt momentous. A marker in time. Rather than taking a step away, we took an intentional step toward.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and ours was a step onto a train. Each small step toward others, each reach, each moment of listening…matters. It creates the progress borne of the disruption. I look forward to taking many more small steps.
I don’t know about you but I’m more than ready for a different meditation.
For many years the “sitting room” was a place we passed through en route to the kitchen or our bedroom on the return trip. It was our staging ground while packing for trips. It was the place we put things when we didn’t know where else to put them. I never sat in the sitting room.
And then, one day, a muse-of-calm possessed Kerri. She wanted a space of peace instead of space of clutter. She wanted to sit in the sitting room. She wanted to hang out in the sitting room. She wanted to read and relax in the sitting room. She became a cleaning dervish. She hung meditative paintings. It was a miracle.
I stopped in my tracks the first time I attempted to pass through the sitting room post-transformation. There was air and light. There were comfy pillows and a throw blanket on the couch. I was filled with an overwhelming desire to sit in the sitting room!
I’d heard rumors of the couch in the corner of sitting room. It was one of BabyCat’s favorite nap spots. Kerri assured me that no creature could sit on that couch without falling into a deep relaxed state. I had my doubts. In my time it was the central repository of clothing overflow. I’d actually never seen the couch. Plus, that BabyCat could sleep anywhere, on any surface. BabyCat was a gifted sleeper.
Kerri appeared behind me. She was holding a book. She, too, had transformed! She was the Siren of the sitting room! I nestled into the couch and cooed, the lap blanket covering my feet. The Siren sat on the other side of the couch. She opened the book and began to read. I was like Dorothy in the poppy field. Eyes drooping. Head bobbing. Incapable of concentration. The last thing I remember was thinking, “So this is what it feels like to be a cat…”
Now, we spend hours in the sitting room, reading on the couch. Falling into a deep relaxed state. Each morning, as I pass through on my way to the kitchen, I slow down and breathe-in the calm.
Sometimes I wonder why we waited so long to create this place of tranquillity. The potential was there all along. The good news? The peace of the sitting room is spilling out into the rest of the house. The sun room is filled with plant-love. The living room is beginning a subtle transformation. We gather around our small table in our tiny kitchen and laugh and tell stories. It’s how change happens. Create the space. Grow the space. It’s how peace happens.
This I know: the muse-of-calm is not yet done with us. I can’t wait to see what happens to the rest of the house and beyond.
Posted on January 13, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative
Georgia O’Keeffe might have painted it. The Light Cathedral is iconic and people approached it with veneration. It was as if the Cathedral pulled people into it. They stopped at the entrance to take it all in before stepping inside the light. Once inside, enthusiasm overtook reverence. Smiles erupted. Families posed for portraits made possible with the photo-help of strangers. I was overwhelmed by the crush of the crowd and my built-in-covid-response propelled me to the far side and out. I turned back to locate Kerri, smiling, patient with the slow moving mass, gazing up at the magic of it all.
I confess: I wanted it all to myself. I wanted to walk to the very center and close my eyes and feel it. I wanted to lay on my back and fall into the apex like so many stars. I wanted to slow-walk from portal to portal, free to turn and pause and spin. To linger inside this art space. A place created.
The lights transported me to another life: Barney took me to a fairy ring. A perfect circle scribed by towering redwood trees. He knew I could feel it and suggested I spend some time there. I meditated. I returned early the next morning to the ring and sat in the center of the circle. Time stopped. I felt rejuvenated. I felt ancient. I laughed because it felt good. A natural sacred space.
Art spaces. Power places.
“What are you thinking about?” Kerri asked as she joined me outside the Light Cathedral, bringing me back to this life.
I smiled, “Two of my favorite things.”
[listen to the difference. One composition. Two variations. Art spaces. Power places.]
Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes & streaming on Pandora
Dear reader, you have done me a great service. You’ve connected my past to my present.
I’m not sure why but, initially, I numbered rather than named my blogposts. My 623rd blog post was about a practice I’d all but forgotten. Building an altar of gratitude.
Someone out there read #623 so it popped up in my analytic. “This is old!” I thought, staring at the screen. A numbered post! Another era. “I wonder what I was writing about?”
2012. Thanksgiving. Among the darkest days of my life and yet, on that day, I was deeply, profoundly grateful. Life had chased me to a cliff. There was nothing to do but leap. I remember like it was yesterday wandering the streets of Seattle placing notes of gratitude in the cracks of walls, at bus stops, at coffee shops. I felt as if I was invoking. I wanted a better world. If I wanted it, I needed to offer betterment to the world. It was a prayer. A weaving. It was the last time I built my “altar of gratitude.”
