John Michael De Marco

MY BLOG HAS MOVED!

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:47:00 +0000

Please visit and bookmark my new, comprehensive Web site:

www.johnmichaeldemarco.com

Thanks!
John

Knowing Thyself

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:38:00 +0000

This past week I took the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II (www.keirsey.com), which is an evolved and more behavioral application of the classic MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) inventory that places individuals in a combination of 16 potential personality types.

I learned that my personal growth, professional development and experiences across the past decade now places me as an ENFJ, compared with an ENTJ classification of about a decade ago and the INTJ result that emerged when I first took the inventory in the mid-1990s. Apparently my capacity for extraverted behavior—with aspects such as sociability, interaction, and multiplicity of relationships—has expanded quite a bit across the past 15 years, although internal focus and depth are still of great value to me. This makes sense to me, since this is the time period during which I have become an executive/life coach and a public speaker/trainer in addition to enhancing my lifelong writing vocation. And the F has now edged out the T, meaning that qualities such as values, appreciation and intimacy are more behavioral in me as compared with policies, laws and categories.

My N (intuition) and J (judging) components have remained dominant and consistent across the years whenever I have taken this particular assessment. I’ve always been a person who is drawn toward abstract, creative approaches, while also preferring to be organized, have a plan and be on time!

ENFJs are rare among the 16 types, the research shows—only about 2 percent of all respondents, although I seem to keep “running into them” and happen to be married to one. One label for this particular combination that makes me laugh is “Smooth Talking Persuader.” Hopefully I’ll live up to this one day.

Furthermore, ENFJs fall into one of four specific “temperament categories” identified by Keirsey, with mine being the “Idealists.” (The other three temperaments are “Artisan,” “Guardian” and “Rational.”) Idealists trust their intuition, yearn for romance, seek their true self, and prize meaningful relationships while seeking to attain wisdom. We tend to be very trusting, quite spiritual, and rather focused on personal journeys and human potential. Among our ranks have been Gandhi, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Moyers and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Idealists as a whole make up about 15-20 percent of the population, according to Keirsey. Drilling down further within the Idealist temperament, ENTFs in particular are specifically identified as “Teachers,” whose greatest strength often lies in their belief in their students.

I find these sorts of assessments very interesting and often affirming, and enjoy how they synergize with other key instruments I have taken such as The Gallup Organization’s StrengthsFinder (www.strengthsfinders.com), the DiSC tool and the various spiritual gifts inventories produced by Christian organizations. Each fills in a key dimension that helps to foster self-awareness and application, and the confluence of all of them has made me more intentional in my career choices and subject matters of study.

I encourage everyone to take one or more of these assessments; not to “completely figure out” who you are—because no assessment can ever fully capture the complexity of a human being—but to embrace helpful frameworks for unleashing epiphanies, affirmations and deeper measures of confidence as you move forward. They also help us to more fully understand another person’s behavior, and develop strategies for stronger relationships and leadership. I have found it particularly effective when an entire work group takes one of these assessments together, and follows through with meaningful discussion that leads to changes in how its members operate.

Taking the same assessment again after a number of years also provides an interesting perspective for how one grows and evolves—a healthy dynamic of intellectual, spiritual and emotional living. When I study my personal and career journey side-by-side with the results of these assessments at key benchmark moments, things make a lot of sense to me.

Washing the Dishes

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:49:00 +0000

Within the past week I've read Thich Nhat Hanh's classic work on meditation, The Miracle of Mindfulness, at least twice. There is a plethora of practical exercises in this short book for how to get still and quiet and focused, many of them revolving around awareness of breathing. These practices transcend any particular religious dogma (for we all breathe, don't we?), and help a person become more fully present and engaged with whatever is happening in the moment. For me personally, they give even greater meaning to Jesus' assertions that the Kingdom of God is here now and eternal life a present reality, and teach me more of how I can "be still and know."

One of the spiritual coachings in the book concerns something as mundane as washing dishes. When you are washing the dishes, the Vietnamese monk Hanh he writes, don't just try to get through the task with the hope of doing something else a bit more interesting. Actually focus on washing the dishes. I tried this, and meditated on what the dishes represented. They are objects upon which my wife and children enjoy their food. I then applied the same approach toward the task of making my nine-year-old's lunch, which certainly can be a hurried chore on a busy school night. This is the lunch my child will eat in school the next day, I reminded myself. And it became a sacred moment to me, packing a little girl's lunch, spreading the PB&J on the whole wheat bread.

Certainly this practice applies most significantly to being in someone's company. The book quotes a story from Leo Tolstoy when emphasizing that the most important time is right now, for this moment is all one ever has; that the most important task is the thing you are doing, for who knows if you will have the chance to do anything else (the future is not guaranteed); and that the most important person is the person you are with right now.

I Stopped to Pet a Cat

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:25:00 +0000

During today's run/walk on a cool October morning, I was practicing being mindful of what was within and around me. I took note of my breath, paid attention to my thoughts as they happened, and heard the song of birds and the yelp of dogs in the distance. I took note of the trees, imagining when they might begin to turn color.

Above all, I could sense life teeming around me and through me, sensing a connection to all created things.

And then I saw the black, shiny cat with the ID tags. She was trotting on the opposite side of the street, and I was still a ways off. I found myself simply appreciating the life of this cat, the grace of its beauty. And I knew by instinct that the cat was sensing me as well. Sure enough, as I looked over at her she spotted me and quickly crossed the street. Without thinking I made the little kitty noises my dad always made when he was trying to get a cat to play with him. She stood next to me, and I gently petted her as the purrs kicked into gear.

"You're a good kitty," I told her over and over, scratching her head as she rubbed it against my hand. And she was good.

After a couple of minutes of this I decided to proceed home. She walked briskly alongside me for a couple of blocks, and I wondered if she would follow me all the way home. But then I glanced back and she was gone, off to her next adventure, living in the moment as cats always do. And I was left with my own splendid moments to pay attention, to breathe, to simply be as I moved along the glorious earth.

A Thought From Holmes (Not Sherlock)

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:17:00 +0000

A mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions.

A new friend shared this classic Oliver Wendell Holmes quote with me this morning during a meeting at a Panera Bread. I'm sure I've heard it before, but it resonated with particular power for me because of the "stretching" I've undertaken for the past several years. It made perfect sense to me because it is true; once the cognitive wineskin has been reshaped or even torn, it can no longer be repaired to snugly fit the same individual's head.

One of the most dangerous and disheartening dynamics to come across each day is the purposeful or unintentional closing of this same mind. I will be blogging much more deeply about this subject in the near future, but I'll say in a nutshell for now that the root-cause culprit of intentional or unconscious mind atrophy is institutionalization.

What do I mean by this loaded word? I am referring specifically to the behavior exhibited when corporations; religious entities; governmental bodies; educational establishments; neighborhoods; and social cliques or organizations perpetuate themselves through incessant expectations, rule-enforcement and relentless marketing via numerous formats--disregarding heartfelt desires and leaving the critically-thinking individual to contend with the triple-play downer of fear, negative peer pressure and alienation.

This perpetuation often comes at the expense of truth, justice and compassion, because the "brand" must be protected and expanded at nearly all costs. It births a significant cluster of stressed-out people who are intellectually "in the closet" because they fear retribution should they be honest and dare to synthesize rather than compartmentalize their work, intellect, spirituality, emotions and relationships.

The person who has begun the process of enlightenment starts to see the dark side of institutionalization, and daily grows more uneasy with serving its cause. He or she increasingly swims against the tide, finding comfort and strength when splashing alongside others who also taste the truthful flavor of Holmes's words. They literally cannot turn around and go with the established current, for the swimmer who once left the shore no longer exists. The synthesis is too life-affirming, too profoundly reverberating with truth down to the core of their being.

A Decade Makes a Difference

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:15:00 +0000

As autumn sets in and this decade nears its end, I am amazed by the extent to which people and circumstances can evolve across 10 years.

This is the end of September 2009. Ten years ago I was well into my final year of graduate school at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., with a return to Florida on the near horizon. We were prayerful about starting a family. I was immersed in a world of courses involving ministry leadership, public speaking and counseling--among others--and had been carefully documenting all of my graduate reading into an A-Z subject list for easy retrieval. The summer of 1999 had involved an intensive internship as a hospital chaplain, followed by a few days in the mountains to read Thomas Merton and Ken Gire and catch my breath.

