Author: adamgfleming

The author lives in Goshen, Indiana with his wife and four children. He is self-employed as a leadership coach working with business executives, writers and other artists, and spiritual leaders. His clients enjoy business growth, increased vision and purpose, work/family lifestyle balance, and freedom from writer’s block.

Writer’s Group: Setting a really great goal

What sort of goal pushes you but is attainable? That’s what Justin and I have decided to push ourselves and our group toward, so that each one is making headway in writing their book.

I’m setting this blog up a few days in advance. I committed to 15,000 words this month and I have just over a thousand left, two days to go. I’ll attain my goal. I’ll push for that last amount partly because I’m leading and it would be poor leadership if I don’t lead by example, and partly because I’m serious about meeting my goals anyway. And partly because I’m committing to it once again, with 51 hours to go.

We fully expect that the writers in our group will publish their books sooner, more frequently, and with more quality than if they were not in the group.

Yesterday I sent my editor my final comments on the first round of corrections for the full draft. In less than two weeks, my goal is to finalize all the copy and send it to press. I’m ambitiously shooting for publication, for books in my hands, by December 1.

Set your goals just low enough that you can attain them every month, and just high enough that it will take effort. Both of these are important. You MUST attain your goal each month, otherwise you become discouraged. You must also set it high enough that you have to work for it. Otherwise it’s not a goal. Think of it this way: if you say “my goal is to eat three square meals a day” but you already do that anyway, as sort of a natural course of events, it’s not really a “Goal,” is it? But if you change the goal to something like this: “I will eat small portions including hard boiled eggs and carrot sticks six times a day, making sure to chew my food completely, and cut out sweets for the next eight weeks” there is a pretty good chance you can do it, and a pretty good chance it will take some conscious effort. Just like health and fitness goals, writing goals must be attainable to keep up your enthusiasm and courage, and hard enough to let you know there’s effort involved. Best of luck in November, when many people write short novels … but you could be writing novels every month with just a little more regular discipline and accountability!

Fusions in the Void, Number 6. Stone and Water-In-Motion: A Polish

In the early 1990s, Albert LaFleur used to tell me, every day, that he loved his pebble “from Nova Scotia. It pleases me more than the Rock of Gibraltar.”

This pebble fit in the palm of his hand: it was flat and smooth and had been worn down over many years to a smoothness that was pleasing to the touch. Albert was blind; there wasn’t much he hadn’t seen in his 95 years, but there was still something comforting in that pebble. Although his face wasn’t smooth, his heart was. What was wrong with the Rock of Gibraltar, I asked him. “It’s dark and craggy, ugly.” I realized later that the Rock of Gibraltar was the last stopping point before Mr. LaFleur went into the thick of World War One. The Rock of Gibraltar was a metaphor for another time in life, a time when the polishing didn’t happen gently, when the rocks of war clashed with one another, when men were left broken rather than polished.

We don’t think of water as “hard” (unless you’re that guy who installs water filters) but we do think of rocks as hard. Yet water against rock over time equals polish. Colors pop: reds and greens, subtler hues of gray and black. The rock, by itself, doesn’t become polished. Nor is it polished by something hard. In fact, if you take a hard rock and smack it against another hard rock, one is going to break, or at least bruise. Water in motion, on the other hand, when coming in waves as the moon circles the earth, can softly polish the rock.

In the Void it’s very easy for our hearts to feel like rocks. They sit inside our chests and, at least spiritually and psychologically speaking, they don’t even feel like they’re beating. Cold, solid, un-moving and unmoved. To experience a fusion in the void, we need water in motion. In fact, we need a tidal bore.

The Bay of Fundy creates a unique tide pattern daily. Most tides go up and down with a normal amount of highs and lows. The unique shape of the Bay of Fundy creates a phenomenon a bit like the sloshing of water back and forth in a long, narrow bathtub. That is to say, when the tides come in at the end of that bathtub, they come in really high, even pushing water upriver into the tributary. When the tide goes out in Truro, Nova Scotia, you can ride the river down as though it was whitewater. The rest of the day, the river is just a normal lazy river flowing into the Bay, but when the tide comes in or goes out, you get a quarter-hour or so of excitement.

