Embrace The Bubble

Posted on June 24, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
A bit of the Eiffel Tower

A bit of the Eiffel Tower

I am nearly through the throes of jet lag and my inner anthropologist has an observation or two about the altered state that occurs when one wakes up in Paris and goes to sleep in Kenosha.

When 36 hours pass in a 24-hour daylight cycle, the human body (my human body) experiences shock and awe. A soul cannot travel nearly as fast as a body in a modern airplane; that’s why they call it jet lag. The jet does not lag. The soul doddles as a good soul should while the body flings through space in a pressurized aluminum tube. The soul lags (note: my inner anthropologist is a scientist and is dubious about using the word “soul.” He wants you to know that “soul” is my translation of his term, “consciousness”).

Jet lag is like being inside a bubble. There are great benefits to being inside the bubble. For instance, the world is wonderfully distorted. Nothing is normal when sifted through a soapy haze. The bubble is the overlap of dream space and the everyday. From inside the bubble, people move too fast. Or, they move too slowly. The words people speak are garbled and generally bounce off the bubble. Checking out of a grocery store is like a scene in a sci-fi movie. Sense-making is impossible but the surrender to no-sense is sweet and oddly comforting. To release the necessity to understand, the need to recognize, rationalize, explain, or connect even the simplest of thought-dots is liberating. In the bubble, a sigh is the only appropriate response.

From the bubble, there is nothing to be done but to watch the time river roll. Jet lag bubble consciousness makes things somehow more simplistic; complexity is not possible from a jet lag haze. Inside the bubble, life routines that were unconscious prior to traveling are startling and new; they are like gestures from a previous incarnation. For example, this morning, doing the dishes, my hands knew what to do yet I was fascinated with the odd process. I was both doer and witness. Doing the dishes was known and new all in the same instant. The bubble, so my inner anthropologist claims, is a paradox: it dulls the thinking but sharpens the simple moments. It opens the senses. Prior to doing the dishes, watching the sunrise through the fog, I listened with fascination to the wind shake the dew through the high leaves in the trees. It was gorgeous; nature’s rainstick.

Within the bubble, sleep is a constant tug like an undertow. It pulls time into slow motion. It creates a liminal space, a not-here-and-not-there space. It creates a “now” space with a single simple imperative: stay awake for a few more hours.

Stay awake. I like the metaphor: to stay awake amidst the pull to dullness; ultimately it is the gift of the bubble. It is a reminder not to sleepwalk through life, to stay alert to the simple moments. Stay awake or your life becomes like a television running an endless cycle of sitcoms. Dullness is a choice. My inner anthropologist just rolled his eyes. It’s more extravagance on my part; apparently “choice,” like “soul” is not an appropriate scientific term.

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Rap With B-Cat

Posted on May 30, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
Baby Cat daydreaming

Baby Cat daydreaming

It occurs to me, as I sit in the studio on this cool spring morning, that there is a fourth member of my household that has yet to be introduced. We have a cat, an elder statesman, a worthy companion and sparring partner for Tripper-Dog-Dog-Dog. He has a name that no one uses because, early in his life, he became a rap star and dumped his given name. He is now known to all the world as Baby Cat.

When I first met Baby Cat I called him Sumo. He is a very large cat, a formidable kitty. Late at night I have more than once thought there was a burly intruder in the house but it was only Baby Cat pacing as he worked out his latest rap. It is an understatement to say that he is heavy on his feet. Sometimes the room bounces when he leaps from a windowsill.

photoBaby Cat is teaching me about clarity of intention. He leaves no doubt about what he wants (food or pets) and is relentless until he gets it. Truly, he is relentless. He does not know the word “try.” Baby Cat gets. He meets me every morning and guides me to his bowl. If I deviate, he wraps his hulk around my feet or herds me like a shepherd. If physical action is not enough to direct me to his bowl, he begins a verbal assault that would make his mother blush. He wants what he wants and he wants it now. Black and white. In addition to Sumo, I also call him Terrorist Kitty because he resorts to biting ankles as a last resort. Yoda would be proud of Baby Cats force of will. Were he not a rap star I’m certain that he’d be a Jedi. Actors would be well served to study with Master Baby Cat.