Since then, I've completed school; become a father not once but twice while saying goodbye to my own father; become ordained as a deacon in full connection by The United Methodist Church; and moved from a pastoral leadership role to business leadership development roles in the corporate sphere. During these past 10 years I've also evolved in my writing from doing mostly articles and marketing copy to a stronger focus on books and blogging. Ten years ago I was still several years away from establishing any sort of Internet presence, and today I'm all about leveraging social media to communicate with others and create awareness. And the context of my family's life has shifted from Kentucky to Florida and now to Tennessee, which certainly feels like home for the next decade and perhaps many more after that.

Throughout this 10-year journey of many changes that have built upon one another and expanded my thinking across numerous disciplines, there certainly have been joys and struggles. Each has taught me something, and some lessons I have had to repeat. I find myself today, as compared with 10 years ago, much less in a "box" and harder to categorize. I have hundreds of new friends or associates whom I did not know 10 years ago, and thankfully have been able to stay somewhat connected--especially through social media--with those I knew well during the 1990s. There are dozens and dozens of books I've read this decade that were not on my radar in 1999, and these certainly have enhanced how I look at vocation, spiritual growth, relationships and certainly myself.

The sustainable joy is in the growing, the learning, the trial and error. I would not be satisfied with a life that remained virtually static across a decade. I do not know what pleasure or pain awaits me across next 10 years, or even what might happen tomorrow. But my hope is that the passion I have for growth and learning that has carried me for so long will continue to escalate, and that I might leverage it wisely and humbly to serve others well.

When Leaders Cry

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:39:00 +0000

I saw leaders cry today, at the end of a workshop I co-facilitated. They didn't cry because the workshop or the facilitator were so bad...they cried because they expressed heartfelt appreciation to others, and had it expressed to them in return. For a precious afternoon, they let down their guard, engaged their hearts and realized it was a good thing not only for human relationships but for business. Both and. What a concept.

When you appreciate others, recognizing and building upon their strengths, you set loose a vocational revolution. People move from worker-bee to leadership perspectives. Jaded managers regain their sense of inspiration and help organizations break through barriers to success.

Appreciation, respect and caring are not hard to express. Such behaviors are some of the easiest a leader will ever have to execute. But they seem to be some of the hardest to remember to execute.

Why is that?

In my opinion, leaders are often inconsistent in expressing appreciation and building on others' strengths because of fear. They fear they won't get a desired result if they slow down to extend the human touch or take their momentary focus off of the employee's areas of opportunity. Fear is a key symptom of lack of presence, lack of being fully engaged with the person before you and the latent possibilities. The mind is zooming ahead to potential consequences, missing out on what could be done right now to make things better. Much of the frustration in a leader's life--and, furthermore in any one's life--is grounded in failing to make the most of the moment at hand because of fear, anxiety, distraction, etc. The moment to come is always more eagerly anticipated, so no moment is every fully enjoyed or capitalized to its fullest.

Leaders cried today because they were fully engaged in the experience of the moment. Heart touched heart, spirit touched spirit. And the business did not come grinding to a halt in the process. My hunch is that the business will be even more vital tomorrow, a day full of present moments.

Blowing Bubbles

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:24:00 +0000

A few days ago my four-year-old, Olivia, and I had some free time to play outside. Someone at work had given me a giant "bubble wand," and Olivia had set her little brown eyes upon it. I unwrapped it and we brought it into our driveway, and proceeded to take turns holding it up to our mouths and blowing out dozens of tiny and large bubbles.

Olivia encouraged me with delight whenever I chased one of her bubbles. She was focused and determined to grab hold of one of mine as well. The end for each bubble was always the same, that silent "pop" into total transparency. For about 30 minutes this game continued, breath interacting with soapy water to give birth to temporary little spheres that floated in the air and delighted a child and her father.

And for that precious window of time, nothing else really mattered but the bubbles. My life, too, felt like total transparency, as if there was nothing too complex or stressful about it. No facades hindering the ease of knowing the nature of my heart.

There was a certain lack of doing in the whole activity. Olivia and I were simply just together. The bubbles might have looked like a "doing," but they really were a form of loving. Loving each other's presence, giving each other permission to play our sacred father-daughter roles in a tender moment that, like every tender moment, was too short and destined to soon pop silently into some pragmatic endeavor.

Me and My Fair Ladies

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:24:00 +0000

The setting was this month's Tennessee State Fair, right in the heart of Nashville. My wife Jenna and I normally hide any section of the newspaper bearing any mention of local fairs, carnivals, etc., lest our 9-year-old Aly catch a glimpse and insist upon our attendance. However, this was a special occasion, as Aly's jump rope team from school was performing at said event on a Sunday afternoon. So we packed up Aly and four-year-old Olivia and slummed our way across town.

Things were hopping from the start with the jump rope team's performance. It was truly entertaining, and not just because my kid was part of it. The Hot Shots' collective talents truly do inspire.

On the other hand, a paradoxical form of inspiration came from the passage of various sentient beings to and fro the stage area. Species of fair goers would continue to be the main attraction across the next couple of hours, until we escaped only $75 or so in the hole, living to fight another year or ten.

Perhaps the most memorable interactions occurred during the long, downhill March to Bataan from the jump rope stage area to the land of the Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds and other machines that rupture discs and elicit pre-digestive vomiting. This Dante-esque and Conrad-like journey into darkness occurred along what is commonly known as the fair midway. There, a plethora of hard scrabble gentlemen (with a few ladies tossed in) stood eagerly behind their booths, stuffed animals manufactured in Third World sweat shops abounding and smiling through gaps normally occupied by teeth as they spewed their offers of games of chance.

My favorite:

"Sir, for only $10 you could win your wife one of these here stuffed animals."

I turned my head at the sound of this form of speech communication, plugging in extra RAM so my brain could more efficiently decipher the concept he had floated for my consideration. I eyed the creature with a combination of amusement and annoyance, and then commenced to daydream in the spirit of the TV show "Scrubs" as I glanced at Jenna.

You know, dude, I thought to myself, look at her, your pretty wife--and you haven't bought her a stuffed animal in years. How could you be so insensitive, such a worthless for-granted taker?

The only thing Jenna would like less than a stuffed animal would be a kitchen appliance. Thus, I quickly dismissed the daydream and focused back on my would-be merchant. I needed to be careful here; I didn't want to inflict any psychic damage. I tied half my brain behind my back. I harnessed another quarter, and then proceeded to speak slowly and carefully:

"We're going to go ride some rides first, thanks." We started to walk off. He wasn't taking the mercy offer.

"The rides are gonna be there," he responded with a sense of urgency that I was too foolish not to overlook. "My stuffed animals won't be."

I paused to let this sink in. Moment of truth, twas. Then I smiled, and calmly replied, "I'll take my chances."

The next 10 minutes made me feel like a freshman girl at a crowded on-campus frat party, just trying to fight her way across the room to hang out with one of her friends and not have some beer-spilling, urine-smelling, unshaven moron grab her arm and go, "Hey, baby, what's your hurry?" The dares to invest multiples of $5 for the slight chance of winning a toy that neither of my kids would care about 10 minutes later continued to fly through the air like pigeons spotting a trash can full of funnel cakes. One semi-kind soul whispered that his boss "would kill me if I told you this, but that guy over there will let you play his game for only $2." I found myself silently wishing I could floss his tooth, but then came to my senses, grabbed my wife and children and ran toward Switzerland.

Throughout the entire midway gallop, Aly repeatedly begged for us to stop and throw some money away for the outside chance that she might win something she really didn't want. Finally I whispered to her, "Aly. These people just want to take our money. Let's save it for guaranteed stuff, like going on rides and eating pizza."

I then told her the story of when I was 15, wandering around a local Oktoberfest in Florida with some cash, proceeding to lose all of it through an obsessive effort to win some kind of prize, any kind of prize. I went home that evening of the fall of 1983 rather dejected, and quite determined to never be made a fool of again by the cigarette-dangling, shrunken-tank top-sporting men of the midway, those who made a "living" by preying upon the foolishness of already cash-strapped individuals who were much better off hanging onto their dough and using it for their kids' lunch money that week.

The brightest moments of the rest of the fair included riding the Ferris wheel with Aly, seeing Aly fly down a humongous slide and watching Olivia ride solo in a little choo-choo train. Observing their happy cherub faces on the rides made the "walk of shame" through the midway a little less shameful. This was what the fair was all about...right?

As we pulled our minivan out of the giant dirt-and-grass lot, we made our way down a little side street. I looked out the window and saw tiny, white, run-down houses, some with three or four very young children hanging out on the front steps. A satellite dish was affixed on one or two of them. Another had a rented bounce house around which 15 or so kids were frolicking, dangerously close to the road. Almost all needed extensive roof repairs.

