Ampersand Gazette #64

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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How We’ve Lost Our Moorings as a Society

To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how we’ve lost so many of our mangroves—those thickets of trees that often live underwater along tropical coastlines. They are endangered everywhere today—but not just in nature. 

Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative, and political mangroves as well—all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism, and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together. 

You see, shame used to be a mangrove. The reason people felt ashamed is that they felt fidelity to certain norms.  

“But in the kind of normless world we have entered where societal, institutional and leadership norms are being eroded,” Dov Seidman said, “no one has to feel shame anymore because no norm has been violated.” 

Nothing is more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities, added Seidman, than “when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority.”  

Trump wants to destroy our social and legal mangroves and leave us in a broken ethical ecosystem, because he and people like him best thrive in a broken system. He keeps pushing our system to its breaking point, flooding the zone with lies so that the people trust only him and the truth is only what he says it is. In nature, as in society, when you lose your mangroves, you get flooding with lots of mud. 

Responsibility, especially among those who have taken oaths of office—another vital mangrove—has also experienced serious destruction.  

Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree—instead of immediately calling for them to be fired—also used to be a mangrove. The first impulse in too many cases these days is to seek cancellation, not conversation. 

Indeed, civility itself also used to be a mangrove. Another vital mangrove is religious observance. It has been declining for decades. Locally owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our national politics.  

As in nature, it leaves the local ecosystem with fewer healthy interdependencies, making it more vulnerable to invasive species and disease—or, in society, diseased ideas. 

More than ever, we are living in the “never-ending storm” that Seidman described to me back in 2016, in which moral distinctions, context and perspective—all the things that enable people and politicians to make good judgments—get blown away. 

Blown away—that is exactly what happens to the plants, animals and people in an ecosystem that loses its mangroves. 

from an Op-Ed Essay by Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times
How We’ve Lost Our Moorings as a Society
May 28, 2024

Shame, responsibility, civil discourse, civility, religious observance, locally-owned small-town newspapers. Mr. Friedman casts these things as metaphorical mangroves, an apt and haunting image, but, to my mind, he starts with a far more incendiary concept: norms.

In fact, I would submit to you that norms, whilst originally named in a spirit of benevolence have been taken to such extremes that they’ve become like a word that’s used so often that it loses its meaning.

Norms. What the hell are norms?

The OED definition is something that is usual, typical, or standard. It comes from Latin roots meaning precept or rule.

What’s happened over the decades with norms is that we’ve taken them as rules rather than as tendencies. Norms aren’t rules. They’re not rigid. They’re generalities, found in the center of any spectrum. And if there are generalities, then there have to be outliers—because that’s how we know that there are norms!

In our reductive digitized reality, though, we’ve made them inelastic. Silly humans, we’ve even tried to make reality inelastic, as though it’s objective, not subjective. Believe me when I tell you, all of reality is subjective—it’s subject to your perceptions if nothing else.

The hard part about this whole norm thing is that once we made them inflexible, they became brittle, and once brittle, it was possible to break norms. Before our demand that norms become predictable, they were made of the same stuff as nerf balls. Soft, spongy, synthetic foam.

Enter codification, hence commodification, and we have the same recipe for disaster that mowing down the mangroves has yielded: reality, as we’ve known it, blown away.

So what’s a body to do? First, let us stop looking outside ourselves for someone else to choose and establish new norms. Second, look within. You have your own norms already, you just don’t consider them that. We know them mostly in our own lives as preferences.

Here’s one of mine: given the choice between a really good movie or a book, I’ll choose the book every time. That’s a norm, for me. Lots of you would choose the movie. The point is that I have the formal authority to establish the norms for my own existence. So do you.

And once I acknowledge that my choices establish my norms, then I have the moral authority to uphold my norms. So do you.

Now I can already hear someone protesting, But what about the norms of others that I disagree with? Here’s a new policy to consider: M.Y.O.B. or maybe M.Y.O.N.—Mind Your Own Norms. Keep your norms out of my business, and I’ll keep mine out of yours.

I realize that this means I have to have a lot of trust in each and every norm-establisher on the planet, and that I will disagree with some of them. So? It’s not my business to weigh in on anyone else’s norms. With a major caveat: If it doesn’t harm others.

This isn’t an easy path, the consideration and establishment of one’s own norms, but it does make formal authority into moral authority when we listen to our own wisdom and follow it.

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My Secret to Creative Rejuvenation? Conferences.

Under the spell of a good conference, I find space to reimagine my routine. The change of scenery, the subtle reframing of who I am, where I’m from and what I do creates a meaningful shift. Away from all that needs to be maintained, I tend to the generative.

