Ampersand Gazette #39
Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest …
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This is the original Pride flag that was created by a flag designer named Gilbert Baker. It first appeared in public in 1978—forty-five years ago. He chose the colors, he and some friends sewed it after hours, and up it went as part of San Francisco’s Pride Celebration.
The “Reclaiming Our LGBTQ Spiritual Heritage” virtual summit, June 17-24, just finished. As part of that, the organizer, Christian de la Huerta, asked me to offer a prayer for the Opening Ceremony. It’s always a pleasure to be asked to pray in public. As far as I’m concerned, more prayer these days is better prayer.
I never plan these public prayers. For that matter, I never plan my speeches or lectures or presentations or sermons either. Usually what happens is I get the first sentence intuitively and it flows from there. That’s all I need is that first notion.
That morning’s prayertime yielded the Rainbow Pride Flag, and that was all. I didn’t know quite what to do with that. Those of us who’ve been around a while tend to feel that we are “so over the rainbow,” but as I said in the previous issue of The Gazette, it’s always someone’s first Pride so don’t let your cynicism hit you in the ass on the way out, dear.
Except, for some reason, I felt the urge to look up the flag in Wikipedia. The image above is what I saw, and I had a flash of insight that utterly knocked me over. Look at the original flag, Beloved. It has eight stripes. Eight.
Mr. Baker, drag name: Busty Ross, refused to trademark the flag when he created it. He felt it was meant to represent everybody—all the diversity in the LGBTQ+ world, and beyond. What I realized, the more I looked at the flag, was that Gilbert Baker was an unlikely prophet, or perhaps a gifted healer, and he didn’t even know it.
Those eight original colors match the colors of the chakras—what you see when you look at the human energy system through a prism. Ordinarily, the chakras follow the colors of the natural rainbow from bottom to top, red to rose. These don’t.
I wondered why. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up.
First, there’s Violet, the color of the 7th Chakra. Its Grace is Abundance.
Second, there’s Indigo, the color of the 6th Chakra. Its Grace is Intuition.
Third, there’s Turquoise, the color of the 5th Chakra. Its Grace is Creativity.
What if Mr. Baker meant each and every one of these colors as reminders? A life based on Abundance, Intuition, and Creativity, in that order? Sign me up.
Fourth, there’s Green, the color of the 4th Chakra. Its Grace is Love.
Fifth, there’s Yellow, the color of the 3rd Chakra. Its Grace is Power.
Sixth, there’s Orange, the color of the 2nd Chakra. Its Grace is Passion.
Seventh, there’s Red, the color of the 1st Chakra. Its Grace is Life.
Eighth, there’s Rose, the color of the 8th Chakra. Its Grace is Compassion.
Abundance, Intuition, Creativity, Love, Power, Passion, Life, and a crowning of Compassion. Oh yes, oh yes please. Mr. Baker, long before there were even whispers about HIV/AIDS gave us an image meant to remind us all how healthy we really can be. A healer-prophet indeed.
When it came time to make the commercial version of the Pride Flag, they had to delete the Turquoise and the Rose because they were too expensive to reproduce in mass quantities. No worries, Beloved. Just go to Wikipedia and look at the image. It’s there in all its glory—shameless, free, out loud.
No matter what prejudices any of us encounter, our wholeness is on display all the time. Sure, it’s taking a while for the whole world to catch up. It’s alright. They’ll get there—eventually. They have to. The only option for beings on Planet Earth is to learn to let our magical selves shine now and shine on just like a natural rainbow does, the product of light. Yes, as in ‘let there be ….’
To the Editor:
Re “A.I.’s Helping Hand” (Science Times, June 13)
During more than 30 years as a clinical oncologist, it was my responsibility almost every day to discuss devastating results and what were often limited treatment options with patients.
