truth | The Direction of Intention

Beautiful. Perhaps.[David’s blog on Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on August 20, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” ~ Leo Tolstoy

We have watched Barney-the-piano change over these many years. As he ages and falls apart we discuss how he has become more beautiful. It is a sentiment that we do not allow for ourselves as we have also aged and changed over these many years.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” ~ James Baldwin

There are days that I do not recognize myself. I look in the mirror and see my grandfather. I look in my heart and am surprised by what I see. In these past months I have discovered my intolerance and I am proud of my intolerance. I have discovered my hard lines of belief. I do not believe that masked men should be plucking people off the streets. I do not believe we should scrub history to make white supremacy palatable. Now, when I look in my heart, I know exactly what I believe. And I like what I see.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” ~ Nelson Mandela

I recently wrote a play about this nation’s resistance to education. Educated people ask questions. Educated people are not easily drowned in propaganda. Educated people do not fear learning that they are wrong because the point of education has nothing to do with right or wrong answers and everything to do with expanding hearts and minds. Minds that expand reach toward the unknown. Minds that close stagnate in the safety of what is known. Entropy, the gradual decline to disorder.

“Change is the only constant.” ~ Heraclitus

Barney is beautiful. He has been home to chipmunks. He is a resting spot for squirrels. Birds revel where he once sported keys. He has dropped all illusions of grandeur and each day reveals his true nature. He makes progress toward earth. He does not resist his natural path. That is the secret of his beauty.

“Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.” ~ Maya Angelou

Master Marsh once told me that when caught himself complaining about something that he had three choices. Shut up (stop complaining). Do something about it. Or leave. In the current reality of our nation I am not able shut up. In fact, I feel it is necessary to raise the volume. That is what I am doing. We write and write and write. We ask ourselves every day, “What more can we do?”

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” ~ Albert Einstein

In their advanced age both Maya Angelou and Albert Einstein arrived at the same conclusion. They agree with Leo Tolstoy: to be better on this earth, we need to change our thinking. We need to think about changing ourselves. Looking at our nation (ourselves) doesn’t it beg the obvious questions: What are we thinking? Are we capable of changing our thinking?

Perhaps, as we dissolve, as we crumble like Barney, we will discover at the core of our national story the rot of exclusion. Then, perhaps, we can face our dysfunction, root it out, and change our thinking. Perhaps we can become the inclusive home that our nature – and our founding ideals – intended us to be. Beautiful. Perhaps.

read Kerri’s blogpost about BARNEY

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Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Identity, Perspective, Possibility | Tagged: albert einstein, artistry, beauty, change, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, education, Heraclitus, James Baldwin, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, Leo Tolstoy, maya angelou, natural path, Nelson Mandela, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | 3 Comments »

Smoke And Truth [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on August 7, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

I was not prepared for the number. In fact, I double checked it because it seemed so outlandish. Because our skies have been filled with smoke for many days – our air quality is “unhealthy” – from the fires burning in Canada – and because we are avoiding most sources of news, I thought it would be a good idea to check in on the fires burning in our northern neighbor. I was not prepared for what I read: there are 742 fires burning in Canada; 201 are considered out of control. 16 million acres have so far burned. It is a record-breaking fire season.

I was heartened to read that the USA has deployed firefighters and equipment to help fight the wildfires just as earlier this year the Canadians sent firefighters to help with the fires in Los Angeles. In some essential ways, our longstanding and cherished partnership with Canada is still intact. I will not bore you with the fire-and-renewal metaphors currently swirling around my brain-pan.

A few days ago I watched Bryan Tyler Cohen’s interview with Elex Michaelson and appreciated this exchange on the economy: in this era of rampant misinformation, in our media universe in which “we pretend that there are no objective truths, [but] there are objective truths! If you go to the grocery store, that number is a number. It is either higher or lower…” The insistence of baseline fact gave me some small measure of hope amidst our national delusion.

No matter the spin, the numbers are the numbers. It is the reason that the current president fired Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) after the BLS released the current job data. He didn’t like the numbers so he did as he always does: he assaulted the objective truth. He wrapped a victim-tale around the numbers and whipped up a conspiracy theory to deflect from the baseline fact. He lit a fire to create a blanket of smoke in the hope of obscuring the data.