So, if we are like rocks during the Void experience, it seems that a polishing is happening TO us, and this isn’t something we can strive for. It will just happen over time as though we were a boulder situated on the beach at the eastern end of the Bay of Fundy. The polishing is not something we can really see or feel happening, but God is there like the tide, in and out, water in motion. God pushes us, then pulls, then pushes again. In the Void, our rocky hearts fuse with the water God bathes us in. One day you will see, even if you are blind like old Mr. LaFleur — I invite you to have hope in this —  that this rock from Nova Scotia you’ve become is more pleasing than the Rock of Gibraltar. It’s happening. Even — especially when it isn’t noticeable.

If you want to read a fictitious rendering of the life of Albert LaFleur, pick up my novel, White Buffalo Gold. 

Fusions in the Void, Part 5. Sword and Flesh: A Word that Pierces

In the Void things Fuse for the sake of Hope.

Unless you have a strong stomach, don’t google ‘swords and tongues images’. I thought about posting a featured image but really these two things just don’t mix. You get swords coming out of mouths, going into mouths, people cutting their own tongues, and none of it’s pretty. This is a fusion of relatively incompatible neighbors. It’s bad enough when swords come out of fists, a la Wolverine.

Here, a Polish-French Canadian performance artist named Kinga Araya uses a sort of prosthetic sword in a piece called Orthoepic as she explores issues of identity/ group belonging. It’s one of the least weird visuals even remotely related to the topic, and this is a performance artist we’re talking about!

The Bible is full of imagery of tongues and swords. Hebrews 4:12, for example, is linguistically somewhat complicated and speaks of “the word of God [which] is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword”.

Without too much detail, commentaries suggest that this usage of the word “Word” do not refer to the written word (Bible) nor exactly to the person of Jesus (the word made flesh), but rather it makes a broader reference to a word of judgement, what we would call a clearly stated or unanimous verdict in a court case. Isaiah 11 and other prophecies in the Old Testament pay tribute to the idea that this is a word which proceeds from Jesus’ mouth. It’s a razor-thin line which leaves no grey area when all is said and done, “piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thought and intentions of the heart.” It’s a fusion which began in the Void, a fusion of sharpness (the Word) and of flesh (that soft mushy tongue, so sensual, dangerous and versatile).

So first of all this is usually quoted with the (incorrect) assumption that the passage is talking about the written down words of the Bible. Second, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone talk about what precedes it — the context. And all the way back to the beginning of chapter three, the author is speaking of one thing: Entering Rest.

In the “void” of the creation story the work begins in a timeless moment, but the act of creation not only begins in this Void, but ends in Rest — perhaps a mirror-like reflection of the Void for all practical purposes. Dig in to the earlier part of Hebrews 4 a little bit and you’ll see that there are two sort of moments for rest. One is Today, and the other is Another Day.

“Let us strive to enter that Rest” (verse 11) becomes this beautiful paradox; the sword-flesh knows our thoughts, carves us up. “Today”, we can enter it, (as modern writers might say, “In the Moment” or “Living in the Present”) and “Another Day” as well. We can observe a Sabbath, we can embrace moments or years or decades of the Void for the sheer restfulness they offer, and we wait as well for Another Day.

This fusion begins in the void, and it ends on Another Day. I suspect that the best way to “Strive” to enter it is really just to observe Rest on a more continual basis than simply the Sabbath (as a construct) and to live Sabbath all week long. I’ve written before about finding “Hedgerow” time, time to walk along the edges of the fields, to pick fruit that only comes to us wild, uncultivated, to embrace the possibility that in resting we find our source of sustenance rather than in work.

This is all a rather difficult thing to pursue. My point is not particularly to do a completely in depth study. It’s to look for where things may be fusing in the void, so that if you’re in one of those dry, desert, Dark Night of the Soul type places, I want to encourage you to find that for Today rest is enough. I know the restlessness that happens in that place, how difficult it is to focus our thoughts, intents and desires on Rest, but I know that as the sword and flesh fuse Today we can see the Void that was and Another Day to come reflected equally. The razor’s edge is the light striking the mirror, or the prism of our hearts, breaking things into colors, showing us where Rest is available and where it isn’t. Let the word that pierces and dissects and gives a verdict show you the way to Rest.