Although I believe that A.I. can offer sound suggestions—or even a script—for how to discuss horrible news in a compassionate manner for the average patient, what A.I. cannot yet factor in is that every patient is different, and the “right words” to express compassion are invariably and understandably different for every patient.
Hippocrates said, “It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.”
Choosing the words to express compassion and empathy require health care providers to first really listen to our patients. Truly appreciating the unique personality, values and goals of each patient is the key first step in finding the best words to express sympathy, empathy, compassion and hope.
Steven Sorscher
Winston-Salem, N.C.
From a Letter to the Editor in The New York Times
June 16, 2023
I had to shake my head when I read the first part of this letter. Using A.I. to communicate dreadful news? No, just no.
Oh, don’t misunderstand. I know it’s hard to impart harsh news, but a medical doctor who chooses oncology as a specialty is not going into that world unseeing. They know in advance that learning to deliver tough news is on the docket.
Beloved, no one needs a script to do this. No one. It’s really very simple. Not easy, simple.
You dig deep into your own humanity, look the person square in the face, and speak from your heart. It doesn’t matter if you’re a grave-digger or the world’s best surgeon, bad news is bad news.
All of us know what that racing heart, adrenaline rush, mental rejection of devastation feels like. It feels human.
Use your God-given imagination. How would you want to hear you were dying? Do that.
For those of us who lived through the early eighties as adults, we know that the queer community got a crash course in this kind of news. There was a plague devastating an entire group of people with no cure, no test, and no end in sight.
Grief much? Oh, yeah. Lots. The names of those I lost in those early days still make my heart ache. And why? Because I, like those gay men (and it was men at that time), am human. I cried with them. I fed them. I held them. I prayed with them. I raged with them. Because that’s what I would have needed.
No A.I. required. What was required was E.I.—emotional intelligence—and S.I.—spiritual intelligence. Usually, we use another name for it: Divine Intelligence. We’ve all already got that in spades if we’ll just pay attention.
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And to honor all those we mourn from the plague, from suicide, from shootings, and all sorts of other inhumane behaviors …
To the Editor:
Re “The Right Is All Wrong About Masculinity,” by David French (column, May 29):
Today’s men, Mr. French writes, “are in desperate need of virtuous purpose,” and he’s spot on about what’s wrong. Propagandists, politicians, pundits and the polarizers of social media are eager to exploit the need men have for meaning and community, and they do so by fostering the collective fantasy that real men are vessels of virtue lifted on the rising tide of legitimate outrage, heroes on the march into a just war, with their orders and armed with AR-15 rifles.
No, we should not discourage masculinity defined by a willingness to fight or even die for what is right, to show strength, purpose and idealism. This drive is a virtue, to be sure, but it needs to be informed by critical thinking, literacy, facts and compassion rather than meanness, blind self-righteousness, incivility and dehumanization.
Sure, “stand your ground,” but make sure you’re not standing on real estate you bought in a Florida swamp; be proud boys, for serving the powerless; keep an oath, to practice empathy; be a human rights supremacist; raise your fist, Josh Hawley, but for peace.
Tim Maxwell
Menlo Park, Calif.
From a Letter to the Editor in The New York Times
“Is Masculinity in Crisis?”
June 11, 2023
I’d extend this to humanity in crisis, but for the nonce let’s single out masculinity as does this letter. For my money, that last paragraph is brilliant.
How’s this for an edit?
Sure, “stand your ground,” but make sure you’re not standing on real estate you bought in a Florida swamp; be proud boys and girls, for serving the powerless; keep an oath, to practice empathy; be a human rights supremacist; raise your fist, Marjorie Taylor Green and Josh Hawley, but for peace.
Inner peace is a clarion call in spiritual work. We will only and ever create peace with others when we first establish it in ourselves. It’s a cascade, from within-out, like this:
Inner Peace > Peace With Others > World Peace
Masculine, feminine, none of the above, it doesn’t matter how you identify, Beloved. It matters how you think, speak, and act. What are you waiting for? Choose Inner Peace starting today, and help the rest of us turn the world right-side up.