None of his shenanigans change the objective truth. Objective truth exists regardless of individual beliefs or opinions or tweets or the nonsense that he or fox news feeds its followers.

We are about to have a not-so-blind-date with objective truth. Medicaid will disappear for many millions after the midterms. As will SNAP. In the next year healthcare will become unaffordable for millions. Since tariffs are taxes that consumers pay, our prices are certain to escalate (they are already rising). The value of the dollar is dropping. The economy is shrinking. There is nothing mysterious or subversive about the numbers. There is no conspiracy. There is cause and effect.

Climate change is objective truth. 742 is the number of fires in Canada. It’s a record. The numbers are the numbers.

Yesterday Dogga woke us just as the sun was rising. I stood on the deck and watched in awe: through the smoke the sun was fuchsia. The sky was luminous yet an eerie yellow. Both were shades of color I’d never before seen. As it turns out I have to bore you with the obvious analogy: despite appearances to the contrary, the sun is not changed by the smoke. It’s not really fuchsia. The objective truth will remain long after the winds of change clear the smoke from our eyes.

Here’s an objective truth to pin our hopes on: even in the midst of all the posturing and bullying, in our hour of need, Canada sent help. In their hour of need, we sent help. When the smoke clears, perhaps the firefighters will help us re-member the objective truth of our relationship.

Greet the Day, 48″x48″ (inner image), mixed media

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE SUN

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Filed under: DR Thursday, Metaphor, Perspective | Tagged: artistry, BLS, Bryan Tyler Cohen, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Elex Michaelson, erika mcentarfer, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, numbers, objective truth, story, studio melange, the melange, truth, wildfires | 1 Comment »

See It All [David’s blog on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on August 6, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom

More and more we are visiting local nurseries and garden centers. I am captivated by the colors and shapes of flowers and plants. Earlier this year, while shopping for specific herbs and plants for the garden, I saw through a different set of eyes. Consumer eyes. Now that our garden is planted and growing, our visits are different. They are not about shopping but about lingering. We wander. We allow ourselves to be pulled. Kerri takes photographs. The narrow focus of a consumer is much different than the open focus of an appreciator; artist eyes. It fills me up to see what is there beyond what I think is there.

Nelson Mandela said, “Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.” This from a man who spent 27 years in prison for resisting a brutal apartheid government. He understood to his bones the relationship of truth to freedom. Freedom is not possible if it’s based on a lie. Lies imprison. As we are now learning, to sustain a foundation of lies it is necessary to suppress freedoms. It is necessary to subdue and distort the truth.

Our divisions, just as the divisions of apartheid in South Africa, are based in lies. There is no truth to division based on the color of skin. It is manufactured, legislated. There is not an invasion of immigrants at our southern border. No one is eating dogs and cats. It is made-up, a hate-lever to those who would control and exploit their way to dominance. Concocted hatred is a worn-out colonialist’s tool. Mandela also said, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”

People can be tricked into hatred, and if they can be tricked, they are also capable of opening their eyes to the truth.

Seeing through they eyes of truth is different than seeing through eyes dedicated to lies. Eyes that seek truth desire to open, to see everything. All the colors and shapes. Diversity. Interconnection. Artist’s eyes.

The other eyes, the eyes of apartheid, the eyes of ICE, the eyes of current Republicans – are necessarily narrow. They see only what they want to see. They refuse to see beyond what they think. And, more to the point, in order to sustain the lie they need to bully all eyes to see as they see – or at least to pretend.

Pathological lies inevitably become an inescapable web, catching the spider as well as the prey. We are watching it happen in real time with the Epstein files. The liar is caught in his web of lies and so he deflects by contriving division, by escalating his lies.

Narrowing eyes eventually close and see only darkness. We are watching it happen in real time with the Republican Congress fleeing Washington D.C. to escape having to see the truth. All of it.