As I read back over this whole thing I realize the tone is pretty mystical. I’d say it strikes the right chord for such a paradoxical fusion! If it all feels rather nebulous today, I hope that the previous articles on Fusions in the Void, and the articles to follow, will surround and support the ideas here. In other words, I don’t think that this particular article stands on its own but as a continuation of the flow of other thoughts. So read those too, and see if they don’t provide a skeleton for this fleshy piece of writing.

Writer’s Group: Wrapping October (already!)

Next Thursday night, on the 22nd, it’s time again for Writer’s Group.

Two things to do in the next week if you’re participating. First, watch the video on relevancy and inspiration, you can find it on the Writer’s Group page here.

2. Start thinking about what sort of goal you want to set for November. November is that month when lots of people write a whole novel. Personally, I’m thinking about doubling my target from September/October and going for 30,000 words in four weeks from Oct 22 to Nov 19. By the end of October, we should be just about done editing my nonfiction project, and a 30,000 word goal in November would put me close to 2/3 done with my next fiction trilogy rough draft: I’d be over 120,000 words!

Maybe this November is your time to finish off the draft for your first book. But I think any month can be your NaNoWriMo. It depends on your schedule and determination. Is this your month to double your goal? Maybe it’s not. Be realistic! Nothing builds your energy for writing like hitting your realistic targets month after month.

This group is effective. Our participants hit their goals. If you want to start attending the writer’s group that meets monthly, send me an email to find out what the requirements for participation are. If you want to let others know how you’re doing this month, please comment!

UPDATE: I’ve written 13313 words this month. Under 1700 to go to meet my goal next week. How are you doing?

Fusions in the Void, Part 4. Distance and Closeness: Vision

Previously in the series: 1. Fusions in the Void; 2. God and Darkness: The Future; 3. Resting and Motion: Power. See archives.

Today — Distance and Closeness: Vision

Watch a bird of prey sitting still. Their head bobs now and then. They are taking a rapid sampling, triangulating the depth of field of their vision with one eye. Our eyes, both in front of our head, make an automatic triangle (two eyes plus the object make three points) with whatever we’re seeing, and that triangle is what gives us depth perception. We can tell how far away something is without bobbing our heads. Eagles have to read two points with one eye, so they bob their heads to get a reading.

Butterflies and moths do this with their olfactory nerves. Their flight patterns seem odd and irregular because they are doing the same thing that birds of prey do: taking readings from two different spots, then redirecting based on their sense of distance to the next flower or mate.

The Void is a place where distance and closeness blend into each other. We feel when we are in a spiritual and psychological space of blindness that we have no vision at all. We are, in the present moment, unable to sense either distance or closeness, but paradoxically, we are both far and near from our objectives, our goals, our dreams.

God is developing vision in something very much like a photographic darkroom. For things to come together when the lights come back on, a photograph needs darkness to develop. You may feel that you cannot see six inches in front of your face, so distance and closeness have fused to the point that life itself is imperceptible.

This same thing happens when we close both eyes to sleep. We rest, we prepare our minds for vision. We dream, in our sleep, refocusing our energies and psyche for the next day. It is in this not-seeing state, this Void where distance and closeness seem to be lost, that they actually fuse together, allowing our spirit and psyche to triangulate and find depth and direction. One day, when the Void moment (or decade) is over, we open our eyes and we see the path clearly. The Void has allowed our picture to develop, and the lines are sharp again. This is the hope the photographer has when she turns off the lights in the darkroom and begins to work. This is the hope the eagle has when he scans the ground for prey from his aerie. This is the hope that the spiritually yearning voyager has when nothing is clear, and nothing feels comfortable — the closeness pressing, the distance vacuous: This hope is that in the Void, Distance and Closeness are fusing to create Vision. Dawn will come no matter how long the night may seem, no matter what terrors the dark may hold.

Fusions in the Void, Part 3. Resting and Motion: Power

When our body makes a move that uses strength somehow, there are muscles working and muscles opposite the working ones which are at rest.

A muscle’s fibers fire in contraction to make something happen, but when they all fire and stay locked on, we get a cramp.