"Aly," I said, "look out the window. I want you to see how the fair's neighbors live, and then think about how we live. It's another reminder of how much we have, how fortunate we are. That's not some other country right here; this is Nashville."

As we drove home for the next 30 minutes, Jenna and I engaged Aly in a discourse on the socio-economic disparities that span between our cozy neighborhood of Franklin and the homes surrounding the cheap land of the annual state fair. We listened as Aly talked through what she had noticed via her own excessive people watching, what she had picked up while listening to how people spoke. Throughout most of the conversation sweet Olivia was whining for something to eat. We gently told her to be patient and hang on, having no doubts that there would be plenty in the cupboard and refrigerator.

Aly had a lot of fun at the fair, but she'd also learned some things. In a sense, a state or county fair is a mosaic of the human condition in all of its highs and lows, all of its extremes. A microcosm of life in a broken world, a world still mostly unconscious. It's a fantasy zone where cold realities come crashing in, a sphere where you can taste both the high of a spinning Ferris wheel and the low of watching some character pocket your change.

"That's not fair!' is a frequent retort I hear from my 9-year-old when she doesn't get her way about something, when we require her to engage discipline in her choices. We often smile and respond, "The fair only comes once per year." Not that often if I can help it...but then again, frequent visits might teach her more than she'll ever learn in school, and at least supplement what she hears from two parents trying to keep up with daily opportunities to provoke critical thinking.

Strategic Living

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:16:00 +0000

Across this year I have spent a significant amount of time helping leaders in the arena of strategic planning. There’s a very simple process that has been at the centerpiece of my consulting. The more time I spend with these components, the more I also see their applicability to our personal goals.

The first step in embracing a “strategic life” is to gain clarity on a couple of clear, tangible goals. These are the big “what” questions that must be answered before any of your actions are to have significant alignment. What exactly do you want, and when do you want it? So much of our vocational and existential frustration can be absolved by giving yourself permission to explore this with some depth. One cannot microwave the answers to such questions; they must be allowed to incubate, and then fine-tuned, edited, strengthened.

Once the goal (or the “what” I want) is solidified, it’s time to move into the “how in general” you will accomplish the goal. “How” is simply a basic term for strategy. Strategy is how you plan to reach the goal. And it needs to be a bit on the generic side, more flavored with a big picture perspective as opposed to specific, in-the-weeds details. Perhaps you’ll have two or three high-level strategies that will help you to execute one specific goal.

Flowing from the high-level strategies are more specific ones that flesh out the actionable details. If high-level strategy is the “how in general,” then as strategies become more tactical (indeed, some call this next step the “tactics”) the question becomes, “Now, tell me more about how exactly you plan to do this?” The challenge is to become as specific and concrete as possible: What exactly will you do and when? Who else will be involved? How will you measure your progress or success? What other resources do you need?

This process might seem draining to those who do not normally dwell in the strategic planning space. But it is threaded with discipline, which when embraced will force your mind to focus and cut through the clutter, rationalizations and vagaries that often prevent us from truly achieving our goals.

Try this process on yourself. Let’s say your goal is to go back to graduate school and earn your masters. Brainstorm the specific components of the goal—what exactly you would like to study, which degree you want to earn and the potential school at which you will earn it. Moving from there, flesh out a few how-in-general strategies that will enable you to accomplish the goal of earning your masters. These will likely relate to things you must do at home and at work in order to position yourself to begin school. You then must drill these high-level strategies down into more tactical steps, very specific actions that you can illustrate on some sort of timeline that flows into the achievement of your goal.

There is no goal toward which this type of process is not relevant. Too many people give up or get distracted from a goal because they do not take the time to detail a working strategy. Try it now for the thing you most want, for time and life are precious.

The Elusive Present Moment

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:20:00 +0000

After a quick first read through Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now--with at least two or three more rounds, highlighter in hand, planned across the next few weeks--it is hard to know where to begin in terms of my usual post-read reflective blog entry.

In a sense, the urgency I feel to write something smacks against the spirit of Tolle's intent: to help people become more fully present or conscious, to embrace the is-ness of the current moment instead of getting caught up in compulsive thinking, planning or fear about how things might turn out in the near or distant future. The fact that I feel the need to compose an insightful blog entry demonstrates the embryonic state of my own journey toward consciousness, I suppose. And maybe this confession is evidence of some progression.

The 1999 book, which I already know is as loved by the masses as it is scorned by them, has powerful implications for each of us and for every profession. It speaks to leaders or managers about how they might react to interpersonal difficulties or strategic conundrums. It offers a fresh angle for religious teachers seeking to make spiritual growth a more vibrant, holistic reality for their pupils rather than just intellectual ascension or task-driven legalism. It helps spouses, parents, siblings, friends, colleagues and strangers to more deeply surrender to the commonalities among each of us and gradually become less addicted to struggles for power, control and materialism.

I'm doing Tolle's body of work backwards. Last year I devoured his more recent book, A New Earth. I gave The Power of Now a shot after I'd read A New Earth, and found it a bit redundant so tossed it aside. After giving it another shot, I quickly learned I had made a hasty assumption. It's funny how during one season you're not ready or open enough for a particular book, challenge or relationship, and then new soil is cultivated and the timing is perfect.

I'd first heard of The Power of Now a few years ago, from a physician whom I was coaching in his executive role. At first I was skeptical as he quoted excerpts from the book; but across time I saw how he applied the principles to himself and began to carry a greater sense of peace and purpose in his work. Those around him responded accordingly, and it is always encouraging to catch up on the phone with my former coachee and hear of his ongoing ability to fully embrace the present moment, good or bad.

Accept Tolle or label him as you might, it's hard to deny one crucial observation of the human condition: We are basically inept when it comes to fully leveraging the present moment. So much of our thinking is composed of either ruminations about what has happened in the past, or hope/dread toward what might occur. To "be still" or to cherish what is right in front of us, is a rare behavior. Look around, and see how few are doing it. Look inside yourself, and make an honest assessment of how much you are surrendering to the possibilities of this very moment, a moment for which--intentionally or not--you have toiled all of your life to achieve.

Vapor Streams

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 13:16:00 +0000

I just returned from an invigorating run/walk on a lovely Saturday morning, a happy mixture of music on my iPod and an intentional effort to simply be present to what is characterizing my demeanor.

During the final leg of my exercise, I happened to look up and see a thick vapor stream in the sky, the aftermath of some sort of jet. My next thought was of the biblical narrative of the ascension of Christ into the heavenlies, and I amused myself by considering whether there was a visible vapor stream that followed him as well.

If so, it must have been so incredibly manifest, so consuming, that all inhabitants of the earth would have gazed upon it. It would have shook the pillars of the world, turned everything upside-down while declaring the majesty of the resurrection that foreshadows the resurrection of all into the fullness of who we were meant to be.

Whatever our religious faith happens to be, once some external stimuli increases our consciousness and awareness of the divinity that lies within and awaiting resurrection, we can no longer be the same. Our pillars are shaken, our framework of reality turned upside-down and every other direction. Our false selves and pretenses begin to slip away, the less we resist and the more we allow that original image of God to come back into focus. For every moment that were are fully engaged in the truth of who we are, and humbly available to love others, the vapor streams becomes manifest and cannot help but elicit a sense of curious wonder

Coming of Age, Part Five: Internal Wars and the New Self

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 02:42:00 +0000

During my tenth grade year I began to sense, for the first time, a fear of not realizing my creative potential, fulfilling my deeper identity as a writer and thus being affirmed by community as a poignant voice in the wind. This fear became a stone in my shoe, a quiet but unsettling whisper that has nagged and kept me restless and dissatisfied, wondering what else is out there. At times it has paralyzed my creativity and motivation, leading to a sense of resignation and an almost intentional embrace of Thoreau's observation that most men “lead lives of quiet desperation.”

It is blatantly obvious that the clearest way out of a sense of not fulfilling one’s potential as a writer is to simply write. Emotions, distractions and even the mythical “writer’s block,” however, have their say and get in the way of the words, bottling up the poetry and diminishing the relevance of the creative idea. To be a writer intrinsically means to be somewhat of a scrambled mess. The darkness and constant interplay of emotions and passions that create the ebb and flow—and the highs and lows—also are what produce the scattered moments of brilliance that make the words meaningful, true and life-changing.

I had enough momentum remaining from that hinge passage of a summer to produce one final adolescent novel, by far my longest and most bizarre. During the late fall and early winter I cranked out Locust, written while I was immersed in Stephen King novels. This explains a lot about the psychological horror genre that characterizes my 407 half-sized typewritten pages.