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And in publishing news …
Here is the ebook cover for Jasmine Increscent!!! Victoria Davies did a stellar job capturing Jasmine, the oldest of the Bailey sisters, now that her older sister is … well, her older brother. You’ll read his story in Jacqueline Retrograde & Jaq Direct.
Here’s the blurb (to whet your appetite)—
A wedding. Increasing. And it’s time to start her vicety … it’s a three-ring circus—oh, my.
Jasmine Bailey is the second eldest of the Bailey siblings, yes, those Baileys. Known for being much more in the present than the future, years earlier she’d begun a one-woman mission to serve mothers who’d been abandoned by their spouses in the worst slum ever to darken New York City: Five Points. Universally recognized by her honorific, Lady Jasmine, throughout Gilded Age society, the wealthy take their checkbooks in hand whenever they see her strawberry blonde braid and her lissome figure coming.
Now it’s time for Jasmine’s vicety—the second of four the sibs had planned upon the death of their beloved father four years earlier. Since then, Jezebel’s pair of viceties—The Obstreperous Trumpet, a saloon, and The Salacious Sundae, an ice cream parlor—were going great guns. Jasmine had originally intended to create a high-end gambling hell. Except ... her wedding is scheduled in less than a month, and she’s increasing. There’s, uh, a lot on her plate.
Jasmine’s research takes her from the lowest of the low policy shops in Mulberry Bend to an outré visit to most elite gambling institution in town. Still, she’s struggling with what is in her heart about starting this vicety. A chance sentence, if you believe in that sort of thing, overheard whilst at breakfast one morning changes everything.
Will her struggle with gambling resolve to her satisfaction, or will Jasmine have to scrap every idea she ever had about it to start over again? Sure, no doubt she could, but does she want to, and how will that affect her siblings and their nefariously well-meant agenda in Chelsea Towers?
Still inputting my editor’s brilliant edits. If you need one, Tony Amato, is really good at it. This time I decided to aggregate all the bad habit edits into one day of slogging. We’ll see if I get through it!
After I do the fixes, we’ll start the read-aloud proof. That’s one of my favorite parts of the publishing process. Then I’ll format it in Vellum, and once it’s done, upload it to Amazon et al.
If you haven’t yet read Jezebel Rising, put it on the top of your TBR (to-be-read) pile. It’ll make Jasmine that much richer when you get to read her story.
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I am, I’m sure, to no one’s surprise but my own, now over fifty thousand words into the third book of The Subversive Lovelies, Gemma Eclipsing. The story has already shocked me. I am excited to see where Gemma takes me. Oh, and I’m still researching, a little, but nowhere near as much as I’d thought would be necessary. Writing is an amazing process.
The strangest part is that almost every day I come across something I need for the book in the public arena. Just this morning, I read The Times, and in it, found three articles that apply to this very novel. My husband says that this is what happens when I’m in it. I think the whole world becomes a conspiracy for my book.
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Christian de la Huerta was the host for the Reclaiming Our LGBTQ Spiritual Heritage virtual summit, June 17-24.
We had a lot of fun in our time together, but more importantly, we talked a lot about resistance and how it’s just not a workable strategy anymore, not in this contentious environment. Instead, we need to learn to resist without being in resistance.
We also talked a lot about the theme of my new historical series, The Subversive Lovelies, although not in that context. The tagline for that series is “someone always goes first,” and Christian pointed out—the man’s known me for thirty years—that I am always one of those go-first people. It’s true.
You can view the interview here.
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Rose is the color of the Eighth Thymus Chakra; it’s situated in front of the center of your sternum, and is meant for emotional, mental, and spiritual immunity. It’s Grace is Compassion. I created this image so I could remind myself what it looks like energetically when I send compassion out into the world. Won’t you join me? And, until next time, be ampersand, S.