In the Void, motion and rest are fusing to create power. There’s a tension which happens in our spiritual and psychological “muscle memory” and it’s that tension we feel before the gun goes off in a footrace. Perhaps we are about to take off on a dead sprint, or perhaps we’re preparing to run a marathon. Either way, anyone who has ever run a race knows the jittery butterfly feeling in the pit of your stomach, the eagerness to begin, the power welling up within, the sensation that any amount of speed will be possible. During the Void we sometimes feel powerless because we aren’t yet active, we’re being held back. Sometimes, we feel like a racehorse who is being shoved into the gate: we don’t like the confinement that comes with the moments of preparation. We’d like to just run without waiting for the starter to open those gates. Each muscle, however, must find a moment of rest, a moment when we store up energy for the thrust of that first step.

In the Void, when we feel psychologically and spiritually depressed due to a lack of motion, what’s really happening is a fusion between the resting moment and the tensing of the muscles (spiritual and psychological muscles) which are preparing to jump forward. The fusion that happens here stores up power.

Another way to think of it is the way a jet engine revs before the pilot releases the brakes, right before takeoff. You can feel it in your seat way back in economy. The entire aircraft tenses. The jets begin to build but the brakes keep you from leaping down the runway prematurely. Only when the jets have warmed up, sped up to the place where the power is enough to launch the aircraft into the air will the pilot release the brake and allow the craft to sprint down the runway. There is a little Void in that moment, a void where power is built, where resting and motion collide to create power.

Then: POW! Off you go. When we’re in the Void our desire is to move, but God is saying “not quite yet” holding the breaks, and so, like a thoroughbred who prefers not to be confined, we buck and back off from the gates, only delaying the start we are eager for!

The Void is uncomfortable in this way, (and it can last for several years) but something is happening here, fusing. It can be an exhilarating moment as well. Hold steady, let the muscles relax even as they tense: somewhere in this paradox, in this fusion, your moment will arrive. Hope for your best race yet. Hope for a beautiful flight.

Writer’s Group: Even when editing

Justin and I were talking about what to do with those in the group who are moving into heavy editing phase. If you’re editing, I said, you still need to keep momentum going, perhaps even for your next project. So we’re encouraging people even when in the midst of editing heavily that they still need to hit a minimum word count. That may be a blog, or working on the next story, or a poem. If we get too mired in editing, it becomes easy to quit writing entirely when the book is done. I’m editing a lot this month, but still shooting for at least 15,000 words. How are you doing?

Next group will meet Oct 22 at 8 PM eastern. If you want in, contact me. Drop progress reports in the comments! Keep up the good work!

UPDATE: Since I’m leading the group it’s important that I practice what I’m talking about here. I have been in heavy editing phase the last three days, but I’m still on track to hit my target of 15,000 words this month — and that’s not including what I did to my manuscript in second draft over the last few days. Vital stats for me today:

Goal is 15,000 words. 10,821 so far, 4179 to go with 13 days remaining. 321 words a day. Easy as pie to hit or beat that target.

Fusions in the Void Part 2, God and Darkness: The Future

This is the second in a series of essays on Fusions in the Void.

Time stands still in the Void. Everything that may have been is not yet. Everything that could be isn’t beginning yet. Living in the Void is like an attack of living in the present. Yes, we hear from wise sages about how living in the present is this glorious thing, but right now it sucks. It’s not what we want, though we know we should want it, and so it becomes an ever-present reminder in and of itself of how disconnected we are to both our own past (which is supposed to be forming us into something, even the bad parts of our past) and disconnected also to our future, all sorts of dreams on hold while we sit, our vision set up on a shelf like a can of sardines which nobody wants to open for fear that it will stink. Even ourselves (pretend that you love sardines for the sake of this argument) even we do not want to open what we, perhaps uniquely and alone, may really want. We can’t get it because we can’t live in the present, because even though we want to, we don’t want to. It stinks, all of it, like a primordial pool of fertilizer.

God-self is fusing with the darkness itself in the Void. God has decided, after many aeons of not-past, not-present which contained not-future, to draw a line in the sand, that everything before will now be thought of as “past” and everything to come will be considered “future” and yet God’s Spirit is hovering over the waters … in the moment. Stirring, perhaps, a pot of gruel or a pot of pourri (what the heck is pot-pourri?) or a pot of something. The first thing God creates is time, and God does this by being in the moment with the Darkness. God encounters Darkness in the void and in that very act God creates The Future. “In the Beginning” it says, “God created the heavens and the earth.” But by the very words “In the Beginning” we can see that the first creation is time itself. Followed closely by heavens, earth, and water.

