My Coffee With Eric

In the early 1980s there was a theatrical run of a low-budget film called My Dinner With Andre. The entire movie was, literally, two friends named Andre and Wally having a great conversation across dinner and sorting out life issues. The relationship, the ideas, the brainstorming and the give-and-take--that was the action. Dialogue was character.

It certainly was not a film for everyone at that point in time, and would probably have even less commercial appeal more than 25 years since its release. But last night at a downtown coffeeshop with my good friend Eric Needle, I experienced again the deep joy of a heartfelt, multi-faceted conversation and celebrated how intellectual and emotional intimacy with an authentic human being is one of the great natural highs of life.

Eric is a very talented, creative, strategic marketing kind of guy who is the principle partner of a group of affiliated companies known collectively as Giant3. There are a few friends whom we come across in our travels that we can truly say changed the direction of our lives, and for me Eric is one of them. When I first moved to this community to build a new career, I met Eric early on and he was a tremendous asset in helping me think out of the box and learn how to more effectively market what I do. He built and maintains my personal Web site, www.johnmdemarco.com; co-created the e-zines GreenBrevard and GreenOrlando with me; and, most importantly, has been a great friend with whom I discuss business, marketing, art, creativity, family and faith.

If our conversation over coffee, sandwiches and scones were a film, one of the highlights would center on our discussion of the humanities. Eric shares my fascination with how the great, timeless myths have impacted and influenced countless writers, poets, artists, religious thinkers, movement leaders and politicians across the centuries. I marveled out loud at the wonders of creativity that persons can possess, and how when they allow their creativity to be unleashed almost anything is possible.

A talented visual artist himself, Eric was making the distinction between looking at a book of reproduced paintings and viewing the painting itself. "It breaks you down," he said. "You weep."

"You've got to get to a museum," he added, as the coffeehouse crooner sang Ray Charles' classic tune "Georgia."

I thought of how true that statement was for myself and everyone. There are numerous distractions to keep us from the supposedly impractical act of "getting to a museum"--and the greatest expressions of art often line the galleries of our hearts, but we seldom get to this inner museum because it is easier to go someplace else. Otis Redding's "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" was now filling the coffeehouse with sound. Is something happening, something tangible, when we just sit still or wander through the museum?

Eric and I also had some invigorating brainstorming concerning the institutionalized church. We are both passionate about our faith, and very involved in our respective church communities. Our discussion touched upon the expectations, assumptions and limitations we can bring into a worship service, and how the structure itself of how we "do" church often creates and reinforces those dynamics.

For example, a church service is designed to begin and end at a designated time; an aspect without precedent in any collection of holy scriptures from any of the world's main religions. And yet, at least in the Christian church, we hope for the "Spirit to move" while essentially failing to create a hospitable space for such movement. We design worship around what is pragmatic--clearly a mirror of our culture--rather than allowing worship to design us as we remain open to what transcendent surprises might occur week by week. How many other worthy pursuits do we hamstring with our expectations or demands, hindering potential we do not even realize is just below the surface?

Eric and I touched upon many other subjects--such as the enduring influence of Bono and the rock group U2--that I'll leave on the cutting room floor of the film editing suite. But I want to leave you with an encouragement to make the most out of opportunities to have quality conversations with deep thinkers. You're never the same when the conversation is over, and you've done something likely more productive and pragmatic than a number of things the culture deems to be relevant. Eric and I look forward to another Saturday night at the coffeehouse before long.

A Life-Changing Day

Today I experienced one of those epiphanies wrapped like an unexpected gift, an insight teeming with internal joy and unleashing a subtle trickle of tears.

I had already been contemplating how I might take my writing, speaking and coaching endeavors to another level, to move from the transactional to the influential—from a “doer” to a “thought leader.” Today I embraced a rare Saturday opportunity to spend several hours by myself in a bookstore, always an incubator of inspiration. My goal was to use this quality time to press toward further clarity on reaching this higher floor, with the hope of a breakthrough.