In particular, it was King’s The Dead Zone that inspired my plot. King’s story concerns Johnny Smith, who wakes up from a car accident with clairvoyant powers that torment him and lead to a fateful mission to save the country from a diabolical politician. My Locust protagonist, Jack Garrel, also is tormented by his mind but in a different manner.

The story is broken into three parts. In the first, “The Dark Journey,” Garrel and his colleague Frank Krossinger are in Nicaragua, and I demonstrate how I had learned just enough Spanish to be dangerous with sentences such as, “Come to my casa.” Garrel and Krossinger write for The New York Scope, covering the war between the rebels and the government (just a few years before the whole Iran Contra scandal broke). Garrel has horrible nightmares that usually involve him being propelled by a force beyond his control and pummeled by frightening images of a white dragon; menacing buildings; missiles and other symbols of war, set to familiar rock music such as The Doors’ ballad “The End” strewn together in maddening montage.

One fateful day Krossinger is lured by a stranger to buy some drugs at an undisclosed location, where he is kidnapped and strapped to a sort of “mind machine” by an evil genius (of course) named Dr. Wesley Handor. Krossinger is made to watch horrible images that strike close to home, such as the depiction of a former lover being attacked in a grotesque manner by a giant snake. While Krossinger suffers, Garrel is across town and nearly killed by an explosion. He wakes up after a nine-month coma (a not so subtle nod to Mr. Smith of Dead Zone) in a hospital in Havana, Cuba, where a Dr. Johnson tries to help him make sense of things to little avail. With his colleague Krossinger missing, Garrel returns to New York and learns that his sister, another New York-based writer, is missing as well.

Garrel’s magazine editor then suggests a “relaxing” assignment in a small town called Mayport, home to a mysterious mental hospital that warrants an investigative piece of journalism. The hospital has long been shut down by the government, yet faces and shadows are sometimes observed in the windows. Garrel (perhaps stupidly) agrees to go, and the novel’s second part features the writer arriving in Mayport and meeting the small-town newspaper editor who will be his temporary guide…

…and things immediately grow quite bizarre. Garrel has a late-night encounter at a hotel lounge with two individuals whom he later learns do not really exist. His nightmares intensify with the ubiquitous white dragon. His attempts to get into the grounds of the Mayport mental hospital lead to an encounter with droid-like guards.

Days pass and Garrel is getting nowhere on his assignment for the magazine, his editor growing impatient. Realizing that the mental hospital resembles a structure Garrel often sees in his nightmares, he visits a psychiatrist; and grows even more uneasy when the doctor chronicles some of the supposed history of the mental hospital. Somewhere in the conversation the shrink alludes to Dr. Handor, who had tortured his friend Krossinger.

The book’s final section, “Living Nightmares,” kicks off with Garrel imprisoned at the mental hospital by none other than Handor and the psychiatrist. Handor resembles the white dragon Garrel has seen in his nightmares; he reveals that he has been tracking Garrel for years as a chosen subject on whom to test his “mind machine.” Garrel, Handor says, reminds him of his late son who was a brilliant writer.

During Garrel’s escape he runs into, much to his shock, the Dr. Johnson from the Cuban hospital, and learns that several people are being kept in some sort of frozen hibernation chamber (a la Han Solo in the first Star Wars trilogy?) within the mental hospital. He suspects that Krossinger and his missing sister are among the frozen chosen. Garrel runs to freedom outside of the hospital, only to be arrested by a corrupt local sheriff who works for Handor; but almost as miraculously as the Apostle Peter’s midnight express, a deputy named Sam Smith sneaks him out of jail.

Garrel resolves that he must return to the hospital to face Handor, the “locust” who will not stop his assault until one of them is destroyed, the one who has somehow caused his nightmares. He and Smith, well-armed, storm the mental hospital to free the frozen captives and face Handor, and they riddle the evil doctor with bullets before Handor crashes through a top-story window. After they free the captives and rush out of the mental hospital the building strangely self-destructs. Just before the implosion, Garrel sees Handor’s image in the same window he had fallen through just minutes earlier.

Reunited with Krossinger and his sister, Garrel heads back to New York to try to get his life together. The novel’s final scene shifts to a hitchhiker who also is traveling toward New York: Dr. Handor.

As I re-read Locust I am amazed, as I am with most of my early novels, by the sheer patience I had to bang out page after page on a typewriter; yanking out and sliding in sheet after sheet of paper, backing up with corrective tape to fix typos and misspellings. I also am perplexed that I remember so little of what I had written, and cannot even picture myself giving birth to the text. It is like stumbling across someone else’s work, yet familiar enough that I know a part of me remains in the pages.

Similarly, I am not quite sure how to characterize this final novel’s enduring message or theme. I was grappling with the madness of war; the power of the mind; the poison of unresolved inner conflicts; and the sheer evil that can plague a person as he descends deeper into darkness and madness.

I have learned how often the wars we fight are internal, and can leave us quite scarred and battle-hardened. At some point we have to storm the gates of the structure that has imprisoned us, and take the risk to find some resolution. We seek some healing for the crop amid the assault of the locusts, so that there might yet be hope for a bountiful harvest of authenticity.

Perhaps the structure that has served to incarcerate me is a lingering lack of self-esteem, affixed firmly to an early foundation of loneliness mixed with fantasy. Too often I feel like I am straddling a pair of lives, the John who connects with the world and the one who is engaged in an idolatrous realm that no one else can touch.

Through grace and my occasional cooperation with the Spirit wind, Christ has made much progress in storming the gates of this teetering yet stubborn structure. His Word, and the words of many others, have compelled me to, as Paul writes in Colossians 3, take off the “old self” and put on the “new self.” As I finished Locust I was almost 16, and still trying to cast off my “old self” but unsure of whom the “new self” should be.

Questions Along The Razor's Edge

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:09:00 +0000

I just finished reading W. Somerset Maugham’s classic novel, The Razor’s Edge, first published in 1943 but still very relevant in its study of human nature and spiritual longings. Maugham takes his title from an Upanishads quote: The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over, thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard.

The story that unfolds is told by a first-person narrator whom one presumes to be Maugham himself, and centers around three well-defined characters: Larry Darrell, a winsome young spiritual sojourner completely absent of materialistic longings; his one-time fiancée Isabel Maturin, who never stops loving Larry even though her needs for a cushy lifestyle and a respectable reputation overpower this longing; and the unflappable socialite Elliott Templeton, who spends a lifetime building the right connections and attending the best of Parisian and British gatherings, only to find himself forgotten and lonely at the end of a life built along a rope of sand.

Maugham’s narrative spans about two decades, taking the reader through the heart of the Roaring 20s and the Great Depression. We see the characters grow and develop to a degree, but in the end they have become more fully entrenched in the context they sought to cultivate at the beginning of the story. Larry (who has less page time than the other main characters, interestingly) has his spiritual peace in the midst of his simplicity; Isabel her comfortable (if romantically unsatisfying) suburban life after riding out the Depression in Europe with her family; and Elliott his one final, high-society party invitation (although a forgery), which he declines because of his impending death.

What seems particularly timeless about Maugham’s story of nearly 70 years ago is the questions he subtly poses through the interplay of the characters. What truly makes for a satisfying life? How does one hold spiritual restlessness and material pragmatism in dynamic tension? To what extent should others define who we must be and what we should do?

And, a final question, perhaps: What sharp edges of the razor are we sidestepping, consciously or not?

Coming of Age, Part Four: An Artistic Life

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:27:00 +0000

Songs from my youth and college years in particular bring memories, pleasant and painful, back to life with present-moment emotions. This has contributed toward a weird but humorous talent, particularly with 1980s pop, for recalling not only the year a song came out but what specifically was going on in my life at the time. People often try to stump me or challenge the veracity of my claims, but the vast majority of the time I am right. Once while on a convention trip in the Music City of Nashville (before it became my home), a record label publicist challenged my answer of a certain song’s debut year. I dared her to walk next door to a large music store, where I pointed out the correct date on the CD in front of an entire group of colleagues and she had to concede defeat.

I often find that my favorite songs on a CD are the ones that were not considered “commercial” enough to be released to radio. These tend to be the longer, ballad-like and introspective cuts, where the artist is most vulnerable. On these tracks I feel the artist or band is singing to me, because in essence they are.

The fact that these tunes tend not to be popularized is just one example of how I have felt like a misfit in a world that typically devalues artists in general. Many will nod admiration at their talents, but simultaneously casts aside their relevance with a smile; a roll of the eyes; a silence; or even a harshness.