What is the first thing God and the Void are coming together in creative, motion-based fusion to create? Your future. You could be in a deep depression, you could be in such a Void you can see nothing. But time is literally on your side because by its very nature it includes not only a past or present. “But my future looks so bleak!” Right. That’s because in the Void you cannot see anything. At all. Everything has come to a halt. Mystically, in the Void, even the future itself seems not yet to exist. It is only an idea that God has not yet had. Sure. That’s what it seems. I get that. But the future is really the first creation of all, and it comes with a side of hope; hope that there may be ice cream for dessert. The past, too, may seem not to be leading anywhere good. All your momentum headed in the wrong direction. The present just Void, dark, the future, if it’s a continuation of what has been, worthless. But this is not so. God fuses with the Darkness to create future. Hope that it will be worth seeing. The future is the sun rising in the east, again.

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Fusions in the Void, Part 1: What are “Fusions in the Void”?

Some years ago I built an artsy coffee table with walnut, maple and a marble top. It also has a drawer. In the bottom of the drawer, covered with plexiglass, sits a piece of paper with fifteen written lines, the first of which (reading bottom to top, seeing the first line as you open the drawer) is “Fusions in the Void:”

I covered the plexiglass with sand, added some pebbles and made some small rakes out of copper with wooden handles, and a tiny hoe as well, so that, to uncover the words underneath one must rake the sand aside, a sort of zen garden tucked in a drawer. The contemplative exercise allows for discovery of the lines, hidden in a similar way to how things are hidden when we experience Void in our lives. This Void has other names: the Dark Night of the Soul, or a Valley Experience. It’s thought of as not only a spiritual but also psychological phase which includes depression and a significant sense of spiritual disconnection, but also can be a time of simplification and purification as well — depending on how you engage it.

In a move of pure hope, (because I was in such a Void when I made the table) I decided that surely in the Void some things were also fusing. It’s a sort of spiritual cold fusion, more based on a hope than a science.

Scientists talk of “pathological science” as a scientific pursuit of something which has been proven not to exist, or of “the science of things which are not so.”  Cold Fusion, the idea that fusion energy could be produced at room temperature, is one example. People keep researching it because there’s some sort of hope that it could be, though scientists have proven it’s a thing “which is not so”. Richard Feynman talked about “cargo cult science” where people do things scientifically in the same way that South Pacific Islanders attempted to bring planes full of cargo back to their island by creating air strips complete with a hut with a home-made air traffic radio man inside it, complete with a headset, made of balsa wood, basically the cult creates all the trappings they’ve observed of an airport but it does not deliver airplanes. No cans of Spam arrive with obesity ensuing.

I suspect that hope must seem a pathological thing during the Void, and that even the trappings of spirituality seem like a cargo cult. We pray and journal and fast and pray some more, we read the Bible, and the harder we try the more God seems distant, as though on a journey or indisposed. His airplane never lands on our airstrip. What are we doing wrong? Where is the God who lit Elijah’s offering in a second? Where are the cans of spiritual and psychological Spam we wanted?

Hope, however, was David’s pathology all through the Psalms. “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” (Ps. 42:11)

I like David’s use of the word “again”. It is as if to say “someday” as well as, maybe, now, as if to say “even though I don’t feel like it now, I will come back around to it eventually.” My friend Tim told me that in the newspaper office where he used to work, the standing joke was that any headline could gain added depth or at least humor by adding the word “again” to the end of it. “Mayor caught embezzling money– again” or “Eagles fall by a score of 52-0 to Panthers, again.” There’s power in that little word.

Part of my hope at the time I made my table was that in spite of the Dark Night or Void, when I had a deep and pervading sense of spiritual and psychological blindness, that there was some sort of Fusion going on, a cold fusion perhaps, when you’re neither hot nor cold, you’re just at this tepid room temperature, virtually numb, feeling little, groping for solutions. Living in fog as thick as pea soup (an image that has stuck with me from the children’s book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs). But in that fog, there’s a hope that fusion will happen in our lives, again.And perhaps even now that fusion is happening, though unseen.

