Ampersand Gazette #43
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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Photo Illustration by Bráulio Amado
“There are no such thing as trans issues. There are issues that nontrans people have with themselves that they’re taking out on trans people. A great example is when they talk about our “agenda.” “The transgender agenda: It’s recruiting people.” My agenda is the ability to exist in public without the fear of being physically assaulted. If my existence is such a profound threat to the social fabric, then what needs to be interrogated is how we created a world that doesn’t allow people to exist.…
You think that you’re hurting me, but actually you’re hurting yourself. Because violence requires self-annihilation. It requires us to sunder ourselves from our own empathy, our own interconnectedness, our own humanity.…
I started to realize compassion was that which allowed me to go outside again. My fear would tell me, Someone’s going to assault me; someone’s staring at me because they hate me. I had to develop another internal voice that said, Someone is going to compliment me today. I began to witness that there were kind, generous people, and that’s where my compassion helped me in a way that none of my fear ever did.…
I don’t see bad people or evil people. I see people who are byproducts of the circumstances that they’ve been through, the emotional information that they’ve been given. Whenever I’m finding myself having judgment of someone who is anti-trans, I try to remind myself there are people whom they love and people who love them. I remember that they once, too, were a baby and felt wonder in the world, and something sad must have happened to separate them from that. I’m trying to get people to extend the love that they already have for their own orbits to the entire world. We’re all in this together.
from an interview in The New York Times Magazine
Alok Vaid-Menon Is ‘Fighting for Trans Ordinariness’
July 30, 3023
Alok Vaid-Menon is not the poster child for Ampersand Living, but they certainly embody it, and they certainly do what they can to live it. I decided to use their words because they were and are hard-won.
You see, it’s easy to react, it’s easy to defend, it’s easy to return judgment for judgment. That’s the strictly human, instinctual experience of living, and all of us, no exceptions, have that within us. To deny we do is to lie about who we are and how we are made.
However, we all also have the ability to move through those reactivities to get to the other side of them, which is what this individual has done, and I really admire their choices.
It is not too much to ask to be safe outside of one’s home. That’s something that most of us take for granted in this world, and we should be able to! We should also be able to feel fear, heed its message, and leave it behind.
To stay in the fear and loathing, which is what this is, does exactly what Alok alleges: Violence requires self-annihilation. In order to remain in violence, we are required to obliterate our very nature. This is definitely a choice we have the option to make, but to make it is to live with some very uncomfortable consequences.
We humans so love to have our cake, and not pay its price, but it doesn’t work that way here on Planet Earth. There is a consequence to every single choice. And while you or I may not understand the experience another soul is having here, we still have the inherent ability to be kind, despite our lack of understanding.
In fact, I’m quite the fan of something Werner Erhardt said years ago, “Understanding is the booby prize.” If you’re bright, and someone explains anything to you at your level, you can understand it. That doesn’t however mean that you can do whatever they’ve explained.
Understanding really isn’t necessary for empathy, nor is it necessary for kindness. The roots of the word kind come from Old English; they mean natural. Think on it. If a young child has a glass of juice, it’s almost guaranteed she’ll offer you some. It’s natural. Kindness is natural, native to our very being. Perhaps because we are all of the same … kind?
Now, whether we use that inherent ability for ourselves or others—that takes a choice. A deliberate, conscious, hopefully, conscientious choice.
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“Matthieu Ricard is an ordained Buddhist monk and an internationally best-selling author of books about altruism, animal rights, happiness and wisdom. … In the early 2000s, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that Ricard’s brain produced gamma waves—which have been linked to learning, attention and memory—at such pronounced levels that the media named him ‘the world’s happiest man.’
“OK, so I’ve been meditating twice a day for probably 15 years, and I feel as if it has improved my ability to control my thoughts and emotions instead of letting them control me. But still sometimes I’ll walk by a mirror and have an extreme flash of self-loathing. Or I’ll get all agitated over something stupid, like finding a parking spot. Will that stuff ever go away?
“Well, they can. Absolutely. You know, once I was on the India Today Conclave.1 They said, ‘Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?’ I said: ‘First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.’ I’m happy to feel I am on the right track. I cannot imagine feeling hate or wanting someone to suffer.