Perhaps this is the best that most people can muster, in a society where each breaking dawn demands of us the tasks we must accomplish, the problems we must solve, and the relationships we must manage. This grind leaves little space for the reflections offered by true artistry. Without intentionally seeking to stem this tyranny of the urgent (and the urgency of well-meaning tyrants), such demands gradually erode the remnants of our childlike desires to dream, imagine and soar.

So caught up in doing that there is little room for being, we gradually lose our appetite for those eternal truths. Instead, we settle for the cheap, fleeting imitations of what we assume to be a fulfilling life because no one else is particularly alarmed by its shallow waters.

Hints of eternal truths are found, I believe, when the soul of another touches our own. Truth is calling when tears spring up in our eyes, when our hearts race, when chills traverse along our spines. Truth invades us when we create space for critical thinking, and no longer suppress for the sake of blind duty the natural flow of emotions.

In my lifelong quest to unveil the deeper dimensions of such truth, I have observed that few things communicate it as powerfully and effectively as not just music but all forms of art. Without the regular nourishment of creative expressions, I feel starved into mediocrity. I descend into bitter normalcy. Life feels bordered by zero lot lines; a sprawling, generic suburbia. It becomes reduced to “a walking shadow…a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare’s King Lear gloomily expressed.

But when I give myself permission to catch but a glimpse of the eternal truths and be changed, I sense new vitality and energy.

The artists of times past and present stand ready to speak vestiges of eternal truths to each of us. We must, I assert, accept their generous invitation while cautiously sorting these vestiges from the brokenness.

When we creak open the shutters of drudgery, we blink our eyes and see ourselves in the pale, horrified yearning of the androgen portrayed by Edvard Munch in his painting The Scream. The cry appears much more than an expression of individual discontent and mourning. It seems to penetrate all of surrounding nature, perhaps all of society. It is a silent plea for people to recognize each other’s humanity, embrace justice, choose love, care for children, refuse to miss life passing by. It is the scream of each of our hearts, and remains silent as long as we are anesthetized by apathy, mediocrity and duty.

Upon taking the risk of dreaming again, we drink in the majesty of Michelangelo’s magnum opus sculpture David. Israel’s greatest king stands poised for battle, geared for love, contemplative of his self-doubts and mistakes. He stands before history as Every Person, embodying the best and worst of the human heart. We stare at David and see ourselves, teeming with unrealized and actualized potential, amazed at how we can hold aspirations for heaven and hell in such dynamic tension.

When we glance up from the want ads or Horoscopes long enough to roll our eyes across Dylan Thomas’ immortal poem Fern Hill, we travel back to the time when we too were green and unaware of our gradual dying. We slowly recognize aspects we have allowed to slouch toward an early demise, and also see what remains green, untapped, virgin, hopeful, exploding with the ability to be recreated.

As we get past our tacit approval of the ignorance that reduces life to a cacophony of role-playing, we embrace the skeptical eyes of Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye, and allow the simple best of life to be our goal. We are less and less tolerant of facade and pretense and sheer human greed. We desire to prevent our children from careening off of fields of hope into caverns of cynicism.

When we duck out of the office and into the theater, we yearn with Jean Val Jean in Les Miserables for fate to “Bring Him Home.” We share his love for Cosette and his desire to outrace his sins and become a new person. When we watch The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock float meaninglessly in the pool to the words of Simon and Garfunkel, we too refuse to be painted into a corner or boarded up in a box.

When we allow it to be more than a temporary panacea to loneliness, music connects one heart to another. “Evergreen” and “The Rose” remind us of love’s pain and deliverance, while “My Heart Will Go On” and “Georgia” drive home its transcendence. As I have said, the music of our upbringing still delivers the lessons and emotions of its initial hearing when we stumble across it decades later. It flavors the epochs of our lives, causing us to yearn for “Seasons in the Sun.” Even if the Italian language escapes us, an operatic solo touches something beyond verbal and cultural barriers, as effectively as a smile or a hug.

We are not all artists in the same regard as those who give us such lasting works via the toil of talents mixed with passion, sweat, pain and contradictions. We can all, however, live an artistic life, leaving just enough space for art to touch and transform us. Perhaps it is not a question of “can” but “must,” in order to remain fully alive before we have been buried.

The arts round us out as individuals. They engrave our distinctions. They shout fragments of truth to us when we have grown dull in hearing it for ourselves.

And in a world of descending grays and irrelevancy, we are desperately in need of authenticity. Hopefully, we gradually learn to place artistic influences into the context of what our thirst for truth ultimately represents.

As a child, then a teenager and finally as a college student, I tried myself to write lyrics that conveyed a sense of truth and a desire to fully love; rather just than a passion for self. I wrote hundreds of them, and still have them in my attic.

No one has ever heard these songs performed. The fact that they exist on paper, however, gives me a certain satisfaction that I had the perseverance to own the inner melodies and write them down; that I had the hope to help people push through the irrelevancy and taste something real. To taste a love more lasting than a sexual high.

These youthful lyrics reveal, I hope, that just enough residue of the image of God remained within me while coming of age to enable grace to persevere. That someday I would more fully trade desire for what was fleeting for surrender to what is eternal.

A Fickle Electorate and the First Celebrity-in-Chief

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:50:00 +0000

A new poll depicts that 49 percent of Americans possess a large amount of confidence in President Obama's leadership, as opposed to more than 60 percent at the President’s 100th day in office around the beginning of May. The conventional thinking is that the rigors of the heated health care debate, and little gaffes here and there such as the whole “Beer Summit” episode, have gradually scratched some of the bloom off of the rose. But I see a larger dynamic at work: the predictable, very American dismantling of the cult of celebrity that has surrounded Obama from the start—and which, for the longest time, served his gain.

Obama is a person equipped with enormous talents: remarkable intelligence; eloquent speaking gifts; persuasive passion; pragmatic ideas; and a compelling life story and background. These attributes combined with the ubiquitous power of social media dovetailing with a widespread disdain of the Republican leadership to sweep the first-term Senator to a landslide victory last November. Obama’s rise was meteoric, catalyzed by a rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention when he was still a candidate for the U.S. Senate, and taken to new heights when he launched his presidential campaign just two years after being sworn into his seat. It’s hard to recall any President in modern times being elected after such a short span within the public consciousness. Jimmy Carter (perhaps not the most favorable analogy for Obama) comes the closest.

Our culture loves to create celebrities out of once-obscure individuals. We have lived and breathed this through our 15-years-and-running fascination with reality television shows, in particular. Paris Hilton is just one example of someone famous for no particular reason other than inheriting fame and fortune. The various bachelors, bachelorettes, island survivors and other winners/losers fill out the rest of the case. We have created a whole new genre of celebrity, those famous for simply being famous but adding little to the advancement of any particular profession or social need.

And just as we love to build up and celebrate these nouveau popular, we take particular sport in tearing them down as soon as they dare to be as human as the rest of us: making occasional mistakes; changing an earlier position on something; having a slip of the tongue; and straying too far out of their own lane…or—and this is most common with the reality show-molded celebs for sure—revealing they had less actual talent than we first believed.

Obama is currently caught in that tearing down phase, whether he recognizes it or not. He has gone from being the underdog to the establishment, fairly or not, and is daily absorbing the rhetoric of both the left and the right. The press likes him more than they did Bill Clinton at this point in the first year, but the media love fest of all things Obama is starting to grow stale as well. This is but the first crucial season in his presidency where we shall see if those great talents can fuel the political savvy to achieve tangible results on key issues, results that a majority of Americans find acceptable.

And such political savvy cannot be underestimated. For all of his assets, the key gap that Obama brought into the White House was the lack of executive experience. Having never served as a governor or even a mayor of a city. Obama does not have the battle-hardened skills of a big picture leader who had to contend with various factions and find ways to unify them enough to haggle key compromises that moved issues forward. Clinton was a dogged survivor across eight years in Washington because of his long executive journey in Arkansas coupled with strategically building relationships with Beltway insiders long before running for president. By contrast, Obama’s two full-time years in the Senate, before spending the next two almost exclusively on the campaign trail, was scarcely enough time to forge deep bonds with Democrats and Republicans alike, Blue Dogs and evangelicals and all the other subcategories, in order to truly be able to count on their sustainable partnership. Combine this with the public’s short experience with Obama and its proclivity to destroy celebrities as quickly as it creates them, and you have the state of our first Celebrity-in-Chief as he moves toward autumn after a blistering summer.