A year later I lived in an entirely different world. Everything went to ashes.
2022. Kerri and I are walking our trail. We’re giggling because we just planted a painted rock in the elbow of a tree. “Do you think someone will find it?” her inner 5 year old asks, too wiggly with excitement to stand still. I expect her to skip in circles of enthusiasm.
“Yes,” I laugh. “Someone, someday, will find it.”
As I reread #623 I realized that, in rising from the ashes, I was no longer building my altar on a single day in a single season. I was no longer invoking gratitude. I was no longer hoping for a world that might someday come into being.
I am creating it. Not on a single day or special occasion. I’m practicing gratitude every day. I’m living gratitude every day. Painting rocks, making dinner, watching sunsets, buying groceries, writing blogposts.
Because you sent #623 back to me, a marker in time, I’ve realized I’m living inside my altar. All the world….
Lately, when I close up shop for the day and come down the stairs from my office, Kerri and I meet on the back deck. We choose sun or shade, settle in, and talk about our day. There are stories to share, ideas to consider, speculations. Sometimes she’ll catch me up on the news, what’s happened in the world since I climbed the stairs in the morning.
Lately, listening to the news-of-the-day is like strapping a large stone to my chest and jumping into deep water. An intentional sink. “Why would I do that to myself?” I ask myself. I call Kerri’s morning surf through social media her “horror trawl.”
The back deck is a place of hope. I can hear the news-of-the-day on the back deck because, while listening, I watch the hummingbirds zip and hover. The evenings are alive with the most extraordinary bird song. The gurgle of the pond is a soothing meditation. The vibrant life on the back deck is immediate and vital. I know the neighborhood fox is actively hunting the neighborhood bunnies so it’s not all rainbows and sunshine, but it is natural process. It is not excessive or hyped or angry. It’s life without self-indulgence or puffery.
I can hear the news of the day on the back deck because I can detach from it. In comparison to the hummingbirds or the squirrels running atop the fence, it seems like a bad soap opera, a cast of characters dedicated to their guck.
After the intentional sink, for an extra dose of hope, I visit the tomato plants. They seem to be doubling in size every day. The blossoms have appeared. Kerri takes my hand and leads me to the pots. “Lookit!” she smiles “More tomatoes in waiting!”
Tomatoes in waiting. Harbingers of good things to come. The stuff of life – to taste and touch. Little red bursts of captured sunshine. The real stuff. Life expressing life.
Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes & streaming on Pandora
Put on your swimmies for a dive into the esoteric.
It was hot last night so I lay awake thinking and that’s never a good thing for the people – like you – who pay attention to the random things I write or say. This is what I thought in the heat of the night: Saul always instructed me to look beyond my opponent and place my focus in the field of possibilities. “Look a hundred feet beyond your opponent,” he said.
It’s universally true that a mind needs something on which to focus. And, left untended, most minds will focus on complaints or problems. During my tilt-at-windmills-consulting phase I’d tease my clients with the notion that, rather than eliminate challenges, people create them. We need them. We call them hobbies. Or play. Or problems. After all, stories are driven by conflict and we are, at the base, storytelling animals. It’s worth noting that a great collaboration is not the absence of conflicting opinions but the capacity to use the heat of creative tension to find/discover a third way.
What does this have to do with Saul and the field of possibilities? A focus, to be useful, needs to be specific. What exactly does the field of possibilities look like?
The reason our untended minds sort to the negative is that the negative is usually concrete, an easy fixation. Fear is a clear picture – even when imaginary. Obstacles are easy to spot. Possibilities are rolling and amorphous. Changeable. It is the nature of a good possibility to shape-shift.
The masters of meditation mostly tell us to soften our focus. Or to let the thoughts roll through the brainpan like clouds; do not attach to what we think. Do not take ourselves so seriously. Practice flow instead of the hard fixing of thought.
And, therein is the source of my late night esoteria: the mind needs something to focus on. Or does it?
If I soften my gaze, if I look beyond the problem-of-the-moment to a vast field of floating possibility, am I tossing myself into a feedback loop? I lay awake wondering what the field of possibility might look like if it was graspable. Some people make vision boards for just this reason. Quinn used to hum and fill his mind with lyrics.