Truth is found by learning, by opening eyes and hearts to see all colors and shapes as they are, not as we want them to be. I am reminded of key lesson that leadership mentor, Eliav Zakay, taught his students: “Leaders shine light into dark corners.” It is the truth that liberates. It is the truth that sets us free.

read Kerri’s blog about CONEFLOWERS

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Filed under: Art, Metaphor, Seeing | Tagged: artistry, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Diversity, division, freedom, interconnection, Jiddhu Krishnamurti, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, leadership, lies, love, Nelson Mandela, seeing, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | 1 Comment »

Especially Now [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on July 22, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

Dear You,

we are trying to regroup, rethink and refocus our melange blogpost writing a bit. we – like you – know what is really happening in our world and do not need one more person – including ourselves – telling us the details of this saddest of descents destroying democracy and humanity. though we know our effort will not be 100% – for there is sooo much to bemoan in these everydays – we have decided to try and lean into another way – to instead write about WHAT ELSE IS REAL. this will not negate negativity, but we hope that it will help prescribe presence as antidote and balm for our collective weariness. ~ xoxo kerri & david

***

Sometimes what we see is obvious. Sometimes it is not. We showed this photo to 20. Kerri told him it was a painting. I told him it was a granite counter top. He narrowed his eyes. He knows us too well. It could be a photograph taken by the Webb telescope: the surface of an unknown planet or a particular slice of the galaxy analyzed through a monochromatic lens. What else could it be? A satellite image of earth’s weather pattern? A microscope image of lymph moving in the body?

Without context it is difficult – well, it is nearly impossible – to arrive at an agreement of what we see. And isn’t that the epicenter of the interesting times in which we live? Deceptive contexts. Most often dueling contexts. We do not wrangle over what we see; our fight is about context; the loss of shared context. We cannot agree on what we see.

His parents used the railing of the bridge to stretch after their walk. The young boy peered down into the water and said, “Yuck.” The family moved on. We stopped at the yuck spot and looked down. Pollen swirling in the slow moving river.

Kerri whipped out her camera whispering, “Gorgeous!”

Whose interpretation is correct? Kerri’s? The young boy’s?

Both. They share context so neither need be right or wrong. They agree on what they see just not on the aesthetics.

What else is real? It is a good question to ask. Especially now.

read Kerri’s blogpost about WHAT ELSE IS REAL

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Filed under: Perspective, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: Agreement, artistry, context, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, democracy, interpretation, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, perception, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | 1 Comment »

The Baseline [David’s blog on saturday morning smack-dab]

Posted on April 26, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

It is the challenge of our times: discerning what is real and what is not. We lack a baseline for truth.

Photographs used to be proof. Video and audio clips were once incontestable. No more.

We live in bubbles of outrage fueled by easy misinformation. Journalism has morphed into entertainment that amps-up the outrage. Fuels the division. Manufactured division is probably our baseline. Our shared truth.

As MM recently wrote, attributing some of our lack of discernment to, “a toxic level of the willing suspension of disbelief required for the mass consumption of “reality television”. After all, reality tv has nothing to do with reality. The act of pointing a camera at something changes the basic nature of the event into a performance. We behave differently on camera than we do off-camera. Reality television is not real just as “truth social” has nothing to do with truth. We are drowning in misnomers. We are lost in our branding.

MAGA world likes to point at 47 and call him a businessman. That, of course, is a role he played on television. In reality, off-camera, he’s driven his companies into bankruptcy six times. There’s an entire industry of media apologists and spin doctors dedicated to painting lipstick on this pig, committed to torturing cowboy-sense out of his dangerous nonsense, his incessant lies, his grift.

In the absence of discernment, conspiracy theories grow like so much mold. Many in this nation without question (or the capacity to question) swallow swill and call it sugar. Heavily addicted to outrage, fed a steady diet of an anger-drug by our media, we are rendered incapable of shared truth and impervious to common (shared) sense. And, sadly, fact-checking seems to take too much effort.

We eschew discernment.

We are in desperate need of Occam’s razor: “a guiding principle in logic and philosophy that suggests when faced with multiple explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one is usually the best. It emphasizes the importance of minimizing unnecessary assumptions or complexities when seeking an explanation.”

The simplest explanation: “from 1981 to 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.” The minimum wage hasn’t risen since 2009. Manufactured division, divided as we are in our media-fueled bubbles of outrage, keeps us easily distracted from our actual antagonists.

Perpetually seeing red prohibits us from seeing the rest of the color-sense-spectrum, prohibits us from discernment rooted in a baseline of shared truth. It’s a fact: 90% of us grow poorer and poorer as the 1% openly trashes our democracy to give themselves a tax cut and a guaranteed cheap labor force. Is it no wonder that we are outraged?