If there’s a key takeaway here that I want to emphasize, it’s the need for Americans to demonstrate more responsibility in embracing day-to-day opportunities to be leaders themselves—in their families; in neighborhoods; in business; with civic and religious groups; at city hall and the county commission chambers. Too often the average American abdicates his or her citizenry to the “official” leader—and even more so when that leader has been clothed in the cult of celebrity. We create celebrities to vicariously represent our own deepest longings, and rip them to shreds when we focus on their faults to the neglect of our own deepest shortcomings.

I would almost see Obama as a victim placed upon this pedestal by a fickle electorate only to be gradually pushed off, were it not for the fact that he sought out the highest office in the land so quickly into his federal tenure. We must be careful what we wish for. I wonder if Obama’s gifts could be more impactful in a different arena, such as heading a powerful non-profit or being a macro-organizer for numerous communities across the country. Washington-based politics is so mired in partisanship, special interests and the specter of re-election, that even the most gifted and well-intentioned person will fall far short of their aspirations. It is a broken, rotted system, and has left me with little faith in either major political party.

But I still believe that real people can make a difference—Obama included, I hope. But, even more importantly, you and I and those around us at this very moment represent true change we can believe in. The non-celebrities, unknown to the masses but potentially famous within their own ranks for making things happen that truly and relevantly address human and community needs…these are the ones who don’t ride the rollercoaster of public adoration/disgust, but steadily hedgehog their way forward.

Coming of Age, Part Three: Drop Our Swords

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:55:00 +0000

A childhood immersed in imagination, fantasy and disengagement paved the way for a writing hobby and vocation, which has sometimes elicited the real acclaim of flesh-and-blood persons and placed food on my table.

Writing has provided a sense of vocational, almost transcendent purpose that clings to me like a shadow, and formed the basis for the public speaking that came to fruition in my 30s. It has been God’s enduring gift to me for decades, a talent I cannot fully explain but can only respond to, refine and turn loose on whomever is willing to read or listen.

The use of words, at first only written but spoken in recent years as well, has continued to bubble up to the surface from the depths of my heart and subconscious. I typed as a child, as I type now, with fury and purpose, blocking out distractions. My father’s boss once visited our home and saw me in the word zone with that far-away stare, and asked Dad, “What’s he writing in there?” My father simply replied, “I don’t know, but I think it’s good.”

I did not then, and still do not, fully understand grammar and cannot define all of its components in a technical sense. But a talent emerged that instinctively knew how to put words together in the right fashion, and only intensified as I placed it into practice and allowed it to develop into a strength. In recent years I have modified a key line from the outstanding 1981 film Chariots of Fire, telling others, “God gave me words, and when I write I feel his pleasure.”

Many others besides my Dad have at times found these words I produce bizarre, or the effort to construct them less productive than other pursuits. I have sometimes raged against my stubborn talent in strange complicity with the cynics, chasing after more immediate satisfactions.

Perhaps good films, books, comics, plays and other forms of art simply touch a natural part of us that is indigenous to being made in the image of a creative God; even when, for some, that God remains temporarily unknown.

What I do know is that as a boy I became captivated by certain stories, and ever since then have wanted to hear, read, see and write other stories. I have mostly fought against the powerful tide that seems to insist little boys and girls must grow up, and leave their stories behind to find more practical things to do. Swimming in the opposite direction of much of the culture often leads me to encounter cold currents of loneliness, and I have learned as an adult that most “artist” types can relate.

My fiction writing, in contrast to my parallel universe writing, formally began around 1979 when I stumbled across comic books while on vacation with my family at a Kentucky hotel.

Issue 227 of Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk was, ironically enough, about a psychologist’s effort to help the Hulk claim his own identity. The Hulk is the ultimate anti-hero, forever pursued by the authorities and all sorts of strange alien creatures. He is the alter ego of meek scientist Bruce Banner, who was caught in a “gamma ray” explosion that transformed his cells in a manner that makes him the Hulk whenever he gets angry or anxious. In a sense, the image of God in Banner became overtaken by the image of a beast.

For several years I read every Hulk, riding my bike with change in my pocket to a local convenience store each month to buy the new issue. I created a comic book series of my own, conveniently called The Amazing Kong and imitation in its most blatant, if flattering, form. Another comic series I authored was called Star Notes, and it is not hard to guess the source of inspiration. A few other comic series were original enough, such as “Digital Jim,” who was half-man and half-robot and, aside from that, just a nice, normal guy like me. I drew the pictures and supplied the dialogue, from cover to cover.

My drawing of comic books and characters caught the eye of teachers who decided I was a budding artist and enrolled me in a special class called “Super Art.” But I did not have the patience for fine-tuning any would-be art skills, and drew pictures only as a means to an end: to tell what I hoped would be compelling drama. For years I decorated the title pages of my stories with artwork, but only to represent the something greater I felt was in the pages to follow.

A step beyond comic books, and a further unleashing of the words that could not easily flow from my lips but found life upon paper, was the production of homemade “books.”

These were first written with my sloppy penmanship, and later hastily composed with my succession of typewriters. From around age 10 or 11 until I was nearing 16, I cranked out 15 “novels.” Perhaps this can be viewed as quite prolific for someone that young, but I am not overly impressed with myself since none in my opinion are of publishable quality. In recent months I have come across notes I saved for an additional 12 or 15 book projects, most of which I started but never completed. Given enough time, there seems to be no limit to the amount of words I can write; whether they are good words is another perspective.

My first of these books was Ghost Castle. Its cover sports the silhouette of a headless knight galloping on what resembles a dragon more than a horse, plus an outline of a valiant man in armor dueling with an unseen foe. A large, gray “castle,” with multi-colored ornamentation, two windows that look like omniscient eyes and a triple crown beset with green flags rounds out the artwork. Under the title is “By John De Marco.” The back cover offers a terrifying portrait of “Og the Fire God.” Internal drawings depict the three main characters and a battle scene.

The storyline: Two knights, “Flash” and “Saturn,” are warned by a ghost that people in the community are scared and troubled. To find out why, they need to journey to Ghost Castle and inquire of Og on how to “help restore freedom to the kingdom.”

Along the way to this presumably haunted edifice, Flash and Saturn encounter a headless horseman who is slashing down one knight after another. The horseman escapes, and the knights proceed with their inquiry of Og. It is the horseman who troubles the people, Og explains, who “makes them scared of the dark and afraid to leave the house, and makes them scared of everything, including their children.” After freeing an imprisoned king in the depths of the castle, Flash encounters the horseman, scrapping with him until he cuts the headless villain to the ground. And so the story ends.

Flipping through the words across the pages, I note how childhood prose can be quite amusing, especially where the obvious is emphasized: “The ghost was creepy…” “and at the top, no head (a description of the headless horseman)…” “Come back here! (Flash and Saturn as they chased the headless horseman)…” “it was a dreary and haunted place (a description of Ghost Castle)…” Ah, the innocence of a fresh mind, unscathed by maturity.

I suppose I felt the story was just too compelling to let it end there, and I am sure the literary critics agreed. So, soon after this epic work came its sequel, Ghost Castle: Part II. (I believe my opening day sales record stood until the first Harry Potter sequel, but I cannot prove this.) This book’s cover simply depicts a tall, green castle; interestingly decked with a cross at the top that gives off a powerful green light. On the back cover is an action shot of a knight swinging from a platform suspended in mid-air, to some sort of extension housed by the castle.

This book, like its predecessor, was written by hand on half-sheets of legal paper and sewn together by my mother. The sequel’s action picks up where the first story ended, re-telling the fight scene to compound anticipation. The horseman having died, Flash swings to a different castle (because the first one disappears into thin air, which I suppose is what happens when castle owners fail to pay their mortgages), and stumbles across the astonishing discovery that the headless horseman is the ghost of a knight whose head was blown off by a cannonball. Even more stunning: this dead knight was no less than Flash’s own uncle! I am sure that only the fact that this book was written before The Empire Strikes Back prevented me from adding the dialogue, “Flash, I am your uncle.”

The next staggering event is the death of Og, the Fire God. After death, however, Og continues to address the knights from beyond the grave, a la Obi-Won Kenobi of Star Wars. The story culminates in a final battle between Flash and the headless ghost, wherein each finally throws down his sword and realizes the other is a relative. “They saluted each other. Happiness was in the kingdom again,” the sequel concludes.

There was a girl in my third-grade class named Jennifer, to whom my new friend Tommy wrote a love letter during class one day. Our teacher, the gray-haired Mrs. Rainey, intercepted the note and did something that even my eight-year-old mind knew was wrong: She told the class about it! Jennifer started to cry, and I think Tommy wanted to die.

