Posted on December 1, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
We spent some time hanging out with Frank over the holiday. He is 93 and doing a stint in rehab. Frank is filled to the brim with great stories told with the laughing good humor of a man who has made a friend of folly. On our way out the door he said, “After all, isn’t that what’s most important in life, what life is about? Good friends. The relationships we enjoy. The time we spend together” We nodded and he added, “It seems like we have nothing to complain about.”
Frank is among my role-models for how to age well. Stay wide-open to new experiences. Believe in the goodness of people. Dance the twist at every opportunity. Laugh at yourself. Cultivate your mischief. Stand firmly planted in gratitude.
A few years ago I read about a comic whose performances and life blossomed when he realized that his job was not to make people laugh, rather, it was to bring them to their laughter. It’s subtle but profound: focus on what you bring to others, not on what you get from them. Later, as we prepared our Guinness Irish stew and mashed potatoes, I realized this simple message was Frank’s superpower, the reason why I admire him: even at 93 years old in rehab, even while facing an impossible mountain to climb, his focus was on what he could bring to us. There was not a hint of self-pity. There was no mention of his aches, pains or growing list of obstacles. He told fishing stories and regaled us with adventures from his youth. We laughed and bantered and left feeling full to the brim with great stories and good humor.
“After all, isn’t that what’s most important in life, what life is about? Good friends. The relationships we enjoy. The time we spend together” We nodded and Frank added, “It seems like we have nothing to complain about.”
Posted on November 12, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
Emerging from the grocery store the sky literally stopped us in our tracks. We weren’t the only ones; harried shoppers racing their full carts to their cars were paralyzed by the beauty. Perfect strangers actually spoke to each other. “Can you believe it?”
“Unbelievable.”
We joined the sky paparazzi and snapped photos, ohhing and ahhing with every click. “You just can’t capture it.”
People joined in beauty. For a few precious moments, people dropped their hurry and their politics, their worries and their angst, and united in awe beneath the fiery performance in the sky. The abstractions dropped away. The performance pulled us together. Pure art.
The moment passed. We can only give so much time to awe. The spell was broken and we each jumped back into our busy lists and went our separate ways. I imagine – or it is my hope – that we left the parking lot knowing that it only takes a wee-bit-o-beauty to pull us from our harried, divided and lonely minds and remind us that – in truth – we walk this miracle earth together.
Posted on January 29, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
It was during Covid that we started calling it “The Raft”. Our warm bed. With two broken wrists, all jobs lost and no work to be found, the heat turned down to save a penny, we felt like we were hanging on for dear life, afloat in the turbulent waters of the spinning universe on our tiny refuge. With Dogga asleep at our feet, we searched the horizon for hope, we launched our messages-in-a-bottle.
Our raft. It was one of the few places we felt safe and warm. Comforted. It was, during those scary and chaotic times, with the world in isolation, a haven where we might approach making sense of the senselessness. And, we survived.
I feel as if we are now back on the raft. The adults have left the capitol and the feckless man, the same nincompoop who suggested that we ingest bleach as a cure for Covid is now shoving Project 2025 down our throats – the ultimate aim is a Christian Nationalist Authoritarian State, a fate for our democracy that is far worse than swallowing bleach. He has returned with his clown car of bad clowns. Incompetents all, picked for their dull loyalty rather than their knowledge, experience or expertise. They know nothing of governing, or of creating or of problem-solving; they are solely capable of destroying.
Afloat on the raft we know that this time there is no refuge. There is no bubble thick enough to protect us from the virus that now infects our nation. There is no vaccine capable of minimizing the damage. There is no shot of courage available to legislators who have lost their moral compass and abandoned their spines along with their oath to protect the Constitution.
The isolation that helped saved us from Covid will now harm us. Of course, we necessarily practice social distancing from those contaminated by maga and made stupid by the fox but for the rest of us, the vast majority of the nation, we will eventually need to step outside, find each other, lock arms and become the raft for one another.
