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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Go Up!

Posted on January 8, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

670. 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 airports, people are often racing to catch a plane. I have, more than once, sprinted through a concourse trying to catch my connecting flight before they closed the doors and captured me like a bug in the airport pickle jar: no way out. When I was in the Philadelphia airport, having more than enough time between flights, I found a nice perch and watched other less fortunate travellers race to their liberation. “That’s what I look like,” I thought as I spied a man wearing his too intense face, trying to reconcile his need to sprint through the crowd with his desire to not trample other people.

Coming from opposite directions, entering a knot of people, two wheelchair bound travelers, each late for a connection, spurred their airport attendee to go faster. It was like watching an old-time film clip of two trains roaring toward each other, unaware, an imminent head-on collision. They couldn’t see each other through the throng of people. The sea of travelers parted, the wheelchair riders caught sight of each other, eyeballs bulged, eyebrows raised, hands came to protect faces, and time – as it does in a spell or a moment of presence – came into a sharp, clear focus. At the last moment, in an impossible maneuver, the pushing attendees, as if choreographed, altered course. The chairs kissed, the spell was broken, and neither chair slowed down; grins of relief broke across the faces of all concerned. Mine, too. “That was well done!” one of the riders hooted to her wheelchair pusher as they sped off into the distance.

There are moments on the stage when an actor forgets their line and all pretenses fall. It’s called, “Going up.” Eyes bulge, eyebrows rise, their mind double clutches in panic, locks up, and for brief moment, without thought, they are intensely present, vitally alive. It feels like a mini-spell as time expands. And somehow, inexplicably, the words show up, moving the mouth without the assistance of the mind. The moment passes; the spell is broken, presence retreats behind the notion of control; waves of relief crash on the sandy shores of the actor. And yet, when the evening is over, the actor will tell you that moment was the most honest moment of the whole play. It was the most “alive” moment of their performance. It was the only moment that was not controlled, constrained, premeditated. It is what they attempt to master: presence on stage.

In watching the near wheelchair collision and remembering those brief moments of vitality on the stage, I couldn’t help but think that we (or I) have it backwards. The spell is not those moments of intense presence; the spell is a life that is rarely present. In those moments of near collision, when we lose control or are snapped into the immediate, the spell of the mundane is, for a moment broken, time no longer matters, nothing is measured or contained or controlled, and we enter life as we exit the predictable. I’m delighted that the wheelchairs did not collide and yet what a gift! Just like the rider I was left thinking, “For a moment, I was here and nowhere else. Well done.”

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Do The Dishes

Posted on December 18, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

649. 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’m at 37,000 feet. The coffee has been served. The trash has been picked up. The man sitting next to me is asleep, as are the people across the aisle. I see the flicker of movies or games on ipads; a baby somewhere behind me is fussy. We are in an aluminum tube hurtling through space at several hundred miles an hour and I am typing. And, as I look around me, I’d say that most of my plane-mates believe that flying through space is usual, mundane.

A hundred years ago very few people had seen the earth from the sky. A few people in balloons made it into the clouds. Now, hundreds of thousands of us soar through the sky everyday. I was reminded in the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas that it has only been 45 years since a human being saw the earth from space. We have been on this planet for thousands of years and the miracle of the earth was something we imagined but had never seen. I am in the first generation of humans to see a photograph of the earth from space. I remember seeing it for the first time and I gasped. Now, we think it commonplace. Sure, from space there are no boundaries, sure it looks alive (it is), but I imagine most of my globe-mates think it is usual, mundane.

It is the center of every spiritual practice, it is the task of the artist: what does it take to truly SEE. How do we develop our capacity to see what is right in front of us instead of seeing what we think is there? To think is to interpret. To think is to abstract; it is a veil that can blunt the immensity of experience. How do we become present to the enormity of being alive and cease to reduce our lives to the mundane?

Travel to another country and you will see. Fall in love and you will see. Climb to the top of a mountain and you will see. Stand in the river with the water rushing around your ankles and you will see. You will see because you want to see; you will enter your moment having decided to be there and nowhere else. You will see because you let go of the fog of knowing and allow yourself to not know. You will see because you have re-entered discovery. Do the dishes for the thousandth time. Do nothing else but simply feel the water on your wrists, smell the soap, the muscles in your hand as you hold the sponge. Feel your heart beating and you will recognize that you have never lived this moment, you’ve never breathed this breath, you’ve never done these dishes and you will come alive quite suddenly and see the miracle of your life.

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Open The Door

Posted on December 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

When I was a kid I was standing on a barrel so I could reach the pencil sharpener. I sharpened my pencil with such fury that I tipped the barrel over and landed on the pencil: it stabbed my right palm and the lead snapped off. I was in a hurry because I was drawing a picture and I wanted to capture the image before the magic dissipated. That’s how I experienced artistry as a boy: a magic door opened. I saw an image on a blank piece of paper and it was my task to bring it into the visible world before the door closed. Sometimes I knew I had lots of time; sometimes I knew the door was only going to be open for a moment and it was a race to get enough of the image so that I might complete it after the door closed. I had a muse and she lived on the other side of the door. I spent many hours staring at blank sheets of paper willing her to open the channel and send me an image.

My fall off the barrel was over 40 years ago and I still carry the lead mark in my palm. It has become a reminder of the magic. It took me 30 years after the fall to realize that I had control over the door; the magic was not separate from me. I merely had to turn the knob, I simply needed to open and receive the image. Like two people in love but afraid to reveal their feelings I came to realize that the muse was waiting for me and I was waiting for the muse. She wanted me to turn the knob and say, “I’m here.” I was waiting for her to turn the knob and say, “I’m here.”

I look at the pencil mark on my palm when I need to remind myself that there is no door; my muse and I are now one. There is no hurry. In fact, what I came to understand was “the door” opened when I became present. As a boy, staring at a blank piece of paper, counting my breaths, I unwittingly developed a nice meditation practice and when I dropped into the moment the door opened. I work with many people and what I’ve learned is that magic is not unique to me – it is available to everyone. We are magic – all of us. If the nozzle is closed it is because we stand in the past arguing for the wound or seeking a future place, somewhere out there where there is magic to be claimed. My work is to say, “Slow down. There is nothing broken so there is nothing to be fixed. Look at what is right in front of you. Stand here and nowhere else: let the world see that you are magic.”

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