Baby Cat is teaching me about simple contentment (yes, like all things true, it is a paradox: intention and contentment are bedfellows). He shows me how to linger in sunny spots or stare out the window for hours, just because. He has reintroduced me to the fine art of daydreaming. He joins me every morning as I stretch and do a bit of yoga, shamelessly positioning himself in the optimal petting zone close to my feet and gives himself over to my affections. And, because he is so capable of presence and pleasure, I’ve found that my morning yoga has transformed. It is no longer a discipline, something I do that is good for me; it has become a practice of simple attention and loving. I am more capable of presence and pleasure. I rest in it. Like Baby Cat, my body tells me what it needs, and I breathe.

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Unbridle Your Enthusiasm

Posted on May 21, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
Tripper Dog-Dog-Dog's trophy collection

Tripper Dog-Dog-Dog’s trophy collection

Tripper Dog-Dog-Dog is tough on toys. He does well with hard rubber Kongs and rawhide bones but the stuffed animal variety haven’t got a prayer. We long ago stopped buying them for him. Even as a small puppy he’d make short work of anything that squeaked or resembled a creature. More than once, moments after giving him a new toy, I found him sitting happy and content amidst a nest of fiberfill with the empty body-shaped sack of toy remnant clutched firmly between his paws. Dog-Dog has several admirers who are unaware of his destructive talents and bring him stuffed animals as gifts. Like offerings to a high priests in days of old, Tripper graciously accepts their offer and removes to the backroom for immediate slaughter. For reasons I can’t explain, we keep the heads from his sacrifices. We use the heads as sleeves for our knife set or as wine bottle covers; it’s our own little version of Game of Thrones.

I’m learning much from master Dog-Dog. Lately his lessons are about faith and exuberance for the sheer pleasure of being alive. For Tripper, every doorway is an opportunity for bounding, every fence an opportunity for discovery. Even if he hopped at the fence 30 seconds prior, his return to the same spot is no less enthusiastic. He does not assume that he knows what he will find there, in fact, he assumes that the world is new no matter which way he looks. He does not blunt himself with notions of knowing like we bipeds. He is a four-legged master of beginner’s mind. If he had an inner monologue I’m certain it would be, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,…”

During our late night pre-bed visits to the backyard, Dog-Dog routinely stops and stands very still (unusual behavior for an Australian Shepherd), and for several moments he listens. He feels the breezes. He smells the air. He checks in with me to make sure that I am standing firmly rooted in the present moment. When he is certain that I am present with him in his quiet enthusiasm for life, that I have given up all of my stories and distractions from the day, that I, like him, am breathing in the miracle of existence, revels for a moment longer and then lets me know that I am ready for sleeping. He turns and prances toward the house, satisfied with my progress and exhausted by the sheer wonder of it all.

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Take The Time

Posted on February 4, 2014 by davidrobinsoncreative
Marc Chagall 'America Windows'

Marc Chagall ‘America Windows’

I finally saw Marc Chagall’s ‘America Window.’ It’s at the Art Institute of Chicago and has long been on my must-experience list. It’s a long list! Unlike most bucket lists, my list cannot be contained in a bucket and I have no illusion that I will experience everything on the list before I die. It’s not possible to experience everything on my list in a single lifetime. I keep my list to remind myself that my life is both finite and that this life holds more miracles than any single life-bucket can contain. Finite lifespan nests within the infinite awe.

The Window provided me with an extraordinary perspective flip. When first approaching it I thought, “How spare!” It was breathtaking in color but seemed narratively sparse, like a Mark Rothko instead of a Marc Chagall. And then I stepped closer and the story of the Window began to emerge. An entire world opened for me. The longer I looked the more I saw. The more I saw the more I wanted to look. It was as if I was at first hypnotized and then drawn into the world of the Window. When I finally decided to leave, I walked several paces away and turned back for one more look. The world that had at first seemed spare was now too full to comprehend. I was seeing beyond my thinking.

What a great metaphor for the process of stepping into presence! It’s a process of moving from the conceptual to an experience. Our thinking, our relationship with language, requires us to generalize and a generality is always an abstraction. It is made up. For instance, right now, looking out my window, I see many “trees” and, in truth, I’m not seeing them at all. I’m seeing the abstract concept “tree” that I attach to many, many unique forms. I’m seeing what I expect to see. If I take the time to go outside and touch, smell and feel them, I see that each “tree” is vastly different than all the others. No two forms are ever the same. They are vastly different than my expectation. It is not until we take the time to move beyond our words that we regain our capacity to see.

