Ampersand Gazette #75
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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One Thing Never to Say to a Grieving Friend
“I have two friends who recently lost someone very close. As people have tried to comfort them, they’ve repeatedly heard the same phrase: “Everything happens for a reason.”
This only makes them feel worse. Grief needs to be witnessed, not deflected, Kessler said. “And if I say to you, ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ I am missing your pain.”
If you’re grieving … When someone who is trying to comfort you accidentally makes things worse, your best response will depend on your relationship to the person and how you’re feeling,
If you’re trying to help … When you want to share words of comfort, you could say: “I am so sorry for your loss. I don’t know how you feel, but I am here to help in any way I can.” You can also share a favorite memory of the person’s loved one.
If you can’t find the words … Finding the right phrase isn’t as important as being present and staying near. We really don’t have to be encumbered by words.
excerpted from a Well Column by Jancee Dunn in The New York Times
One Thing Never to Say to a Grieving Friend
October 11, 2024
The hosts of a podcast I’d recorded asked me this week if I’d offer some words of wisdom in the aftermath of the U.S. elections. I’d already planned to use this article on responding to grief for the Gazette. No mistakes.
Regardless of how you voted personally, I maintain that there are two major emotions running rife right now through civilization, and not just in the U.S. They are grief and rage.
Consider the chakra colors that have been held in front of our eyes for months. Red, the first root chakra, represents survival issues, life itself. Blue, the sixth brow chakra, represents wisdom, intuition from within. When you combine the two, you get purple, the seventh crown chakra, which represents Divine Abundance. Believe it or not, that’s where all of us want to be.
So how do we make that choice in the face of cascading and sometimes virulent emotions? And how do we make that choice for everyone? No exceptions. Here’s how:
First, we grieve. All of us.
Second, we take a good, hard , open-eyed look at the patterns of blame and punishment that all of us fall into from time to time. I know no one who is exempt from this. Why, if you’ll think about it, the whole American Experiment has had both baked into it from its very inception.
All lasting spiritual work starts within. You know that as sure as you know your own name most of the time. Oooh, but it’s so tempting to answer, Yeah, but … if only so-and-so group would do such-and-such, then everything would be perfect. Um, no, Dear One. I swear one of the major tenets of true spiritual growth that gets left out of the equation all the time is: MYOB. I’m not kidding.
MYOB. M ind Y our O wn B usiness. But I don’t mean it in the sense that most people use it, as a rebuke. Instead I mean it as a reminder. I need to starting minding my own business, and the fastest, most effective, and best way to do that is to STOP minding the business of other people. Ohhhhh.
That’s why it’s time to do the spiritual work to heal our own patterns of blaming and punishing. Until we do, it’s going to be really hard, as my friend Virginial Bristol Johnson wrote in her company newsletter, “to continue, living a life of integrity and kindness, being in community and nurturing community, even on the hard days. Especially on the hard days.”
And, make no mistake, there will be some hard days ahead, for all of us. That’s in the nature of life itself. Keep your eye, and your heart, trained on that Divine Abundance. Wear purple.
Pastrix Nadia Bolz-Weber posted what she called, and I quote, “I got nothing for you but this shitty little prayer.” Part of it read: “If it is possible to remind us that millions of human beings throughout history have lived through worse political situations and still managed to make art, and find joy, and share meals and resist despair, could you do that for us please? And then keep guiding us toward their wisdom.”
Here’s another serving of wisdom. I am an avid reader of Anu Garg’s A-Word-A-Day newsletter. At the bottom of each one he usually has a quote from someone whose birthday falls on that day. This week, he did something I’ve never seen him do, not in the all the years since my dear late Donna Henes recommended him to me. He quoted someone whose birthday it wasn’t. The words came from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 Oct 1869–1948.) They were a balm to me:
“When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.” Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 Oct 1869–1948)
I checked in with several people the day after the election just to take emotional temperatures, and see if anyone needed some extra loving in order to cope. One of my nearest and dearest said,
“I keep thinking about what you told me 8 years ago when I said it was like the supervillains were coming out of hiding. You said, ‘You know what happens then? The superheroes come out.’”
So like I said in the last Gazette: I WRITE. What’s your superpower? And until things calm down, and we’ve worked through the grief, and through the rage, and healed a little more of the blame and punishment paradigm, please, for all our sakes, wear your purple cape.
