Ampersand Gazette #41

Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on some of 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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To the Editor: 

These days, the three scariest words in the English language are “6 to 3.” 

Harry Nussdorf
Queens
The writer is a retired assistant district attorney. 

from Letters to the Editor in The New York Times
7.10.23 

To the Editor:

Re “On School Stages, Politics Plays a Leading Role” (front page, July 4):

You report that schools are banning plays with cross-dressing, among other things.

Alas, without cross-dressing, there is no Shakespeare. All his actors were male, including those playing Juliet and Lady Macbeth.

Paula Glatzer
New York

from a Letter to the Editor in The New York Times
July 12, 2023 

I know it’s not just me. In fact, multiple clients and friends have mentioned it to me repeatedly. So I’m, as usual, (well, since I learned to talk) just going to say it: We’re scared.  

And I know, I know, the saying goes: name it and you claim it, and sure, but also, don’t name it, avoid it, stick your head in the sand about it, and watch it get bigger and bigger until through our own resistance, it overwhelms us all. 

The world is a scary place for now. Things happening here on our lovely green marble, from Supreme Court decisions to whether and what to do for the high school play, don’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s the hottest year on record. Drag queens are under siege, and don’t get me started on healthcare, or transfolx, or, God help me, book bans. On and on and on and on and on. 

Avoidance, Beloved, is a form of resistance. Just because I am willing to note and name what is happening around me doesn’t begin to mean I condone it or am content to live with it. Are you? 

So what’s a metaphysician to do? Read on, MacDuff. 

& 

I received this letter recently from very wise Kabbalah teacher, Orna Ben-Shoshan. Find her here. [These are excerpts.] 

Dear friends,

It's hard, tight, and intense out there. We all feel the growing pressure when harsh energies descend onto the world. I asked the Hebrew letters for advice and support that would help us ease the mental-emotional burden for this time. 

The letter that came up in the reading is the letter Hey (ה) which represents abundance, fruitfulness, success without effort, and pleasantness of conduct.

Hey represents the feminine aspect in Creation. The pronunciation of the letter Hey is effortless. This teaches that the world was created effortlessly, by God’s word and the spirit of his [sic] mouth. The letter Hey is prominent and leading, but also introverted and gentle.

*Full text from the image can be found below. 

And how accurate it is for this time! How much we need the feminine energy right now to run the world with grace!

It seems that the male energies that are still ruling the world until the present time have exhausted themselves, after becoming expressions of power, rapacity, and aggression.

This is not what we need now, and therefore—as you can see with your own eyes, many systems that were based on male energy are collapsing in on themselves. 

&

So for all of us … 

I very much appreciated Orna’s take on world events. She’s based in Israel, one of the major hot spots of turmoil.  

Patriarchal structures are breathing their last. Just look around. She’s right—they have exhausted themselves, and with reason. Life was never, ever, ever meant to be a fight, or a war, or a rat race. As Lily Tomlin so brilliantly observed, “The problem with trying to win the rat race is that at the end, win or lose, you’re still a rat.” 

All structures are meant to evolve here, just like we are. When they don’t, when we don’t, and institutions or individuals dig in their heels in an effort to maintain the status quo, literally, the state in which, we already know what happens. 

We call it, for brevity’s sake, calamity, catastrophe, cataclysm. These are mere aliases for a far simpler, happier word, if only we’ll name events this way:  

Change. 

Change is only thrust upon us, Beloved, when we resist it. No exceptions. None. For real. Forever. And ever. Amen.  

Consider this as an alternative to moaning with our social media acquaintances, sounding the alarm like many of our press corps, or taking our shovels and going to play in a different sandbox: 

Receive what’s happening. 

Don’t judge it. Don’t gloat over it. Don’t lament over it. Don’t anything it—instead, witness it. 

Pretend you’re Walter Cronkite, and simply report to yourself on it. (If you don’t know who he was, Google it—that’s what Google is for!) Tell yourself: yes, this is happening. That’s all. Yes, this appears to be part of our reality at this time. Yes, I see this. Yes, I receive it. 

Again, receiving doesn’t mean agreeing. It means not turning away. It means making space. It means breathing into—the pain, the judgment, the confusion, the doubt, the fear, the worry, and every other bit of drama any one of us can conjure.  

We must say to ourselves, and others, this, whatever it is, is. This is … then add two entirely game-changing words: 

for now. 

When you want to be a part of the change you want to see in the world, the most important thing is to start right where you are. Unless we do, we cannot get to wherever it is we want to go. 

When we learn to lead with nonresistance, with yes, with the kindness, the gentleness, the sheer humane-ness of witness, Beloved, then change can come effortlessly and organically to us, and to the world. And there, right there, as Orna so rightly recommends, is where we fall fully into grace. 

The other practice that has kept me on a relatively even keel is to daily bless each and every being in our galaxy with a wish that each one be healthy, wealthy, and happy, followed immediately by a prayer that each being be a blessing to this world. When I want for everyone what I want for myself, I live myself (and them) right into it—with joy, with ease, with grace. 

& 

And in publishing news … 

Tony, my editor (and if you need a good one, find him here), and I are doing our level best to read two chapters of Jasmine Increscent aloud every day. We’re up to Chapter 31 as I write. Only 43 more to go!  

Honestly, for someone who has written as many books as I have—and that’s 34 finished ones to date—I am still always surprised at what we catch when we read aloud proof that neither of us noted when reading to edit on our own. It’s extraordinary what the eye fills in on the page when one reads silently. 

We’re hoping for an August release. I’ll keep you posted. 

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. And for those who missed it … 

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?

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Well, from two weeks ago’s (is that even a word?) all-you-can-eat-buffet, I have narrowed down exactly what my focus needs to be for Gemma Eclipsing, Book Three of The Subversive Lovelies. Finally! Good thing too because I’m 86,129 words into it! This book is turning out to be building the plane while flying it. Always an adventure. 

I’m still almost daily coming across helpful things in the public arena. The best magic ever, though, is that I fell over a book published in 1904—the very year of my story!—which lays out the gift I wish to offer each reader in Book Three. It was utterly uncanny how that happened, but I can’t tell you what it is because I’ll give away too much of the plot. So sorry! There’s a reason I’m known for my fiction cliffhangers… 

On an entirely different note, a next, new speculative fiction series is beginning to pull its threads together in the rabbit warren of my interior creative labyrinth. It’s not ripe enough to explain yet, but hold the idea with me anyway. As soon as it’s more solid, I’ll share. I promise. 

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The exquisite Tony Bennet died this week, that lovely man from Queens. Take a few minutes, dear one, and bask in the joy of Mr. Bennett singing “The Best is Yet to Come” with Latin pop singer Chayanne on his album “Viva Duets.” It’s a good message for our time because the best really is yet to come, if we’ll hold to our visions for an ampersand world—one that works for everyone. 

Until next time, we need your ampersand consciousness more than ever, Beloved. S. 

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* Text from above: The letter Hey connects between the spheres Keter (Crown) and Hochma (Wisdom) and is associated with the fire element. “Hey” will help you become renowned, charismatic, and demonstrate a strong presence by emphasizing the feminine aspects of your personality: applying the wisdom, intelligence, gentleness, lightness, and grace to inspire love and harmony. Hey will strengthen you in the areas of fertility and reproduction, stimulate regeneration, creativity, prosperity, and effortless success, and will help you become a vessel for receiving and transferring abundance. This letter is useful for improving speech and communication, to pull out from difficult situations gracefully and rectify injustices.