Cold fusion may be an impossibility in the world of physics, but in the spirit/psych world of the Dark Night or Void, I am happy to pathologically believe that fusion is happening.

I invite you to follow a series of 14 more essays on Fusions in The Void. I’m sticking with the Void idea (and will not clutter future essays with the other terms) because it’s a place of creativity, of creation. I invite you to the paradigm shift that we are experiencing Void, not, perhaps in the sense of Eastern Mystics, but in this sense:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and VOID, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” (Gen 1:1-2)

What happened during a time covered in darkness? Two verbs: creation and motion. The combination of these two verbs happening together is the idea I call fusion. (By the way, we need to pay attention to the fact that the motion here is not particularly directional! Think of it more like the motion happening when your stomach is growling: a churning and digesting motion.) The following essays (which, on my blog will bear titles beginning with “Fusions in the Void, Part __”) will explore what may be created in the Voids we experience from time to time. It is my hope that you will take this journey of pathological hope too, and that, in the end, you would find that this is not a cargo cult activity, but ultimately a productive one. Especially if you’re in a Void, I urge you to come back and read more of these Fusion essays … again.

Guns in America: A metaphor for your organization’s culture

I watched all 12+ minutes of President Obama’s speech on the shooting in Oregon. The only thing I disagree with (and this is a nuance) is that it’s a “political choice”. Nope. It’s a cultural choice. One of my favorite quotes is “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” (Peter Drucker). Politics — using the strategy of changing laws to attempt to deliver a desired result — will ONLY be driven by a change in culture. I think he addressed that in a roundabout way, and his evident emotion and sickness at heart push us toward a question: do we desire cultural change in this area? I have to say this is the best speech I’ve ever heard him give. It’s been a long time since he really inspired me. Thanks, Obama. No… wait. Seriously. Thank you, Mr. President Obama, for reminding us that we should be upset by this, that we should not accept it as routine. (Why has it become routine that when we thank our President the initial assumption is that we’re being sarcastic? — Er, that’s for another blog another day.)

I don’t have answers for gun laws. I hope that people want change. Strategy could go through a variety of iterations before we get it right, but we won’t even really begin to try until there’s a fundamental, tectonic shift in the culture, where the geological plates in the culture shift away from conflict, and instead of those plates shoving against each other, one side shoving guns and violence up on a pedestal high as the Rockies, they shift back (so that “Every mountain shall be made low”) to a great, smooth plains, a place of reasoning together whether we own a gun or not. We have allowed something to sell us an idea of liberty in the place of safety, and we have eaten the meal and the after-dinner mint is … sour.

We all have things in the culture of our organization/workplace/field which have become routine but aren’t right. Thank God they don’t have literal, physical casualties. However, they can have pretty long-lasting impact on a lot of people, they can end up sending people away, leaving them spiritually or emotionally battered and bloody, and why? Because we want to hang on to some old way of thinking, some pattern that is getting justified the same way some say “well, we need more guns to protect us from bad guys with guns!” (We have forgotten that Jesus said “only God is good” and so in our cultural mindset we are ALWAYS the good guys).

For myself, this came to a head in a particular area in the culture of my family. Seven years of lean thinking put us in a position where we have the same issue and struggle every few months. Like the President said, unless something changes, history tells him he’s going to have to go make a similar statement about grieving families before his tenure is up. Same thing in our culture.

Change the rules all you want: if the culture doesn’t change at a more fundamental level, you’re just shifting stuff around, shifting blame, most likely.

So with our situation, we went outside and placed stones of remembrance in the yard. We marked those seven years of lean thinking and prayed. We drew a line in the sand in some way, spiritually, culturally, and I am ready to make changes so that I don’t have to go back to the podium again and say, well, 2016 has been the 8th lean year … No. It’s time for a fat one. It’s time to recognize that the issue has been cultural, and at least in this family I set 50% of the cultural tone. I’m the one who gets to change. I’m the one who has to step back and allow the valleys to be exulted and the hills made low, so that the Glory of the Lord can shine among us.