snakes | The Direction of Intention

Pluck The Symbol [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on March 14, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

Tonight, as we near the day of clover, the celebration of St. Patrick’s snake dance, we will make corned beef and cabbage for our weekly dinner with 20. There will be Guinness, too. The snakes in the story, by-the-way, are symbolic. There were no actual snakes in the region. Remember, as I will when tipping my Guinness, it’s a religious holiday though, through the advent of Guinness, pagans like me can play, too.

One of my favorite things about human beings is how blind they are to their natural curiosity. For instance, read the wikipedia entry for four-leaf clover! There’s layers and layers of data on the odds of finding a four-leaf clover. Sometimes curiosity looks like study. Sometimes it looks like science. Or engineering. It’s one of my least favorite things about human beings: we can kill the spark, snuff the magic of the curious story-telling-mind, by how we tell the story.

Believe the snakes are literal and you miss the point of the story and misunderstand the reason for the holiday. The same is true with arks filled with animals and the Red Sea parting. Metaphors made literal: the apple remains uneaten. Knowledge dies on the vine.

Symbols open stories. Symbols make the story universal which is impressive if you stop and think about it. How can two people, living in two different cultures, who don’t share a common language, understand in-a-flash the same idea? Symbol. Metaphor. Heart openers. Mind expanders. Experience joiners.

In the epic of Saint Patrick, as a pagan I’d be one of the metaphoric snakes driven into the sea.

And remember, the data suggests that for every ten thousand three-leaf clover that you spy, you’ll find one stem with four. A symbol of good luck, no matter what the data suggests.

Train Through Trees, 51″x46″, mixed media

read Kerri’s blogpost about CLOVER

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Filed under: DR Thursday, Metaphor | Tagged: artistry, corned beef, creative mind, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, four leaf clover, good luck, Guinness, heart opening, Ireland, Irish, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, knowledge, literal, metaphor, metaphors, pagan, snakes, St. Patrick's Day, story, studio melange, symbol, the melange | 1 Comment »

Re-Invert [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on November 2, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

Three snakes crossed our path. A sign, some would say, that the world is about to go upside-down. Topsy-turvy. Of note: Topsy-Turvy is a brewery in Lake Geneva and also a movie about Gilbert and Sullivan. Also of note: our world flipped over a few days after the snakes-on-the-path.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when things are upside-down. Inversion need not be dramatic or accompanied by a marching band. It can be a slow process. A multitude of weirdness piles up. Also, we live in “interesting times” so upside-down is not so easy to spot because, mostly, our national-world-order is already on its noggin.

Sitting at our kitchen table late at night, we had a hysterical conversation with Rob about panic. The inner-voice of reason advising calm while you thrash around making things worse. Even though relaxing-amidst-the-tangle is the only way to extract yourself, every muscle in your body flails. Panic eats reason for lunch.

As the blood rushes to our brains and we realize that the leaves ought to point in the other direction, we diligently go out on the trail to entice a different number of snakes to cross our path – or perhaps a nice deer or two. We happily entertain the possibility of another sign or symbol, something to foreshadow the righting of the upended ship. Feet on the ground. Blue sky above.

In the meantime, there’s a brewery in Lake Geneva. A movie about Gilbert and Sullivan.

read Kerri’s blogpost about Topsy-Turvy