Posted on January 18, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative
In the story of The Crescent Moon Bear, a young wife endures several trials on a journey to find medicine that might cure her ailing husband. In the end, the trials are the medicine. The trials teach her the path of healing. As we near the day of national disgrace, the inauguration of a despot, the Crescent Moon Bear story has been walking with me. Perhaps the trials we are about to face will be the medicine. Perhaps they will teach us or show us the path to heal what ails this nation.
This is what the story has already taught me: the young wife would not have kept walking, she would not have endured the hardship of her journey, had she not carried in her heart a greater purpose. A reason to endure. The healing of her beloved.
No one endures hardship without a heart-full of service to something greater than comfort, something more potent than personal gain. The red-hat-mob and oligarchs will learn this soon enough. Gluttony is vapid purpose, a flavorless reason for being.
Kerri just read to me a post by John Pavlovitz. The necessity of acknowledging – and being honest – about the dark despair we feel in this moment of national shame. I was struck by the common theme expressed in the many, many comments: people feeling alone, isolated in their disbelief and grief.
It occurred to me that those of us, discouraged by the election of hatred, fearful of what’s coming, will soon need to find one another in order to embark on a journey to discover a cure for the corrosive poison now coursing through the nation’s body. We need not walk this path alone. Our shared grief is a sure sign of our unity, our capacity to meet the coming trials with a greater – shared – sense of purpose.
Our hearts hurt. They should hurt. The despair we feel is natural, necessary, a compass to guide us as we embark together on this odyssey. We will, in our journey, if we come together and walk united, learn that we are the medicine we seek.
Posted on November 15, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative
The birds on a wire brought my Periwinkle book to mind. Context is everything. It is now as relevant as the day I wrote it:
Peri Winkle Rabbit was lost.
All the other animals were lost, too!
There had been a fire. Peri Winkle was asleep when grandpa Harry Winkle Rabbit shook her awake and said, “RUN!”
Peri ran. At first, Peri ran with her mom and dad, her sisters and brothers and grandpa Harry Winkle, too.
All the other animals were running, too, the deer and the bears and the foxes and the squirrels. Some were running in circles but most just ran away from the fire.
It was confusing. There were so many legs and paws running this way and that. Peri could no longer see her parents. She couldn’t see her brothers or sisters. Even grandpa Harry Winkle Rabbit was nowhere to be found.
Peri stopped and got knocked down. She hopped back up and called out for her mother. She called for her father. She couldn’t see them anywhere.
A great paw scooped her up and she was suddenly eye to eye with a bear!
“This is no time for still standing, little ears!” said the bear.
“I can’t find my family,” squeaked Peri Winkle Rabbit. The bear was holding her very tight.
“We’ll find your family, little ears,” puffed the running bear, “But first we have to find a place safe and beyond the fire.”
The bear held Peri Winkle Rabbit close to his chest. Peri could hear the boom-Boom of the bear’s big heart as he ran swiftly away from the flames. Peri Winkle Rabbit felt so sad and so tired, she couldn’t help it when she fell fast asleep.
“Good morning, little ears!” The bear smiled as Peri blinked open her eyes.
“Where am I?” asked Peri.
“I don’t rightly know, “ said the bear, “but we’re now safe and far from the fire.”
That’s how Peri Winkle Rabbit came to be lost. She looked around and saw that the forest was gone! The other animals looked and they saw it too. All the green was now black and the mighty trees were charcoal twigs twisted in ruins on the ground.
The animals started to cry. Even the big bear cried. Peri cried, too. Together, they made lots of loud crying sounds and it felt good to wail the loss of their forest home.
And then, they each told their stories of escape from the fire. They told of their lost homes and missing family and friends. They told the stories of their cuts and their bruises, their fears and their worries. They told of how they came to be together, in that place at that time. Peri Winkle Rabbit told her story, too.
“What do we do now?” a red fox asked, which was exactly the question that Peri Winkle Rabbit was thinking!
No one said a word for a very long time. They looked at each other, all covered in soot, dirty and singed and ruffled and tired.