Tjakorda Rai laughed at me and told me I needed to “open my story.” At the time I thought he meant to take responsibility for my story. Now, I know exactly what he meant: let it flow. Get out of the way. The demons and monsters and fears and problems and challenges are…passing things. Story fodder, nothing more. So look beyond them. Flow. Focus on the flow. Open the story.
Years ago I directed a production of Into The Woods and I wanted a set design alive with David Hockney colors. The production was gorgeous. The set the designer created was a vibrant fantasyland with the dark undertones wrought by dinosaur-size-too-big foliage. Tiny people in an oversized children’s pop-up book.
If I were going to direct the musical again today, I’d approach it through a different lens. I wouldn’t place it in the vivid palette of fantasyland; this world we journey through is fantastic just as it is. When Kerri and I walk, I am sometimes stunned to silence by the shapes and patterns and pops of color. Ominous and serene. Alive.
For reasons that have nothing to do with reason, I started using imagined leaf shapes, plant-symbols in my paintings. I know when I someday return to my easel, the plant shapes will be present – perhaps even dominant. There is no end to the eye-popping variations. Our walks in nature have me “seeing” again.
A few years ago, Brad and I talked about the deep backstory of why an artist creates. Of course, there’s not a single driving reason – it changes over time as we change over time. I know many artists who’ve set down their brushes, singers who stopped singing. They satisfied their backstory. They channel their creative juices into other forms. Based on the evidence, these days I am a writer. Lately, I spend more time drawing cartoons than painting paintings. And yet, I still think of myself as a painter.
In the past, a step away from the easel was acknowledging a fallow season, letting my batteries recharge. This time, the step away is different. My reasons are spinning, changing. The younger me-artist was finding a place to transform pain into presence. The middle-age-artist-me entered the studio because it was the only place on earth that made sense. It was a sanctuary. A quiet place.
Each day I walk down the stairs and stand for a few moments with the canvas on my easel. It’s a stranger. I hear my easel whisper, “Not yet. Soon.” I am content with soon. I feel as if I am in an extended meditation, borrowing a tradition from Japanese masters, sitting in the quiet until there is no space between me and the brush, no space between me and the motion. No space between me and the shape, the pop of color, the infinite variance of pattern. No space between me and the surprise-of-what-will-happen. No space between me and the story.
My sketchbooks are punctuated by weird landscapes. It was a practice. When I felt the need to draw regularly, to exercise my artistry, I worked on compositions for future paintings. And, when I had no idea what to draw, no composition in my head, I sketched my weird landscapes. They were fun and I got lost in them.
There was a blowback effect. I’ve never been a landscape artist. I considered my weird landscapes as not-serious exercises. Yet, they were made of scribbles and patterns and it became a game to collect patterns from nature. My not-serious exercises required me to look around. To get close. To look at the edges and splashes and etchings available in nature. To see. My weird landscapes became eye-opening meditations.
There are miracle-patterns in bark. Orchids, I recently learned, are a master-class of pattern, shape, and color. It is impossible to find a hand painted brush and ink painting as perfect or as spontaneous and lively as the strokes on the rattlesnake plant. Go to the garden if color combinations are in question.
I will never invent anything as imaginable, as impossibly beautiful, as what already exists in this world. I will never produce any painting as glorious as the paintings in nature. The best I can do is play. Look and marvel. And isn’t that a great relief?
One of the advantages of having stepped in every pothole, tripped on every cobble, and made every mistake at least twice, is that I’ve learned about potholes, cobbles, mistakes, tripping and stepping where I ought not step. If I could boil down to the essence the single thing I’m beginning to grok it is this: life is not elsewhere.
I laughed aloud when I at last I realized the absurdity of “practicing mindfulness” as if it was something to achieve. Mindfulness arrives when the practice stops. Of course. Meditating for self-improvement, I’ve read, is a uniquely Western oddity. “Trying” to be present is ridiculous if you think about it. You are present. What else? Because your mind is running amok does not actually magically transport you to the past or the future. You are present with a mind that is running amok. Minds are like puppies: chase them and they run away. Stand still and they will eventually come to you.
Is any of this pothole wisdom helpful? Absolutely not. Like mindfulness, wisdom arrives when the obsession with knowledge-for-betterment ceases. I’ll let you know what that looks like when I stop trying to attain it. There’s no end to the tripping stones. I’ve learned that, too. Again and again. And again.
The best things in life are not achievements. They are relationships. Me to you. Me to me. Me to the world I am passing through, one moment at a time. With you. Stand still in the moment – you might as well since it is where you are – and you’re libel to experience all manner of beauty.
The Direction of Intention 