1 An annual TED-like event held in India that gathers leading thinkers from a variety of fields.
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“When we speak of compassion, you want everybody to find happiness. No exception. You cannot just do that for those who are good to you or close to you. It has to be universal. … [C]ompassion is about remedying the suffering and its cause.
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He also says that we are looking for “a deep sense of eudaemonia,3 of fulfillment,”
3 A Greek word used by Aristotle to describe the happiness attained by people who base their actions on reason and morality. One scholar has drawn parallels between eudaemonia and the Buddhist concept of nirvana.
“That’s why I like the idea of Richard Davidson’s5 that happiness is a skill.”
5 A professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin.
“Not to reduce 2,500 years of contemplative science to a single sentence, but is there a thought that you can suggest to people that they can carry in their minds that might be helpful to them as they go through life’s challenges?
If you can, as much as possible, cultivate that quality of human warmth, wanting genuinely for other people to be happy; that’s the best way to fulfill your own happiness.
from The New York Times Magazine Talk Column by David Marchese
“The ‘World’s Happiest Man’ Shares His Three Rules for Life”
August 14. 2023
This interview could be considered the how-to of what Alok talks about …
I so connected to Brother Matthieu’s three secrets. There’s no secret. It’s not just three points. It takes a whole lifetime.
I was on the phone yesterday with a friend who’s fifteen years my senior. We were talking about choosing to be happy. I made the observation that I thought you had to be over sixty to realize this.
It’s true, you know. Very few of us realize that happiness, and by that I mean daily happiness, everyday happiness for no reason, is a choice. It’s choosing to be happy, no matter what happens. It’s never letting events steal your happiness. It makes happiness an inside job, which I find a relief.
And it’s true, the fastest path to personal happiness is, bar none, wanting for others what you want for yourself. Choosing for others what you choose for yourself. There is not a finite pool of happiness, Beloved. Nor does happiness evaporate waiting for us to choose.
It’s here. It’s present. It’s available—by choice. And if I do not want you to be happy … truth? How dare I want that for myself? I daren’t.
When I want for you what I want for me, we all win, and I’m thinking, given what’s on around the planet at the moment, that we could all use a win. So how about it?
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And in publishing news …
We finished Jasmine Increscent!!! Oooh, it’s good, too. I never really know till I hear it aloud, and I really like this one. Tony, my editor (and if you need a good one, find him here), and I followed some very good advice from Alice in Wonderland. Begin at the beginning, go on till you come to the end, and then, stop.
Now, I have a bunch of things to do before we release it, and if I buckle down this week, we might make the August release hope.
We’re coming toward the end of summer now, and the beginning of school, the time when everyone’s schedules change. If you want a juicy last-minute summer read, may I suggest the first of the series, Jezebel Rising?
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 the 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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I’m still writing over a thousand words a day on Gemma Eclipsing, which is rolling along nicely. The process for this one has been completely different than for the previous two. When will I learn?! Each book comes with its own rhythm, cadence, timing, process and any one of a number of things that keep me fascinated.
Thirty-four books in, you’d think I’d know this by now!
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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. In the past two weeks, more and more pieces of it are coming to me. I’m still in the cast-a-wide-net phase, which means by the end of a day, my desk is covered in open research books! It’s one of my favorite parts of the process.
One of the best things to happen is that I received a working title for the series, so here it is for inquiring minds …
This is what I wrote two weeks ago: “For the moment, I’m sure about the word Phoenix but am thinking that there’s something … more apt in lieu of Ordination. As always, my books are an evolving, inside-out process. Let’s see what my intuition cooks up within the next two weeks. More next time …”
And right after I hit send for the last Gazette, the series title changed! Isn’t that the way of it?
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This is the first peacock window designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. He was a pioneer in creating church windows from nature rather than Scripture. In Byzantine iconography, the peacock symbolized eternal life. I thought it was an appropriate final image for Alok—the peacock personified—and Matthieu, no peacock at all.
Wherever you fall on the peacock scale, Beloved, please choose happiness for you and yours and everyone else, and as always, Be Ampersand. S.