separation | The Direction of Intention

Flip it!

Posted on January 7, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

669. 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 am in New England and it is winter. This morning as the sun rose, as the sky progressed through purple and orange to steel grey there was a very light snow falling. The world was so quiet that it inspired inner quiet. I think this is what is supposed to happen in winter: we are meant to slow down, get quiet, to go inside, reflect, keep warm, catch up on some sleep, and touch the eternal in ways that are only accessible when the days are short and the ground is frozen.

Yesterday, as Alan and I planned the summit that we will facilitate in Holland in March, we strayed from our task and talked about separation and connectivity. I am oriented into the world according to my cultural defaults: separate from all of nature (including my own), a dominator, steeped in the notion that I can control things and given to the hubris that one of the things I can control is nature. And yet, I am at odds with my orientation. I don’t believe any of it. My life’s work (for myself and others) is to flip it, to offer a different, healthier narrative.

Once, many years ago, when I was in Bali, I had a conversation that helped me clarify what would become the work of my life. I was explaining to a Balinese man what it was to be an artist in America and he was deeply perplexed by my premise. He said to me, “But, all people are artists; all people are creative.” To be alive is to be creative. It is a mark of the culture of separation to believe that you are or are not creative, to see creativity as a limited resource or a perhaps an endowment for the special. It is a characteristic of a culture of connectivity to understand that all of life is creative and to be alive is to be a participant in the vibrant, creative, ever changing flow of life – as a vibrant, creative, ever changing being.

Filed under: Art, Creativity, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: alive, artist, connectivity, creative, separation | Leave a comment »

Stand In The Cornfield

Posted on December 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

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

Many years ago I painted a portrait of my father standing in a cornfield. It was an odd painting for me to do at the time as I’d stopped doing portraits years before. I just had to do it. I wasn’t working from a photograph; I just knew he had to be standing in a cornfield. It is a painting I never show. It is a painting of yearning fulfilled.

My father was born in a small farming town in Iowa and spent his adult life yearning to live in the place of his birth. He moved for work and then for love and although he knew where he wanted to be, he could not find a way to return. I put him in the cornfield because symbolically that was where he most wanted to be: in a small community, contained, where life made sense, where people knew where they fit and where people were not in so much of a hurry that they would stop and talk.

Yearning is a funny thing. Yearning is a necessary thing. Yearning is not what is missing; it is the space between where you are and where you want to be. Yearning can be fuel. It can help clarify what you want and energize your actions toward manifesting your desire. Or, it can twist your guts and make you bitter: unspent energy needs to do something and if it is not moving toward your fulfillment it will knot your belly and make your neck tense. Once in a class, I watched several people give speeches. Many put their energy into the speech and where poised, present. Many others were ungrounded and unconsciously pounded the podium or wiggled their legs; energy must have someplace to go.

Yearning can be proof of separation (“I don’t have what I want”) or proof of connectivity (“this is what I will create”). The difference lives in how you define yourself: if you are in this life looking for what you can get, your yearning will probably feel a lot like separation. If you are in this life living according to what you bring to it, your yearning will be an umbilical cord to what you will create and will nourish you in the creating.

Filed under: Perspective, Possibility, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: connection, desire, fulfillment, nourishment, painting, separation, yearning | 2 Comments »