“Well,” a great ram began, “I am sure footed, I can help carry what’s needed.”
A hawk landed on the ram and said, “I can see far away and can help find your missing families and friends.”
The great bear said, “Yes, and I have a nose that can smell good smells for many miles, I will help supply all of my new friends with food!”
“I can gather nuts!” cried the squirrel, rubbing his nose with his hands.
“I have great ears!” cried Peri Winkle Rabbit! “I can hear what is needed and help find who can do it!”
And all the animals offered their great gifts in service to their new friends. They slowly began to do what was needed with whatever they could find. They found water and food. They found shelter from the rain. They looked for their families. They made new friends.
“Remember, a forest must grow back slowly, one day at a time,” said the bear when Peri felt impatient.” Our job is to help it grow.”
“It is all different than before,” said Peri, suddenly missing her old home.
“Yes,” said the bear. “We are all different now, little ears. The fire has changed us forever.”
Peri Winkle Rabbit wrinkled her nose.
The great bear smiled and hugged her close, saying, “Now might be the time for still standing, little ears, we don’t want to miss the lessons of the fire.”
So together Peri Winkle rabbit and the great bear sat very still, listening to the forest and thinking about all that had happened. And though she didn’t quite know where she was, Peri Winkle Rabbit wasn’t lost anymore.
A one-copy book made for a child who lost their family during Hurricane Katrina. I’ve never published the full text but thought it was time. I included photos of a few of the pages.
Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora
Posted on December 25, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative
As additions-to-traditions go, the bauble-on-the-tree is a relatively recent inclusion. People have decorated their dwellings with pine boughs, a symbol of renewal and rebirth (of the light), for many, many centuries. Placing ornaments-on-trees only began in the 1800’s.
We decided this year – for reasons that reach beyond words – to bring out Beaky and Pa’s ornaments. We are minimalists mostly so in the decade of my Wisconsin life these ornaments have lived in a box in the basement. We look at them every year but have never – until now - hung them on a tree. They are glass and fragile so we worked slowly, placing them with care.
Having them with us this season has been more powerful than I imagined. Having them with us this morning is more meaningful than I thought possible. Family is with us. And, isn’t that, after all is said and done, the point of it all? Given family and chosen family. To feast our long line of belonging and celebrate our brief time on this earth together. To honor that we are, as Jean Houston wrote, “…the burning point of the ancestral ship.” To gather, adding to the rich bank of shared memory. We reach back in time with gratitude. We live forward through our children and their children and their children…
This morning we sit quietly, sipping our coffee, sharing stories, hanging out with Beaky and Pa, in our recognition and deep appreciation of this time of life’s Renewal.
Posted on December 22, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative
When I was a wee-turnip I found a textbook on the shelf from a course my dad took in college. Comparative religions. It’s a big-big book full of many-many comparisons. It now resides on my shelf. This book sparked a life-long fascination for me. The universal nature of myth and story across individual cultures and how these stories and symbols are, over time, pulled and twisted like taffy, co-opted, integrated and sometimes claimed as the private property of religion x or y.
Today, as I write this, we sit squarely on the solstice. I thought a few tidbits of story-symbol might be fun to visit so, together, we might taste the taffy.
In Italian tradition, La Befana is the goddess of the solstice. She rides a broom through the skies leaving candy and presents to the good little boys and girls. As a broom-riding pagan goddess, she predates Saint Nick by more than a few centuries. The Christian tradition snagged her and after a bit of twisting, she became a character in the Magi story. On a cold, cold night she gave shelter to those three wise-men but declined to join them on their quest because she had unfinished chores. After they left she had a change of heart but couldn’t find the manger on her own so she gave the gifts she had in tow to the nice children she met during her manger-search.
On the solstice, the goddess Isis gave birth to her son Horus, the sun god. Leta gave birth to Apollo on the solstice. The Persian god of light, Mithra, was born on the solstice. These births were technically virgin births since the conception in every case was immaculate. Egyptian. Greek. Persian. These stories predate the Christian story by centuries. It’s a ripple across time and culture of the same human impulse: after a long dark season to celebrate the return of the light.