Chagall, like all great artists, knew this. He knew that people need help seeing and that seeing is vastly different than looking. Vital life, dare I say the rich meaning of life, is available when we learn to see beyond our abstractions. Vital life (the infinite) dances in front of us all of the time. It is the role of the artist to help us move beyond our expectation and engage with the dance. The Window reminded me that sometimes we need only take the time to open our eyes and see.

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Have Faith

Posted on August 22, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

In the past two days I’ve journeyed from Indianapolis to Tampa. With the exception of Kentucky I’ve traveled a corridor of this country that I had not before seen.

In Tennessee there was a rainstorm so intense that every car on the freeway pulled over. It was impossible to see. The storm came and left within fifteen minutes and when it was gone I thought I’d dreamed it. I saw a sunset in Georgia that included colors I’d never before seen. I gasped. Literally. I have no way of describing the shades of pink, purple and orange that melted through the sky. If I made up names for paint colors they’d be something like lavender explosion, sensational salmon pink (I’m laughing in disgust, too), and crisp aspen orange.

There’s nothing like a long road trip to pull you out of the everyday numbness and re-excite presence. If you put away your gadgets and look out the window you’ll see an endless number of adventures beckoning. Every little side road is a temptation. Every roadside attraction or vegetable stand begs you to stop and have a conversation. Every community is an opportunity to explore or merely linger. Although there are Cracker Barrel restaurants everywhere in this part of the country – and I religiously avoid the mass-produced – I’d never been in one so we stopped, ran inside, and played with every toy. We laughed at the candy I’d not seen since I was a kid (there was a huge box of double bubble bubble gum!). We ate BLT’s and chatted with the women stocking the shelves. There was no hurry to get going. There was no place else to be.

I read a phrase recently in Brida, a novel by Paulo Coehlo, that every moment of our lives is an act of faith. We never know what the next moment will bring – even though we like to believe that we do. Even though we convince ourselves that we’ve done this before and that we are bored, in truth, we never know what the next moment holds and we step into it anyway. I think road trips bring us closer to that truth. Each step every day is a step into the unknown. Every day is packed full of the new when we stop pretending that we’ve been here before. I’ve never lived this day. I will never have this day again. I have no idea what it will bring. I will step into it anyway.

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Follow Barney

Posted on August 15, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

It’s morning and I am sitting in the sun. I have coffee. There is a gentle breeze blowing off the water and rustling the leaves in the trees above me. The shadows are dancing. In the distance I hear a train, a mower, and some wind chimes. The birds are lively and playful. There is a pond to my left with a gentle fountain gurgling and adding to this morning’s symphony.

A few weeks ago I followed Barney up the hillside through the vineyard. Barney is jolly like Santa with roots, like Santa’s, that reach back to Odin. He is filled with laughter. On our way up the hill he plucked flowers, showed me roots, talked about soil and nutrients and cycles and seasons and energy and motion and force. He taught me about polarity and balance. Midway up the hill he stopped and said, “This is what people used to worship. It is life, concrete and tangible. Now we have this abstraction called spirituality.” The penny dropped for me. It’s sacred – all of it. That is no longer an ideal. It is tangible like soil and seeds.

Once in class, after leading a meditation, Alan and I talked with the class about the purpose of meditation. The purpose is not to take you away from reality but to bring you in to presence. Using meditation as an escape, to move away from the moment, is to protect yourself from presence.

Presence is word like paradigm: it is so overused, misused and abstracted that it has come to mean nothing. Be present. Be Quiet. Be. What does it mean to be present in an urban (urbane) world with clocks in every device, lists, lists, someplace else to be and something else to buy? How can presence be anything other than an abstraction when separate from the root? How can we understand presence when we do not experience it or ourselves as growing, changing, energy exchanging, vital, inhaling and exhaling, and full of life? It’s not an abstraction if you take your shoes off and stand in the dirt, feel the breezes, and listen.