Outrage should be our baseline. Just not focused at each other.

read Kerri’s blogpost about REALITY

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Filed under: smack-dab | Tagged: artistry, baseline, branding, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, discernment, division, fact, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, misnomer, Occam's Razor, reality, reality tv, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | Leave a comment »

Context [David’s blog on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on March 17, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“The world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn.” ~ David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

I sometimes wonder if we are capable of presence, of being somewhere. With our faces aimed at screens, gaming or doomscrolling every few minutes, lost in Facebook or Instagram, awash in advertisements designed to makes us feel as if we are lacking, perpetually breaking news, worshiping at the biz-altar of efficiency and effectiveness. Do-more-faster. Is it any wonder that we, the citizens of the USA, lead the world in drug-use disorders?

I suspect that we are not trying to escape reality but are trying to find what, if anything, is real. Or meaningful.

“Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.” ~ David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

I had a revelation the other day about our current national mess. During my stint in software development we periodically discussed the context/content reality flip-flop. Essentially, our grandparents lived in a world in which their reality (context) was stable and consistent. They made sense of the news of the day (content) by sifting it through their mostly shared context.

We live in the opposite circumstance. Our context is fluid, volatile. With an average of 100 new emails coming in overnight, with a never-ending-rushing-social-media-stream, with tweets sending shock waves through the system, our context changes every day. Our content now defines our context. We are perpetually trying to arrive somewhere stable. We are constantly trying to find sense in the stream.

We do not sense-make together because we do not share an agreed-upon context.

It’s why we doomscroll. It’s why we have impenetrable information bubbles. It’s why we are impossibly divided. It’s why the phrase “alternative facts” wasn’t cause for hysterical laughter. It’s why there was nary-a-blip this week when, to avoid being held accountable for their participation in the nation’s demise, “…Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day…” [NYTimes.com as quoted by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American, March 12, 2025].

A day is no longer a day. No-shared-context. Reality avoidance. Content defines context. It’s upside-down. It’s insanity.

My revelation? An angry people with no actual shared context are easy marks for a content creator like Fox News. Anger becomes a shared context when people are fed a steady diet of outrageous fabrications meant to exploit their fear. Anger-driven victimhood is the identity-glue that binds maga. It’s a powerful drug. There can be no other explanation for a group so willingly swallowing obvious lies, so readily and eagerly participating in their own demise, so completely and deliberately unplugged from verifiable fact. An overdose of anger gives them a shared sense of belonging. A context.

Kerri and I walk in nature to regroup. We purposefully step out of the noise. We consciously practice being somewhere instead of racing, racing to get somewhere. We return to the trail again and again to reclaim – even for a few moments – a stable context. A known. A natural rhythm.

We might do better as a nation if we turned off our devices for awhile, looked up from our screens and stepped outside. We’d do better if we took a nice walk together in nature in a place (context) that calls forth something other than anger, a context that is easily shared, a context that is undeniably real.

read kerri’s blogpost about BE

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Filed under: Identity, Merely A Thought Monday, Perspective | Tagged: anger, artistry, belonging, content, context, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, doomscroll, drug use disorder, Heather Cox Richardson, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, presence, reality, shared reality, social media, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | 1 Comment »

A Real Stumper [David’s blog on Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on March 12, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart….live in the question.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I just learned something new. There are two definitions of the word poser. The first is familiar: an exhibitionist, an attention-seeker. To varying degrees social media has made posers of us all. Self-publicists. Perhaps that is why our politicians grand-stand at every turn: negative attention is still attention. Substance is no longer a requirement for dominating the news cycle. Every relationship a transaction.

The second definition took me by surprise: a difficult or perplexing problem. A brain-teaser. A riddle. An enigma.

It invoked the obvious statement: The current circus of political posers poses a real poser!

It’s a knotty problem. Vexed. A tough one to crack. Bad behavior, outrageous statements, outright lies… garner the attention, capture the media. The spotlight swings to the most despicable, the greatest train wreck, and since ratings-are-the-game, since “likes” are the prize, is it any wonder that we are on a fast track to the vapid bottom?

Truth, generosity, courtesy…are not the actions of a poser. Since they are their own reward, people who value these actions do not seek the spotlight. And, since the people who value these actions are generally focused on benefiting others – a surprisingly simple intention – they are not difficult to understand. Kindness is never a mystery. Good deeds are rarely puzzles. They are never transactions.