Most of us laughed, but even while chuckling I sort of wished I could have been the one to write the note. More importantly, I was stunned in my own naïve way that our teacher had embarrassed Tommy in such a manner before our little classroom community. What was she thinking? Why did she have to be so cruel? I did not have the words or understanding to put it this way in those days, but there was a substantial lack of grace, mercy or compassion in Mrs. Rainey’s decision.

I have often wondered whether she created some scars in young Tommy that day, a touch of fear that may have haunted him into adulthood. I never got to ask him and I do not recall us ever talking about this incident; but Tommy continues to haunt the memories of my childhood like a ghost in a castle. I am sure Mrs. Rainey is long since deceased, but I would love to ask her why she had such a lack of empathy toward that young boy. I wonder why she did not view him like one of her own children, if she any.

Why don’t people in general treat each other more like fellow journeyers in the same three-act-play of brokenness and hope; trying to get life right but often getting it wrong?

We share the same human conditions. Like Flash and the headless horseman, we would oppose each other a lot less if we realize we are all related in some deeper sense, that ultimately we are children of the same loving God. We are each trying in our own manner to grapple with loneliness, find our hidden talents, unveil our identities and make an effort for the world to take notice and be transformed.

What a daily wonder society could be if we mustered more of the courage and character to drop our swords and salute, instead of condemn one another; to offer grace instead of shame.

Coming of Age, Part Two: Grains of Sand

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:02:00 +0000

The last time I saw my cousin Gina De Marco was at Christmas 1989, when we all made our way to my sister Fran’s house near Cleveland, Ohio, during one of the coldest holiday seasons on record. We had played together as children in a great big sandbox at Gina's house, but lost touch for many years after my family moved from Ohio to Florida. By the end of 1989 Gina was a beautiful 20-year-old with big brown eyes, attending college.

We had a great time during the visit. After flying home, catching a cold on the airplane and finishing what was left of my last Christmas break of my last year in college (and my last foray in the make-believe world before I had to launch myself into a real working life), I packed up my stuff and made the four-hour drive back to school in Tallahassee, Fla.

Shortly after arriving, a phone call from my brother informed me that Gina had died in an icy car crash that weekend in Ohio. And just like that, the last grains of imagined childhood innocence slipped through my fingers like fine sand, as quickly as Gina had slipped from life to death.

I spent that final semester of college haunted by the photos we had taken of Gina just 10 days or so before her death: hanging out in my sister’s living room, happy, perfectly healthy, well-adjusted to life. I clung to the distant mental images of the two of us playing in a sandbox as young children in the early 1970s, hanging out, happy, perfectly healthy, trying to adjust to childhood. Had it all been a dream?

While passing co-eds on campus—and there was no shortage of coeds at Florida State University—I would sometimes see her face. I threw my all into school that semester and earned a 4.0 in my classes to finish strong, and part of me was serving the effort as a tribute to Gina; my own private way of keeping her memory alive.

I have noticed ever since then that what is most precious to me is ever fleeting and already slipping through my fingers, even as I hold it before me: naked innocence; people; opportunities; happiness; and so forth. Every moment matters, and in my constant hurry to get to the distant future that could be I often fail to appreciate the current stretch of highway.

Even as I write this my oldest daughter is already just shy of 10 and my youngest a year away from starting kindergarten. I feel adoration for my little girls that resonates with that sense of falling into bliss for the first time, and this provides a taste of how God must feel about me. They are both full of life, perfectly healthy, trying to adjust.

I want to help them to understand and leverage who they are becoming, and find community and vital relationships; even as I continue to unwrap my own identity and seek to more fully thrive in my uniqueness. I do not want to let one grain of their precious childhood or innocence slip through my fingers. I want to hold all the sand in the palms of my hands, and keep eternity secured in the shelter of my passionate oversight. I cannot come to terms with even the potential of goodbyes when it concerns my little ones and their own big brown eyes.

But I know I cannot retain the grains any more than I can suspend the tides or predict the winds. I can only play hard and bring out as much joy and potential in them as possible, during whatever fleeting time we have to share together in the sandbox.

Coming of Age, Part One: Darkness and Grace

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:24:00 +0000

During the fall of 1973, innocently ignorant of Vietnam, the Watergate hearings and just what a fashion disaster the current decade was turning out to be, my thick glasses and I began our kindergarten journey at Butternut Elementary in North Olmstead, a Cleveland, Ohio, suburb.

My kindergarten teacher, Ms. Farmer, might have been the first authority figure to call me John instead of “Johnny.” I had always been Johnny until school, and then somehow morphed into John. Embracing my formal name in a sense formalized my slow ascent to adulthood, one small metaphor for letting go of innocence. Even though many in my family stuck with the endearing nickname, I became John in my mind and in some way was older because of this.

Shy, quiet, compliant and a lifetime away from daring to speak in public (or even in private), I do not remember much about my abbreviated time at Butternut except a green crayon incident. The crayon was the offending instrument I used the only time I got into trouble that year, one of the few times I have ever been in trouble in my life, period. I was sitting at a table with other children as we colored (what else?). For some insane reason, I felt the urge to take my green crayon and scribble all over the non-green drawing of the kid closest to me; my first memory of “deliberate” sin, I guess you could say.

As you might imagine the nameless child was aghast and started crying, calling out for Ms. Farmer. She took this in stride with her larger view of the relevance of such incidents but certainly did inform my mother, who expressed her surprise but did not dole out any meaningful punishment. My shame and embarrassment were enough; for the first time, I was the bad guy. (The Greek Furies of classical literature, which demand justice for the improper acts of mortals, got even with me years later when my first car was painted a nauseating green.)

It is a bit unnerving to consider the spontaneous cruelty welling up inside of me at that moment when I decided the world around me should be green. Was it a metaphor for some seething envy? It was not the last time I would experience such emotions. Sometimes in life I have just been…mad, wanting to lash out at those around me or toss out a spitball of spite, feeling some indefinable weight of injustice or the snare of some tightly-woven conspiracy intended to keep me mediocre.

If I have learned anything in nearly four decades of life, it is that the residual darkness I possess in the crevices of my soul will from time to time demand its hour upon the stage. My lingering efforts to develop and refine qualities such as character, discipline and maturity play a large part in determining to what extent the curtain rises or falls on its performance.

As one of my seminary professors, Dr. Chuck Killian, once remarked, “Our only boast is in God’s mercy. Most of us will never get what we deserve. We’ll get grace.” And most of the time, grace has given shelter for my shame. An authentic response to such grace goes a long way toward gradually suffocating that internal darkness.

Hallway Fitness Monitors

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:59:00 +0000

The following short excerpt is available at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/137/fast-talk-making-it-personal.html

How BodyMedia Is Making Fitness Data Personal By: Kate RockwoodWed Jul 1, 2009 at 2:00 PM

Ivo Stivoric, 38, has developed wearable fitness sensors for clinical patients for more than a decade. Responding to demand, BodyMedia introduced its GoWear fit line for consumers last year.

"Doctors will tell you to eat better and exercise more, but they're not specialists in behavior modification. If you're on a treadmill, that's the only time you have a dashboard that's telling you concrete numbers. We provide people with dashboards for their bodies. On average, our users wear them for 16 hours a day.

Right now, we're just feeding you the data so you can make your own conclusions. Over time, fitness monitors will be able to feed back more proactive, personalized content. Imagine getting a message that the last time you went a certain numbers of days with little sleep, you got sick. We could even lower your home thermostat after sensing when you've fallen asleep. We're just now scratching the surface of what's possible."

Okay....I think this is really cool technology. And philosophically, whatever makes for a healthier populace--hey, who can complain?

But...if you need a 16-hour-per-day dashboard to remind you to sleep, what deeper questions about intentional living should you be asking yourself? I'm just saying...

Instruction: The Ultimate Vacation Workout

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Here's how it works. Your holiday travels to a coastal region will take you away from the gym for two entire weeks. Given the fact that you will be eating anything you want while executing very little mental activity, there is a strong risk that both your body and your brain will atrophy in two-part harmony.

This is not desirable. It is best to retain muscle mass in at least one of these dimensions, and for the sake of avoiding cruelty I am suggesting that you give yourself a break and allow the mind a temporary hiatus from higher-self development. That leaves us with the issue of the body, which begins to soften the moment you cross the state line and weakens even more in direct proportion to the number of miles between yourself and said gym.

