snap | The Direction of Intention

It Speaks Volumes [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on November 10, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

We’re hearing a lot about SNAP during these days of government shutdown. SNAP is the acronym for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. As the current administration attempts to eliminate this critical life support for 42 million citizens, I am plagued with a question. How is it possible in the richest country on earth that 12% of our citizens are living on the thinnest of margins? But that’s not my question. This is: How is it possible that the government of the richest country in the history of the world, a government of the people, would refuse to throw a life ring to its people who will starve without it?

Asked another way: Who would stand on the dock, holding a life ring, and not throw it to a drowning person?

It’s worse: Who would stand on the dock and actively prevent others – rescuers – from throwing a life ring to a drowning person? To a community of drowning people?

It speaks volumes.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE LIFE RING

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Snap [on KS Friday]

Posted on February 12, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Whenever the question comes up,/ the poets all say the same thing:/ the only poem we are interested in is in the next room,/ the one not written, the poem of tomorrow.” ~ Billy Collins, The Next Poem

I am trying not to focus on the next. The next chapter. The next day. This is a day of my life even if it is unfolding in a time of pandemic, of jobs lost, careers collapsed, broken-wrists-not-healing and my father’s slow disappearance.

Yesterday was hard. I made it so. Even before noon I was wishing the day away. I was anxious to get to the next. To stick a fork in it. Then, when the truck wouldn’t start, it was all too much. I could have shaken my fist at the sky but instead I decided to stop trying to be someplace else. I decided to feel the hurt. Be in the day.

I miss my studio. That’s not quite right. I miss myself in my studio. I miss how I feel when I am working in it. Timeless. In that place, there is no next. In that place, I feel good, all things become possible. It is a staircase away. These days, it might as well be on the moon.

Mary Oliver wrote, “Next time what I’d do is look at/ the earth before saying anything.” This seems to me, as I approach a birthday, an age marker, a sunrise unlike any other, to be sage advice. See the miracle before I diminish it with my thinking, before I jam it into sackcloth with my opinions.

Once, on a bitter cold day, feeling blue, I leaned back against a red brick wall and closed my eyes. I felt the sun warm my bones and, in a snap, wanted to be no where else on earth. Try as you might, you cannot take that from me, the sun. The warmth against that wall. The absence of next. The boundless power of the snap.

read Kerri’s blog post about NEXT