The poser-in-chief intends to eliminate all-things-woke and he needs to in order to achieve his transactional goals. Lies cannot stand up to truth. Meanness is laid bare when next to generosity. Common courtesy exposes the poser. Care for others throws a harsh light on our current national trajectory. Care for others must be vilified and removed if his authoritarian aims are to be successful.

What to do with this poser and his tribe of posers? It’s a real poser for we woke lovers of democracy and stewards of the tradition: of the people, by the people and for the people. It’s a tough one, a real stumper. And there is no better question – no more important question – for us to live-in, to ask in earnest so that, “…this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” ~ President Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

read Kerri’s blogpost about POSERS

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Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Identity, Language, Perspective | Tagged: Abraham Lincoln, artistry, common courtesy, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, freedom, generosity, government, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, kindness, poser, Rainier Maria Rilke, service, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | 1 Comment »

Face It [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on March 7, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore.” ~ Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

Given the collapsing farm markets with the annihilation of USAID, tariffs imposed on our allies, with Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security in the DOGE crosshairs, the dedication of tax dollars to prop up crypto-currency, the Department of Education on the chopping block…the folks in my bubble ask this question each and every day: “How bad does it have to get before they realize they’ve been had?”

I, myself, have often asked this question. Today, on our trail, as we watched the sun struggle to burn through the clouds, I came to a blindingly obvious realization: consistently discarding reality is the single requirement necessary to support the despot-wannabe. Consider all that had to be ignored: rapist, felon, insurrectionist, an estimated 461,000 excess deaths from a bumbling response to the pandemic, pathological liar, twice impeached, rated among the worst presidents in our history…This is a short list of a very long, long catalogue of reality-to-disregard. In other words, the red-hats will never realize that they’ve been had because they would rather swallow a fire hose of “alternative facts” than plug into substantive reality.

I understand the desire, the hope that our family members and fox-hypnotized community members will reclaim their capacity to discern fact from fantasy but I am now convinced that we should stop waiting or hoping or investing any energy in trying to reach them. We need to stop ignoring the reality that they have no interest in fact or data or verifiable truth. They simply do not care. They simply do not want to care. To borrow a phrase from Stephen Colbert, they are so far down the “stupid hole” that no amount of rope will reach them.

We should also stop waiting for members of the Republican party to honor their oath to the Constitution. They, too, are engaged in a fantasy world of “hear no evil, see no evil.” They are studied apologists for every outrage. If rape was not a bridge-too-far, if colluding with Russia is not a deal-breaker, if the tyrannical boast about “getting things done” without the participation of Congress doesn’t set off every constitutional alarm bell in their caucus, then there is no desecration that they will not swallow, excuse or justify.

A few nights ago, in commencing his tariffs on our allies, a move that will further wreck the farm economy and our alliances, the tawny tyrant tweeted for farmers to “Have fun.”

“Of course he wrote that,” I thought. Amidst all the fun that farmers are about to have, I am certain of one reality: when they lose their farms they’ll blame Biden or Obama or the woke or the Democrats or DEI for their pain because they’ll never turn away from the fox-cult and face the fact that they’ve been had.

“Been had” is an informal idiom that means to be tricked, cheated, or deceived by someone.

reality (noun): the world or the state of things as they actually exist.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora

read Kerri’s blogpost about REALITY

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Filed under: KS Friday, Perspective | Tagged: alternative facts, artistry, authoritarian, been had, blame, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, discernment, fact, fantasy, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, reality, story, studio melange, taking stock, tariffs, The Constitution of The United States, the melange, truth, USAID | 1 Comment »

Sit In The Circle [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on March 6, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

Somewhere in my past a teacher suggested that it is helpful for a writer to know to whom they are writing. Who is your audience? And more specifically, is there one person that your words are meant to reach?

The question came up for me on our trail. The snow dampens sound. Some people find a winter landscape bleak but I find it beautiful. Distinct. Thought provoking. Ideally suited for an introvert like me. Quiet life. Stands of warm sienna reeds sharp against the ice blue snow. The creaking-moan of tree limbs rubbing in the cold breeze. Perfect for inspiration and reflection.

Much is changing in the world broadly and in our world close-in. I am not writing as I once did. I am not painting like I used to. When I first began writing my audience was a community of international coaches, interculturalists, and diversity, equity and inclusion facilitators. I wrote broadly. I had points to make. A brain to flex.