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Look Beyond The Word

Posted on April 6, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

According to my dictionary, an entrepreneur is a risk taking businessperson. This is not much of a definition. The word is French in origin and it meant to undertake. It was a verb. To get out of bed and undertake the tasks of the day makes us all entrepreneurs. Especially these days when risk, according to the dictionary, means that there is a chance something might go wrong. I’ve yet to live a day when everything went right. For instance, last night I opened a jar of curry powder with too much enthusiasm and curry exploded everywhere. I think there is a more appropriate definition of an entrepreneur: someone whose not invested in things going right. In fact, entrepreneurs look for things going wrong because that provides the opportunity necessary for new creation. Entrepreneurs see the world beyond right and wrong. They see opportunity. Risk has nothing to do with it.

An artist, as defined by the dictionary, is a creator of art, a performer, a person with skills or a cunning person. The origin of this word is either French or Latin. We are cautioned in the dictionary not to confuse artist with artisan. An artisan is engaged in a craft. An artist is engaged in a fine art though I can’t find any mention of what distinguishes a craft from a fine art. From the definition of artist, the phrase “cunning person” shouted to me so following the word chain I learned that cunning means crafty and deceitful, clever or cute. So, artisans, unlike artists, must not be deceitful, clever or cute though they are, by definition crafty. In the Venn diagram of artist and artisan, craftiness is the crossover. So, to sum up: artists are cute, crafty, clever and deceitful while creating something fine. Artisans are rough, dull and honest while also crafty. Can one be crafty and dull at the same time? I have a more appropriate definition for artist: someone who lives beyond the abstractions of thought. They engage with what is there, not what they think is there. In other words, someone who has made presence a priority in his or her life is an artist. Artists guide their community to presence.

Words like “risk” or “fine” blind us. They distance us from our potential because we think we need to take risks to be entrepreneurial; we think we need to do something fine to be and artist. Artists and entrepreneurs explore. They engage. They discover. They act first and then make meaning of their experiences. They master their “doing” because they are not invested in win/lose games. They step into the unknown without reservation. Artistry, like entrepreneurship, defines a way of being not something achieved.

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Make Another Choice

Posted on April 5, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Today I drew cartoons. I had coaching calls. I turned soil and helped plant a garden. I’ve never planted a garden before. I read a recipe and made naan bread and turmeric chicken. I’ve never before made naan or turmeric chicken. I will do all of the above again and again. As I turned the soil and later as I kneaded dough I remembered a moment in class earlier in the week. We had a conversation about the absence of resistance.

The conversation went something like this: The absence of resistance in your life is a sure sign that you are living fully in choice. If you are pushing against what you don’t want, chances are you’re invested in the notion that you have no choice. Flip it over and say it another way: resistance is a signal that you are invested in a drama. Pushing against what you don’t want is a signal that your inner victim has come for a visit.

If you pay attention, resistance can also be a guide. Resistance shows you where you’ve invested in the idea that things happen to you. Resistance exposes the places in your life that you’ve abdicated your responsibility for your choices.

The great thing about planting gardens for the first time or making new recipes, is that presence is not a problem. Doing things for the first time invites presence. Not knowing brings us to this moment. We pay attention. It is the magic secret to learning. Another side benefit to stepping into unknown activities is that you have a choice. You can have the experience first and then make meaning out of it (note: this is how your brain works. Or, you can resist the not knowing, pretend that you should know, resist the moment, and miss the learning. It’s a choice. Experience is always determined in that tiny moment when you choose to walk toward something, or push against what you don’t want. It sounds simple because it is simple. Listen to what you resist and make another choice.

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Be A Hypocrite

Posted on March 21, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Apparently, I am a hypocrite. I do not always practice what I preach. Most days I believe that I am my brother’s keeper. Yet some days I walk passed someone in need; I turn my head and pretend not to see them, saying to myself, “This is not mine to do.”

I believe in anchoring my life in love and yet sometimes I enshroud myself in a wet blanket of fear. I say things I do not mean. I judge and run back to my safe place.

I believe in the power of possibility and yet there are days that I fill my cup to overflowing with “I can’t.” I invest with gusto in my disbelief and hide my gifts beneath a mound of doubt.

I preach the virtues of going slow. I believe in being present and yet at times I find myself racing to get somewhere. I tailgate other drivers wanting to “get there.”