At a conference held at Princeton, Anne Lamott says of writing, “Stop not doing it.”

At a conference, I have to introduce myself over and over again. These repeated introductions—your little bio or elevator pitch—start to sound new. Out of context from your everyday life, these mini-narratives provide a chance to think about who you are, who you pretend to be, and who you are becoming.

In this space outside of time, I do small things I don’t do at home. I feel unusually provided for.

from a column in The New York Times Magazine by Julia Cho
My Secret to Creative Rejuvenation? Conferences.
May 21, 2024 

The coolest thing about this lovely essay on changing one’s context to infuse creative renewal is that it comes after writing about norms. Norms, by their nature, require maintenance. As Ms. Cho says, at conferences, she tends to the generative and not that which maintains. 

The generative mode in life is an utter necessity to creating norms! When you create norms from the inside out, as I suggested above, maintenance is what comes after their creation. When maintaining your norms is starting to feel like work, that’s the time to change the context, if only to figure out whether it’s time to change your norms. 

For Ms. Cho, it’s conferences. Not for me. Oh no, I find conferences, even when I’m merely there to present, a total drain. Not my thing. Not at all. They do change my context, but not in a generative way. 

Just as we must consider and establish our own norms, and live by them, we also are in charge of our own contexts. Even if they feel sometimes like they can’t be changed. Don’t be silly. All context can be changed—even if it’s only taking a different path to get to somewhere you always go. 

The point here is to know when you’re losing conscious awareness because you’ve gone numb to your context, and making choices that either renew the same context, or put you in an entirely different one. 

If you always go to the mall and park at one end, next time you go, park at the other end. Voila! Changed context. If your morning routine is always the same, say, email first, go for a walk first instead. 

What we’re really reviewing here is habits-that-numb. Habits, in themselves, are good for you. If you always put your keys in the same basket, then they’re always there when you need them. Habits are meant to simply your life. It’s when your habits make you go numb that it’s time for a change. 

And even though few of us like to admit it, we ourselves are actually in charge of change in our lives. No one else. The person who goes to a job they deplore every day, and sighs to himself when he gets there, “I wish I had another job,” shouldn’t be surprised when he’s included in the next round of lay-offs. 

That individual knows he needs a new job. Otherwise, he wouldn’t say that every morning. When we don’t act on the things we know, the energy we’re exuding acts. Those layoffs might be the catalyst for creating a whole new entrepreneurial thing for that laid-off worker. 

Remember this, belovèd. All change starts with one step. Usually, one small thing. When you’re going numb to your world, change one tiny thing, and watch it ripple throughout your whole reality. Let go maintenance mode, for a little while, and ask deep within: what will regenerate me? 

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Here’s a universal affirmation. It works every time, for everyone, always and forever …  

Dr. Susan Corso 

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And in publishing news … 

Gemma Eclipsing is up on Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and Nook! And in honor of Gemma being Book Three of the series, it’s F*R*E*E for three weeks! 

Because of Amazon’s silly policy about conflating ebooks and paperbacks for series and numbering, which I am working on getting changed, it shows up as number five of the series. It’s not; it’s number three.

A BIG ASK 

If you have bought Jezebel Rising, and liked it, I have a personal request to make. There is a special promotion I want to do for the series, but I need to have over ten 4+Star reviews on Amazon Kindle. Would you please take a few minutes of your valuable time to go HERE, and write Jezebel a review? Thank you, thank you, thank you! 

The two volumes of the paperbacks are up on Amazon as well. I’m waiting for my author copies. 

Once again, if you haven’t seen it, here is the blurb for Gemma Eclipsing—Book Three of The Subversive Lovelies! 

A rescue. An artistic vision. And her new vicety demands its immediate birth.  

Gemma Bailey is the third of the Bailey siblings, yes, those Baileys. Known for being exceptionally talented on the stage, whether theatrical or domestic in nature, Gemma is given muchly to dramatics in the best sense of the word. She can make an occasion out of anything. She loves ritual. She loves pomp. She loves circumstance. She’s good at all of it, and she’s perfectly content with her legion of myriad friendships, no romance necessary. 

Now it’s time for Gemma’s vicety—the third of four the sibs had planned upon the death of their beloved father seven years earlier. Since then, Jezebel’s pair of viceties—The Obstreperous Trumpet, a saloon, and The Salacious Sundae, an ice cream parlor—are going great guns. Jasmine’s vicety, The Board Room, the first of its kind in the City, is racking up the profits, all of which go to charitable causes. Gemma has been naming and claiming a music hall as her chosen vicety for years until the time arrives to make it happen.  