We lose more than we know when we – to borrow a great term from Joseph Campbell – concretize a symbol. The stories and myths are meant to open us to greater unity with each other and the world we share. They are not meant to be taken or understood literally. Holding them literally slams the door on their greater meaning and unifying power. It renders them a possession, a plot point on a map.
On this winter solstice I can imagine no greater gift to this divided world than to recognize we are, through our unique symbols and characters, telling the same story, yearning for the same possibilities, sharing the same ideals whether they soar through the air on a broomstick or in a sleigh, both rides brimming with toys for good girls and boys. We borrow each others best ideas and ideals, rewriting them to fit our unique audience. From Isis and Horus to Mary and Jesus, it’s time once again to celebrate the rich warm return of the light through our myriad forms and cultural traditions, to feel the push and pull of something ancient and deeply human. Together.
Posted on November 22, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative
An ode to markers on the trail:
Popcorn is for a safe return. Remembrance. Home is this way.
Cairns are a gift to those who come next. Courtesy. This is the way through.
Blazes are systemic. Reassurance. You are on the correct path.
Signs are for sorting. Guidance. This is a crossroad of choices.
Companions are for amity. Togetherness. A living marker. The journey is best when shared.
“We’ve sorted a lot of life on this trail,” she said.
It’s a loop. We usually walk it twice around. Sometimes we’ll reverse direction and make a third pass. Loops are good for untangling knotty questions. We rarely come to certain conclusions, almost never leave with answers. We metaphorically set markers on our life trail so we know if we are in unknown territory or have been this way before. “Do you remember when…”
Posted on November 20, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative
Language is among the most powerful yet rarely acknowledged and mostly discounted forces on earth. We name our experiences, we story our lives with words. Alter a single word this way or that and the story of a lifetime takes on a completely different cast. Success. Failure. Together. Alone.
Currently we are witness to an aspiring autocrat label fellow citizens as vermin and thugs. A well-worn page from the despot playbook. Dehumanization of others is the first step in approving, priming, unleashing, and then normalizing violence. If history teaches us anything it is that language is not only capable of creating unspeakable beauty, it is also capable of unleashing unimaginable horror. This is not playground rhetoric or locker room talk. This is laying the groundwork for brutality. White. Black. Supremacy. Equality. Community. Tribe. Division. Togetherness.
Language matters (education matters).
Consider this simple phrase chalked onto a park bench: I With. This phrase struck me as particularly potent yet unappreciated. I accompany you. I am with you. I walk with you through this life. I choose to stand with you. With. I.
No word is more dynamic and intoxicating than “I”. There is no more necessary or formidable preposition than “with”. I with love? I with hate? I with unity? I with division? I with open-heart? I with closed-mind? I fear. I embrace.
The great power in language is in the words we choose to live.
Posted on November 16, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative
In art it’s called the contrast principle. The pairing of elements that are opposite from one another. Or somehow different. Man made next to nature made. Fabric next to steel. Autumn color next to grey and white.
Contrast principle is a fundamental, not only in art but in perception. We only know ourselves through relationship with others. I am a son, a husband, a friend. These designations are also examples of the contrast principle. I know myself, I perform myself, based on the others that I am with.
Contrast need not be oppositional. It can be a complement. Red and green. Blue and orange. Relationships that change the individual colors. Together they are bold. Lively in their contrast.
A single color on a canvas, a single idea in a brainstorm, a single party in a congress, is static. Bland. Lifeless. Ellsworth Kelly placed his wall-size blue canvas next to a wall size yellow next to a wall size red. Primaries in contrast capable of snapping your head back when first you see them. Dynamic. Alive.
A community with contrast, a community of color and varied ideas, a community that embraces the value and power of the contrast principle, is capable of anything. The illumination of each other. The best kind of harmony.
The Direction of Intention 