It has taken me a lifetime to know who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming. Today, I see a sprawling panorama of images full of vibrant characters that helped to orchestrate this life of mine. And today, I can clearly see that the fuel for such a life was an audacious love for the quest that would lead to the ONE TRUE HUMAN HEART: a heart that beats from the mechanisms of divinity and reveals that EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL. But, before arrival, as James Marcus, a fallen man in a fallen marriage in Toronto, Canada, I had to make a supreme choice: to leave all as I knew in search of... Aspendos. "Martino aims to illuminate men and women from within, to depict the conscious mind as the only expression of deeper human needs, the soul's search for a more profound meaning in a spiritually arid world. He takes his reader on a mystical journey in a lifelike natural flow, which finally crystallizes in his ultimate message of the oneness of the human heart." (Dr. Zeynep Apaydin, University of Marmara) Sometimes, a story is 'really' presented in such a way that it shifts what was once fiction, into a rather precise transcendent: a human form. In a world of nonsensical characters, eccentric and surreal, odd and even ridiculous, where everything appears as real and as wonderful as a big wacky dream, finally we wake up to, after we stop reading... and wonder 'what happened'... and what did happen? Through the vision of Martino's magical/psychological style of creating a parallel reality to whatever one thinks reality is anyways, the reader enters settings that exist or appear to exist through outward and inner streets that explore the theme of love and fate. And depending on the choices that one makes to shape one's destiny, the journey ultimately takes one to a birth 'inside the light' and out from the physical womb of the human mother into ALTOGETHER IN THE SHIFTING WORLD.