Facing this dilemma while wandering the lovely beaches of Florida just recently, I came up with a workable solution. I jogged along the shoreline, taking in the sights, sounds and smells of a nearly perfect world, until I reached the half-way point of the distance I had chosen to traverse. There, not looking around to see who was watching, I plopped myself into the thick sand and promptly did 15 push-ups. I performed two more identical sets, but in between did several stretching exercises as well. After the last of the push-ups, I concluded with a set of crunches.

Then, pleased with my efforts and glistening with sweat and sand, I trudged my way back to the shoreline and waded into the ocean. There, the foamy waves cascaded over me and cleansed me of all itchiness and debris, and I emerged feeling healthy and alive. I ran back to re-join my family, which was sharing joy, fun and a season in the sun.

I repeated this nearly every day I was at the beach across a two-week expanse. I ate whatever I wanted, and felt no guilt. And the only mental activity I allowed myself was reading a couple novels, writing a few blogs and checking Facebook. Okay, I guess only the novels and the blogs count in this regard...

Skeptical About Sequels

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:05:00 +0000

Some books just do not need sequels. Most, as a matter of fact. And let's not even talk about movies at this point.

During my recent vacation I read a delightful novel called Love Walked In, by Marisa de los Santos. Very tight character development, featuring a few key personalities with whom you could really get involved. It was one of those books that is harder to put down the closer you get to the end. Imagine my joyful anticipation when I learned there was a sequel, and my assumption was that the author would take me deeper into these three lovely characters I had grown to love. This author, after all, could be trusted!

And then came my disdain that Belong to Me--part two--continued the key original characters but tried to force me to like a whole new set of other people on equal footing. The book screamed, "Care about these people!" And I just could not care.

The experience of reading the sequel was not quite as devastating as seeing Grease 2 or Stayin' Alive, but it was close. Throw in a couple of ridiculous plot twists near the end that made at least one of the original characters less likable, and the reader finds himself feeling a bit yucky and wishing Dr. de los Santos had chosen to write something else. Sometimes too much of a good thing really is too much.

My general sense is that works of science fiction, fantasy or mystery are best geared toward sequels or series. I loved each Harry Potter book more than its predecessor. Chronicles of Narnia--check. J.R.R. Tolkien's works--ditto. But for some reason--and this is just my perspective--stories about real, everyday people that touch the human heart in a profound manner are perfect just as they are. There is no need to add to or take away. Let them live forever in the crucible of a final page count.

I'm sure at least J.D. Salinger agrees with me.

Perhaps de los Santos will crank out another novel before long. She has a brilliant mind, and I would love to partake in more of her imagination. But if I read the book jacket and see the names of familiar characters, the story for that day will be John Walked Out...of the bookstore!

Moments of Re-Creation

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:45:00 +0000

We have just returned to Franklin, Tenn., after a two-week road trip to Florida. I had the chance to visit family, numerous (but not all) good friends who are based down there, and one of my favorite things in the world, the ocean.

Vacation carries mixed emotions. The anticipation builds up for weeks or months; often the execution of the vacation itself does not live up to the expectations, but in this case it did. But then there is the knowledge in the back of your mind that the trip must end, that you must resume "normalcy." Such knowledge is in the front of my mind today, on Sunday, the day before I return to work.

However, I would like to transcend the typical, dead-end way of thinking that the end of vacation means a return to drudgery. Must life really be about 48 or 49 weeks per year of just trying to survive, and then a few precious weeks of recreation and relaxation? There must be some way to be more holistic, to be intentional about "re-creating" one self every day.

I want to pay attention to those re-creating moments, rather than just hang on until the Christmas holidays and the anticipation of my next two week chunk of "freedom." The best avenue toward this that I can think of features embracing a vibrant faith, consistently tapping into a few core strengths, and building deep relationships on a constant basis.

There is existence, and then there is abundant living; I choose the latter!

Knowing Your Heart's Desire: Better Than Obtaining It?

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:43:00 +0000

Today I read a striking paragraph near the end of a little novel I just finished, Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos:

"...I'd figured out that a real life didn't mean attaining my heart's desire, but knowing it, meant not the satisfaction, but the longing. Knowing what you love and why, I found out, is as real as it gets."

The love story had some unexpected twists and turns, and the protagonist--Cornelia--gets much more than she could have imagined after facing some heart-wrenching disappointments. Her quotes above are her first-person summary of what she has learned about herself through both the disappointments and blessings that have come her way. And they caught me off guard, with a different angle from the many I had considered about what truly makes for authentic living.

I am de-constructing the sentences even as I write this:

"A real life didn't mean attaining my heart's desire..."

"...But knowing it."

"Not the satisfaction, but the longing..."

"Knowing what you love, and why...is as real as it gets."

So much of this screams counter-intuition, counter-culture, anti-consumerism. Illogical. Isn't life all about reaching the goal, securing the prize, winning over that person you desire, landing the job, getting the book contract...all of the accomplishments by which we measure ourselves or are evaluated by others in terms of what constitutes a "successful" life...and yet, when this wife and mother of two writing this book allowed Cornelia to share this observation for her readers, it resonated with my soul and made sense.

There is something deeply alive about gaining clarity. On your values, your passions, your niche customers, your preferences, your strengths...and your loves. There is boundless integrity in making sense of love and being willing to feel and hope even if you are not guaranteed some semblance of satisfaction or reciprocation.

And there are no guarantees, are there, even for whom or what you hold loosely in your possession at this very moment?

The bottom line: Cornelia's quotes are another twist of the adage, "It's not the destination, it's the journey." Self-awareness, self-understanding--these are wonderful stops along this sojourn. Too many of us rush past them to grab hold of the fruit of the destination, only to realize that it doesn't agree with our taste buds.

Do the hard work to learn what you value or love and why, and you're much more likely to be in the ballpark of actually attaining it...but the learning itself is the ultimate joy, which the end results--gain or loss--can never take away from you.

In Scorn of Excess

noreply@blogger.com (John Michael De Marco) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:29:00 +0000

Everywhere I look this week, I see too much. Highways teeming with billboards advertising endless restaurant chains at best, and houses of ill repute at worst. Houses loaded with trinkets and furniture cluttering up every single inch of space. Kitchen pantries and restaurants full of junky, sugary snacks and processed foods. Ahhhhh. Stop the insanity. Please.

I am blessed—or cursed—with a penchant toward the simple, and this cuts across the mental, physical and spiritual dimensions of health and well-being. Thankfully my wife is wired pretty much the same way, so this creates unity in our marriage rather than tension. Our joint challenge is the surrounding culture that seems to want to clutter everything up and inundate us—and, frustratingly, our children—with junky ideas and junky foods. Stand up to the culture and you’re considered a snob or high maintenance. Give in to it, and you get sucked into the tepid, swirling whirlpool of consumerism, shallowness and overall mediocrity. I suppose that, at times, my family has fallen victim to all of these conditions.

There is excess all about, and to me it feels like a bottomless warehouse of crutches to be relied upon because possibly there is not enough reality or introspection inside. One resorts to overconsumption to not just serve practical needs or enjoy the products that are being consumed, but to fill a void or avoid dealing with something. It does not matter whether the product is toys, vehicles, gadgets, trinkets, trips, tabloid publications, alcohol or junky foods. The things being consumed to the excess become transformed into vehicles of delay, distractions to the mind and spirit so that the real, disciplined work of personal transformation can be put off as long as possible or blissfully ignored.

If you choose to live that way, I feel bad for you but I will spend only so much energy trying to “change you.” In the end, you have to make your choices.

But please keep other people’s kids out of this unhealthy cycle. I can only do so much for my own. In the context of my home, they experience a minimalist environment when it comes to commercialism and consumption. Our household is more about ideas, exercise, spiritual growth and open-ended questioning geared toward stoking the fires of critical thinking. I get really frustrated, however, when other households aren’t run quite so intentionally and my kids—naturally, being kids—come home full of junk in their heads and their bodies. And yeah, call me a snob or a control freak or high maintenance, but I’ve got a problem with that.

Sometimes I just want to scream at the culture around me: “Enough already! Turn off the TV for a while…try reading a book…try exercising a bit…clean the sugary junk out of your cupboard and help stem the ongoing rise in childhood obesity…STOP THE MADNESS!” Am I the mad one because I feel this way? Or am I one of a minority of voices being constantly drowned out by the din of excess, frustrated that others choose to ignore the diseased manner in which we are desperately avoiding looking inside by worshipping everything we can grab a hold of on the surface?

I recommend an antidote. It’s a book called Freedom of Simplicity by Richard J. Foster. Foster offers some specific mind shifts and tactics to gradually learn to counter the madness. Check out this work and others by Foster as well, and visit www.renovare.org to learn more about Foster and his community of fellow writers.