safe haven | The Direction of Intention

Sanctuary Creation [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on July 28, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.” ~ Anne Frank

We began thinking of our backyard as a sanctuary during the early days of COVID. Since at the time sheltering in place was a necessity, why not create a space that evoked calm and inspired peace-of-mind? We planted tall grasses along the fence, hung happy lights and prayer flags, we made special seating areas and placed a table on the deck where we ate our meals, painted rocks and listened to records on a suitcase record player. We were gifted with a beautiful chime. We hung bird feeders and installed a bird bath.

Our sanctuary filled us with light and sustained us through a very dark chapter.

Now, finding ourselves once again in a very dark time – and getting darker by the day – we’ve returned to the original impulse. We are consciously reinvigorating our backyard sanctuary. We are amazed each day as the sweet potato plants spill out of their pots. Tending the herb garden grounds us and we delight that it thrives. The jalapeño harvest is eye-popping. We cook each night with basil or rosemary or cilantro or parsley that we clip from our garden. The tomato plant is almost as tall as I am.

For us, sanctuary-creation is more a process of finding than a design-and-installation game. We evolve as we go. We are not flush with resources – and, thankfully, our aesthetic leans to raw wood and peeling paint – so we wander through antique stores or restore discards that, to us, look like treasure. Half the fun is in the finding. It fills our sanctuary with serendipity stories.

We stopped at our favorite antique shop to pick up a piece of old ladder. The moment we stepped out of the truck, a small garden table called out to us. It was tucked into an unlikely spot, a few yards from the chicken coop. Kerri, always the master bargainer, asked the shopkeeper, “What’ll you take for it?” We bought it for half-price and loaded the little table into the truck with the piece of old ladder.

Both are now fixtures in our haven, our safe space. The ladder is adorned with a purple sweet potato plant that is already exploding out of its pot and draping toward the lower rungs. The little table is nestled on the end of deck and looks like it was made for that particular spot. It is home – and also provides a home to a licorice plant.

“I love it,” she said. Me, too.

Our sanctuary once again inspires quiet. It is like a magnet that pulls our minds and hearts out of the darkness. We sit in our safe haven, breathe deeply, filling ourselves with goodness that is as big as the sky itself, alive with growing things, grasses that wave in the breezes, an aspen tree that joy-quakes, cardinals that sing to us, and is now home to a little table that called our name.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE TABLE

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Filed under: Creativity, Merely A Thought Monday | Tagged: antique stores, artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, evolution, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, light, safe, safe haven, safe spot, sanctuary, serendipity, story, studio melange, the melange | Leave a comment »

A Singular Dedication [David’s blog on saturday morning smack-dab]

Posted on November 23, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

Yes. We did. We spontaneously exploded our living spaces. We rearranged furniture all day. Nothing has landed for certain. It’s all a work in progress.

When the dust settled and we stopped to eat dinner, Kerri looked at me and said, “You know my favorite part of the day? The whole time I didn’t once think about politics.” I didn’t either. It was a refreshing respite from the coming storm, from the despot-elect and his clown-car-cabinet-nominees.

Our home became a sanctuary during Covid. We turned our creative hearts into making a safe haven, a beautiful space, a place in which we could isolate yet also continue to grow and move forward. Our spontaneous house rearrangement comes from the same impulse: in a nation dedicated to falling back into the fascist-dark, we will create a safe space in which we can nurture our hearts and minds and continue moving into the positive, the generative, the light.

Like all of us in this nation – and there are many – who refuse to surrender our decency and goose-step into the mistakes of the past, we are not going back. And that singular dedication begins in the one place we can control – our home.

read Kerri’s blogpost about NOT GOING BACK

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Filed under: smack-dab | Tagged: artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, decency, Kamala Harris, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, safe haven, sanctuary, smack-dab, story, studio melange, the melange, we're not going back | 1 Comment »

Glance Sideways [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on October 20, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

It came as quite a shock. Our beloved plant, Snake-In-The-Grass, was hosting a community of Gnomes and Faeries. We haven’t actually seen the Gnomes and Faeries – they are notoriously hard to spot. They are not fond of human beings since we are famously territorial and also so easily eschew our imaginations. Fearing all things “wild,” we generally erect fences and street lights, build dams and make management plans for “nature.” If we could see them, I suspect we’d notice how often they roll their eyes at us.

When I was playing the role of consultant in public school systems, I took note of a central mandate of the adults, playing the role of teacher or administrator: clamp the imagination of the young people, those imaginers playing the role of students. The students would enter the system with wide-open imaginations, free from limitation, and the oldsters found it necessary to kibosh or contain that wide-open meadow. This is not meant to disparage those actors playing the role of adults; when young, they’d been recipients of the imagination whammy, too. They were simply carrying on the tradition. The imagination is apparently considered a wild-thing so necessary of damming.

Dammed imaginations do not die, they distort. Imagination, as a wild thing, will run in circles when put in a cage. It will gnaw its leg off when caught in a snare. It will invent monsters and madness as it paces to-and-fro. It will get angry as it descends into madness. You might say that millions of Americans are gnawing their legs off, angry at the swirl of dark imagining run amok in their caged craniums, seeking reasons and someone-to-blame for their dark imagining. The caged imagination will lead all the lemmings over the cliff with the shout, “Where we go one, we go all!” It seems that we are awash in imprisoned imaginations howling to be freed.

I took it as a positive sign that the Gnomes and the Faeries took up residence in our house under the good protection of Snake-In-The-Grass. While the world outside our doors goes deeper and deeper into the cage-of-its-own-creation, the world inside our house seems to have become a refuge, a safe haven, for those beings still alive in their imaginations.

David recently wrote that he was dedicating himself to being a better artist. He’s been making art with his son again, a wild imaginer that has pulled his daddy (and me, too) out of our cages and into the open meadow. I can’t wait to see what David will do next. Who he will now become. What role he will shed. He’s already a great artist so the possibilities are…wild.

I confess that I regularly wander into the sunroom and glance sideways at Snake-In-The-Grass. Sideways – so they say- is the only way we humans can catch a glimpse of the Gnomes and Faeries. I want them to know that I’m looking.

read Kerri’s blog post about TINY MUSHROOMS