Barely 45 minutes into my bookstore musing, I was perusing a copy of the Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers book The Power of Myth. While reading phrases such as the whole earth bloomed like a sacred place and the soul’s high adventure (is) the quest of mortals to grasp the reality of God, the floodgates of insight opened with psychic violence. I had to step back in order to avoid hindering the raging passage.

What presented itself was yet another delicate synthesis, a vision of how to bridge two strong areas of interest rather than limiting myself to an either-or approach. This vision united two loves and made them singular, much in the same way that two souls become one at the marriage altar or the untrained manner in which a parent with any degree of soul can equally adore both of his children.

The revealed synthesis brought together my love and natural instincts for a wide umbrella I will loosely call the “arts” (and here I include spirituality, myths, motifs, music, film, visual arts, literature, and so forth); and the shaping of organizational life (through organizational development work such as leadership development, coaching, training, mentoring, and so forth).

The sacred life and the business/non-profit life, coming together with the ability to form and influence one another for the sake of progress; personal or corporate mission/purpose fulfillment; and sheer human delight.

This is not a new concept, but one needing fresh expressions in conjunction with the search for meaning and navigation of rapid change that has infected so many of us. In a previous blog entry, I identified my “life mission” as leveraging words to help others thrive and discover eternal truths, and today’s epiphany added some arms and legs to a focused, niche approach for just how I might do this.

And it reminded me of how I am already doing it. Dramatic sketches utilized in the context of business training, such as the “Superman” skit I wrote and performed last year for the entire middle management team at my company. Raphael’s School of Athens painting as the central image for the January 2007 launching of a new series of classes at work called the School of Leadership Arts. Numerous anecdotes and quotes from various thinkers, peppered into classes I teach and coaching moments with leaders. In a sometimes raw and sometimes refined sense, I have been doing this for years, but now these inclinations and joyful behaviors come into clearer context as what I might do best.

My time in the bookstore also reminded me of why I love what I love. Why I cherish a deep conversation, devour books, keep watching Star Wars films, play the soundtrack of Les Miserables and the classical piece Adagio for Strings over and over, and am desperate to more fully get my arms around the works of the Greeks, Romans and Renaissance artists. Why I love to write short and longer pieces that in some fashion employ metaphors or ancient references that invite people to their own present-day a-ha moments.

Needless to say, I purchased the Campbell and Moyers book.

I am competent and passionate in the arenas of writing, teaching, facilitating, speaking and coaching, and want to achieve excellence in each of these. I would like to empower such a move with action steps such as further professional business training; individual study; quality relationships; the insights and skills offered by the successes and failures of sheer experience and practice; and the earning of a doctorate degree—all while continuing to write books and articles that influence rather than simply inform. Keeping one foot in the business/non-profit world (regardless of the industry) and slowly extending another foot into the academy, I hope to be of wise service to both.

At times of exhaustion I feel that I want to sneak off to an island or mountain somewhere and just write, but I keep getting drawn to the shaping of organizational life and the equipping of others.

Perhaps I should pay closer attention to how my feet take me toward community rather than isolation. I do wish I had more time to write, and cannot ignore or justify this restlessness in an effort to invalidate my feelings. But I am coming to understand how my interactions with community add layers of fine gold to the wealth of the words I might compose. After all, my personal faith acknowledges that God in his triune nature is community, and that the souls of mortals (as Campbell says) do indeed thirst to grasp his reality.

Recently I wrote an article about a Tampa, Fla., man who spends several nights per week serving homeless persons. Once homeless himself, Doug Brown has been engaged in his ministry for 25 years. A colleague describes him as “a man who has found his passion.”

I feel that I have found my passion. But it is not altogether a new discovery, like embarking upon an unseen world. It more closely resembles the slow unveiling of that aforementioned gift, one crisp piece of wrapping paper at a time, one layer of the onion per moment. I have recognized and tasted the numerous elements and possibilities of my passion for many years, but now am reveling in the fact that my spiritual, emotional, physical and intellectual drivers are unified in a vocational identity that serves real human and societal needs while serving God.

I only hope that I feel the same way tomorrow!