one | The Direction of Intention

What I Remember [David’s blog on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on August 13, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

Memory is a funny thing. It’s almost never accurate. Over time we revisit and restory our life experiences, scrambling the order of events, forgetting essential details while hanging on with white knuckles to specific moments that we understand as truth.* This happened. It matters. I remember it.

I re-member it.

Joseph Campbell introduced me to a phrase, an aspect that is present in all creation myths: the paradox of dual focus. “…so now, at this critical juncture, where the One breaks into the many, destiny “happens,”but at the same time is “brought about.”

Kerri and I have an ongoing conversation about the paradox of dual focus. For instance, our coming-together-story seems fated, as if it was part of the grand-plan all along. “It was meant to be!” we exclaim. And, at the same time, we ask, “What are the odds?” Our meeting was a happy accident in a vast chaotic universe.

Both/And.

It just happened. And, it was meant to be. It depends upon how we re-member it. It depends upon how we want to story it.

A Balinese man told me that, in Bali, when two people crash their cars into each other, their first thought is “I am supposed to meet this person.” Insurance claims and blame are not priorities. Fate orchestrated a fender bender. The strangers emerge from their cars and greet each other as if fortune had just smiled upon them; they are two pieces of a greater puzzle come together.

Supposed to happen. Accident.

The greater puzzle. The essence beyond the fragments. The One that breaks into the many. Focusing on the small stone does not negate the truth of the mountain. The single blossom is an expression of the plant, which is nourished by the soil and rain and seasons and critters…

Memory is like that. It is both stone and mountain. Blossom and ecosystem. The order of things is less revealing than the essence, the relationship to the whole. We grow and change and so that what might have at one time seemed a hardship now seems a course correction, a blessing. Kismet.

It happened. It matters. That’s what I remember.

*(It is a sign of our times that I feel it necessary to distinguish my thoughts on individual memory from the facts of history. We live in a time when those in power are actively editing, scrubbing and rewriting history. They concoct a narrative that has little to do with the actual history of our nation. This is not dual focus. This is white supremacist fantasy-creation.)

read Kerri’s blogpost about BLOSSOMS

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Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Identity, Story | Tagged: accident, artistry, chaos, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, dual focus, essence, fate, focus, happy accident, Joseph Campbell, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, kismet, memory, one, plan, story, studio melange, the melange | 1 Comment »

Scratches On The Wall [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on October 15, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

Scratches on the wall. Petroglyphs, the only evidence that remains of a people who once lived in these canyons, who lived by the river we’ve named Fremont. We do not know if they had a name for the river. We do not know if they had a name for themselves. We call them the Fremont, after the river. A location name.

The Fremont River is named for an American explorer, John Charles Fremont, so the people who scratched pictures into the rock over 1,000 years ago also carry his name. As is the nature of history, we locate them from our point of view. We build an identity-structure and civilization-story about them based upon our story of them. We’ve placed them in our narrative timeline, 1 – 1300 CE. We have no idea how they thought of or marked their time.

We have no idea what became of them. They disappeared into time. We have no idea what the petroglyphs mean or why they scratched them into the canyon walls. We wonder at the semiotics, the inner symbolic life that produced such strange (to us) images that remain on the red rock walls.

This morning, through my COVID aches and chills, I watched the news. I would like to say that I am mystified by the civilization-story currently being spun and supported by half of my nation but I am not. I would like to say that the hatred and fear-mongering of the red hat tribe is as much a mystery to me as the way of the Fremont, but it is not. The concurrent xenophobia and wild-eyed-creation of an internal enemy (anyone not in a red hat) has roots that are all too easy to see. It’s a fascist popcorn trail, a page from Hitler’s handbook. The language is identical. The images, scratched into the red-fox-walls of our time are all too easy to interpret. A frightened and misinformed populace is easily manipulated. Fooled.

What is a mystery to me is the inner symbolic life of my nation’s conservatives that seem so ready to trade our sacred democracy for a populist authoritarian. What scratches on the walls of their minds are so easily storied into hatred. What has so hardened their hearts that they embrace with cheers the repulsive bile spewed by their candidate? It is as incomprehensible to me as the petroglyphs of the Fremont.

All societies disappear into time. Ours, relative to the Fremont, is still in its infancy. We can only hope that an explorer in some distant future finds our petroglyphs – and although a mystery to them, we will have known that we transcended the authoritarian threat and overcame the fox-fear-fantasy, manufactured hatred and dark lies. And, over the next thousand years, our scratches on the wall tell the tale of how we matured to fulfill the promise of our sacred ideals. Out of many, one.

read Kerri’s blogpost about PETROGLYPHS

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Filed under: Language, Metaphor, Perspective, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: artistry, authoritarian, Capitol Reef, civilization, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, democracy, Fremont, hatred, ideals, identity, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, language, lies, narrative, one, out of many, petroglyph, petroglyphs, possibility, promise, Sacred, semiotics, society, story, studio melange, the melange, vote | 3 Comments »

See The Glue [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on June 8, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

It’s a new phrase to me but I liked it immediately. I liked it because I have known some amazing people, those rare birds who keep the runaway-egos focused on the project, who naturally and seemingly without effort coalesce disparate talents into a cohesive creative team. The ‘glue people’ is a perfect description.

Glue people intuitively understand power as something that is created between people, not something wielded over people. I suspect that is the epicenter of their glue-gift: they see beyond the parts to the sweeping possibility of the whole. They know that “every man/woman for themself” is a recipe for disaster.

Despite our dedicated cowboy mythos, innovation is never the province of a single person. There may be a single visionary but the vision is never accomplished in a vacuum. Inventions, like organizations or nations, come to fruition through the efforts and skills of the many-working-as-one. Glue people generate “the-working-as-one.”

Stage managers, production managers, executive assistants, contractors…those highly overlooked people at the center of the information, who quietly make sure the work of creation happens without collision while also making certain all the parts and pieces know how much they are valued.

Meaning makers. Making value explicit. Glue people. Just try to get an idea off the runway without them.

read Kerri’s blogpost about GLUE PEOPLE