Then, the extremis of a young painter causes a vision for a fine arts academy strictly for women artists to be birthed full-blown from Gemma’s eternally capacious imagination. And despite her abundant performance giftedness, Gemma discovers a fulfilling talent she never dreamed she had. 

Will her vision engender the support it needs from all corners of the exclusively masculine art world? Will she struggle pointlessly to put forth her case? Or will an encounter with an unlikely colorful glass artisan change the whole game completely for Gemma and her vision for a vibrantly creative future for Chelsea Towers? 

So, if you want the paperbacks, look carefully. There are two volumes for each title. If you want the Kindle, there’s one file for each title. 

The first two of the tetralogy, Jezebel Rising and Jasmine Increscent can be found at these live links for ebooks and paperbacks. 

I’m still writing Jacqueline Retrograde, the first half of the eldest Bailey sibling’s story, every day, about fifteen hundred words. I’m guessing I’m about halfway through. Writing Jaq’s backstory, and the Bailey sisters as children is a lot of fun. I think Jaq’s story will come out in two separate launches—#3.5 Jacqueline Retrograde, and #4 Jaq Direct. When I finish the first one, I’m sure it will be made clear. 

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I’m still reading about shame, and thank God, I finished one of those A Brief History of … versions because I have never seen an author make as fascinating a subject as shame so damn boooooring. God bless the man, but I almost fell asleep on my exercise bike reading his book! And that’s sayin’ something. 

As I’ve said, this is an eight- or nine-book series. A client of mine asked how I knew that. It’s because I’ve figured out that the books will be based on the structure of the human energy system, the basic building blocks of which are the eight major chakras. And speaking of that … 

My chakra work is ongoing, as it has been since I fell over them in the early 1980s. I haven’t mentioned the Energy Integrity books in a while. These are eight paper workbooks on how to learn about, heal, and reclaim your own energy system. CAVEAT EMPTOR: They only work if you do the work. I wrote the books! Now you fill them in.  

If you live in a territory where you can’t get the paperbacks, go here, and you can get them in ebook form. They definitely work better if you’ll print them out, and handwrite your answers in the pages provided. 

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People love to dream about writing a book of their own. I’ve heard all kinds of dreamers talk about this. The thing is, there’s you, there’s the story in your mind, there’s the blank page. What’s missing? Someone typing. 

Seriously. That’s what makes for writing a book. You sit down, you write, and you prioritize your writing. The thing is, take it from someone who’s written a lot of books (over 40!), it’s always worth it—the time, the energy, the work. If you’re holding in your heart a book you want to write, Beloved, I know a guy.  

Tony Amato was my editor and my friend long before I got smart enough to marry him. He’s a singularly outstanding book coach and editor. May I encourage you to reach out if you need book-husbanding, which includes coaching along the way? Like I said, if you need anything in your writing life, Tony Amato is the person. Without him, my books would be nowhere near as good as they are. Find him here.  

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As I said, I began to look into the emotional phenomenon of shame this week for my secret series. I thought it might be a break from the HIV/AIDS reading I’ve been doing, which is pretty bleak sometimes, and teeming with hope, others.  

Anyway, so typical of me, I started with a book called Shameless by Nadia Bolz-Weber, the Lutheran pastrix who founded House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver. Oy. The book is brilliant. 

It’s not a systematic theology by any means nor does she intend it to be, but it is one Christian’s deliberate unpacking of the utter mess The Church and religion have made of sex, sexual mores, and sexual practices. This might be my favorite quote from it: “And I’m not suggesting we make a few simple amendments; new wine in old skins ain’t gonna cut it. I’m saying let’s burn it the fuck down and start over. Because it’s time.” 

Okay, no. This is my all-time favorite, “When the church drag queen … (Shirley Delta Blow) …” She’s given me a bang-up idea for my new secret series! I mean, really darling, shouldn’t every church have its own drag queen? I think so. 

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And speaking of church … 

That time in 2018, when the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence crashed her performance at Penthouse in San Francisco to bestow
Sainthood on Stormy Daniels, now
“Saint Tempestuous, Eye of the Hurricane of Truth and Stormer of the Barricades of Intolerance” 

Saints, just like the rest of us,
come in all sizes, shapes, varieties, genders, and orientations. 

I am, without doubt, certain that And is the secret to all we desire.
Let’s commit to practicing And ever more diligently, shall we?
Until next time,
Be Ampersand.
S. 

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