Now I am bereft of answers and have only questions. Some days I write specifically – for Alex or Buffalo Bob. Some days I write for Horatio or Judy or Dwight or 20. Sometimes I write to members of my family though I know they don’t often read what I write. Sometimes I write for Kerri. Many days, probably most days, I write to myself. I reach in. I am asking myself questions about what I believe.

The people who populate my audience – my community – now and in the past – are bonded in their empathy. They care about others. They strive to make the world a better place for others. They are modest. Humble. The opposite of elitist. They are kind. They ask questions. They are thinkers who seek truth in all things; they are open hearts, open minds, with finely-tuned crap detectors. They care enough to fact-check what they hear. They are learners, curious about difference, unafraid of stepping beyond what they know. They are the people I want to hang out with.

On my walk in the snowy woods I realized that I need them now more than ever. A community that inspires hope, that fuels the creative fires burning inside of me and others. A bevy of goodhearted people I admire and believe in. A community of sanity – my community of sanity – in a country deliberately trying to lose its mind and sell its soul.

I write each day so I might sit for a few moments in the circle with these good people, whether they know it or not.

Instrument of Peace, 48″x91″ mixed media

read Kerri’s blogpost about REEDS AND SNOW

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Filed under: Creativity, DR Thursday, Gratitude | Tagged: artistry, audience, community, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, DEI, empathy, humble, inclusion, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, kind, open heart, open mind, questions, sanity, story, studio melange, the melange, truth | 5 Comments »

Cartoon Possibilities [David’s blog on Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on February 26, 2025 by davidrobinsoncreative

Call it self-preservation. With the inspiration of MM, I am compiling a mountain of cartoon ideas borne of the laugh-or-cry idiocracy currently sweeping away the nation. There seems to be no bottom to the inanity of the red-hat cult and those that they’ve elevated to power.

The abundance of comic fodder spewing forth from overly sincere conservative faces has me meditating on what makes them both so horrific and so funny. It is this: they ignore – and expect us to ignore –Occam’s Razor. The Principle of Parsimony: It’s a good rule of thumb, if sanity is the goal, to seek the simplest explanation. It is usually the best. If insanity is the aim, seek conspiracy theories and complex machinations.

Take, for instance, the fires in California. Jewish Space Lasers meet unraked forests? Or, perhaps rising global temperatures and drought are to blame? The first requires a reliance on science-fiction and a multi-layer-cake of ill-intent, stupidity and bigotry. The second relies on science. And common sense.

Or, consider this snicker-worthy intrigue: Did the COVID-19 vaccine included microchips capable of tracking people? Or, was it protecting citizens from a raging pandemic? Again, the first requires a madcap sci-fi dystopian fantasy. Occum’s Razor would have us tip toward the reality of science responding to the pandemic. (note: if you use a cell phone or shop on line, there’s no need to vaccinate a chip into your body since you are infinitely locate-able. Google maps already knows where you are since getting you from point A to point B requires, well, knowing where you are…).

The red hats are awash in conspiracy theories. The fox revels in fueling the fantastic and muddling the minds of the easily led. In my comic-thought the actual red hats are lined with tin-foil to protect their brains from alien mind control. That, and better ham radio reception.

I suppose if human beings are capable of believing that the earth is flat, that climate change is a hoax, that the massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary was a scam, that Democrats are drinking baby’s blood beneath the streets of Washington D.C…they are also capable of believing in the big boogeyman, the Deep State. It’s the reason we’re been force-fed for the dismantling of our Democracy. Woke waste and fraud! George Soros secretly controlling the world’s economy! Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!

It is worthy of cartooning and lampooning. Or a good cry.

This just in from historian Heather Cox Richardson: “…the relative stability of American democracy in the late twentieth century allowed politicians to win office with the narrative that the government was stifling individualism, taking money from hardworking taxpayers to provide benefits to the undeserving…But the Trump administration’s massive and random cuts to the federal workforce are revealing that the narrative of government waste does not line up with reality.“

Does not line up with reality. Occum’s Razor. It’s the simplest explanation for how we find ourselves in an era dominated by lies and lunacy. It’s a rich (and increasingly sad) field of cartooning possibilities.

read Kerri’s blogpost on THE CLOUD