I believe in the power of language and yet I have said hurtful things and am often unaware of what I am actually saying.

I believe intuition trumps intellect every time and yet I regularly justify and reason myself out of following my gut instinct. I spend an inordinate amount of time in my head (I call it my office) and talk on and on about being more in my body or in nature. Empty words.

I believe in loyalty and trust and yet at crucial moments in my life have chosen self-preservation; I did not throw myself under the bus to save the other.

I believe in self-love yet have given the farm away more times than I can count. I hurt my self regularly with my unwarranted self-judgments and unrealistic expectations. I hold myself to standards that I would never expect from others.

There are gaps everywhere. I am flawed, flawed, flawed. Accuse me of almost any hypocrisy and I will look you in the eye and admit my imperfection. I am human and by definition that means I am messy and riddled with contradictions. Hold me to a standard of perfection and I will utterly disappoint you. Ask me why I say one thing and do another and I will get angry and defend my belief even as I know that I have betrayed it with service to yet another belief.

What I do not believe is that the world is black and white. I do not believe in absolutes. For me, truth is found in the paradox. Life is lived in the contradictions. I grant my life the same principles that make color vibrant: there’s nothing like a touch of red to make the greens pop. If you really want to see the orange, surround it with something blue. As Quinn once told me, all religious traditions have one thing in common: they instruct us to find the middle way, seek the path between the pair of opposites. It is impossible to find the middle way by eliminating the contradictions; one must test the boundaries to know where they are. As Dan Pink writes, “Clarity depends on contrast.” Given my massive contradictions, I expect someday to be utterly clear for at least one brief moment. In case you expect my clarity to last be forewarned that I will most certainly follow my moment of clarity with wholehearted dedication to some new spectacular confusion.

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Take One Step

Posted on January 9, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

671. 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 watched the sun come up this morning. I was sitting in Alan’s sun room sipping coffee, marveling at the winter colors of the sky: salmon pinks, lavender, and ice blue. And then, beneath the tree line, in a specific spot, the branches began to shimmer. I expected Merlin to materialize. And then the shimmer warmed, became orange and round and instead of Merlin, the sun lifted above the horizon, streamed through the trees, and washed me with the warmth of a new day. Were I a plant my leaves would have opened and I would have taken a might drink of the light of the new day. As a human, I had coffee on the inside, sun on the outside – I was warmed through and through.

I do not know what this day brings. Alan and I will teach a class, that much I know. Then, I will dash to catch a plane and then if the timing is right I will catch a train. If not, there will be an entire day between the plane and the train. Planes and trains are sometimes on schedule and sometimes off schedule depending on Mother Nature and the nature of machines. Tonight I could be in one of 5 different cities. I recognized as the sun rose that I am in presence training. I am learning to trust. For the next several months there will be no daily pattern that repeats itself. I will be mostly on the move; my suitcase is my home. Sometimes I will be with loved ones, sometimes I will be in isolation, sometimes with new friends, sometimes in another country. I am throwing my work away, tossing the patterns of my life as I knew them and re-imagining things. I couldn’t be more alive and present to my moment. My inner gypsy stubbed out his cigarette and hissing smoke through his nose said, “It’s about time.”

It is about time. We count our days, our minutes, we measure our lives, check our lists, stay on our schedules. We count ourselves into desperation when we forget what we are counting. Each breath is life giving. Each breath is unique and never to happen again. I watched the sun rise again and it was no less a miracle today than it was yesterday. It was not the same. Another year just turned over (if you recognize the same calendar that I do) and I can look to the past and think, “This and this happened.” At least that is the story that I tell, none of it is true for anyone but me. I realized an amazing thing about personal edges and story this week. The scary edges are only visible if you are oriented to the past; anchored into and trying to maintain the known. Orient to the unknown, anchor into present and there are no edges, only experiences. I think that is what I mean by learning to trust – I am learning to orient according to what is with me right now as opposed to what has been, what should be, or what might have been. Those things are mental abstracts – as are scary edges….the edges certainly exist, the “scary” is a story I can tell. Here is presence school, I am taking one step at a time, something I have done since first learning to walk only now, as an experienced walker, I am paying attention to the steps as I take them.

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