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Tehom Center Publishing, the brain child of artist, author, and scholar Rev. Dr. Angela Yarber, is based in St. Petersburg, Florida. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that they recently had not one, but two, hurricanes, one after the other. Tehom lost $30,000 in the publishing company inventory, art inventory, and the building that house both, which their copious insurance won’t cover. They’ve made these subversive t-shirts as a fundraiser and … the holidays are coming. Click here to donate or order.
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“Why Do We Say ‘Like,’ Like, All the Time?”
Like is serving a function for you. It’s what linguistic speak calls a quotative like, using it to substitute for the verb “to say.” What you are saying is, “I’m not telling you verbatim what the teacher said. I’m giving you sort of my subjective recall of what she said.” It allows you more flexibility when telling a story.
You can use like sometimes to draw attention or highlight. It can also be used to hedge what you say. You can use like to indicate that you’re making a subjective estimation of something. So you could say, “He’s like a doctor or something,” which is indicating I don’t exactly know what he does, but it’s something like a doctor.
You can also use it at the beginning of a sentence. That’s usually a sentential adverbial, which makes it sound fancy and important, but really what it means is it’s a linking “like.” So when you say something such as “I don’t know what he did. Like, I think he was a doctor.”
The similarity among all these likes is that they’re all expressing some sort of subjectivity. And that’s the true power of like. Subjectivity is something that’s often frowned on and not taken as seriously as something that’s considered a cold, hard fact.
There are a number of reasons why people don’t like like. I think one is because its whole purpose is imprecision. Often we take impreciseness to be uncertainty, but they are not the same thing. Just because someone is imprecise in what they’re saying doesn’t mean they’re uncertain about what they’re saying.
We first get like in our language as a verb in the 13th century. I like you. Around the 15th century, we start to use it in similes. A toddler is like a puppy. Then in the 16th century, we start using it as a conjunction, where instead of just being between two objects, you’re expressing similarity between an object and a whole sentence. He rode the bike like the sky was on fire.
In the 1700s, we start to see it as a discourse marker. The same way we use Well or I mean. This is where we see like used the way it is now for the first time.
Excerpted from an article by Jonquilyn Hill in Vox
Why Do We Say ‘Like,’ Like, All the Time?”
September 25, 2024
I once lost the chance to do a wedding because of the word like. The bride was sitting in my living room, and said, “I’ll have, like, three, bridesmaids.” I guess I was feeling snarky that day, or like hit me wrong. I said, “Like three? Or actually three?” Whoops. But, really, what is a like bridesmaid?
Let’s list the linguistic function of like, shall we?
Like is used for flexibility, like is used for highlighting, like is used for hedging, like is used for subjectivity, like is used for linking, like is used for imprecision.
Like is a verb, a preposition, a conjunction, a noun, an adjective, an adverb, and part of myriad phrases and idioms, according to the OED. Talk about an all-purpose word.
Whilst I’m sure the linguist who opined in the Vox article is an expert, I disagree with her. Or, no, maybe not. She’s talking about how we use like, and I’m more interested in why because I think if we ever stopped seriously to consider why, we might stop using it in a heartbeat.
So why do you think we use like all the time in conversation? And now, even in written form? And, be honest now, doesn’t it just, like, bug you sometimes?
Kidding aside. I think the reason we use like all the time is originally sourced in television.
And before you protest that sit-coms only use the common parlance of the day, hear me out. That’s not why I think television is the culprit. When we watch television, we’re watching life, but not real life. Faux life. Facsimile life.
Television life can be entertaining, no question. But it’s not 3-D life happening to you or in front of you. You’re … once removed … from the living that you see on TV. I make a distinction between television and the movies here because when you go to the movies, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, but now, with all the cable channels and a 24-hour news cycle, you can watch life on television 24/7. And that’s not the same as living it.
That once removed perspective on life lessens the stakes of life. We’re living vicariously through the lives we see on television, and in video games, and in whatever qualifies as virtual reality.
Beloved, there’s a reason it’s called virtual reality. It’s qualified, and that’s because it’s not reality itself. The OED says virtual means “not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so.” It’s a simulation.
Well, a simulation is, again from the OED, an imitation. If you look up the word simulate, the verb form, its mid-17th century roots are Latin simulare from similis meaning like. As the logicians say, Q. E. D.
It’s easy to see the word similar therein. But again, what is similar to life is not life. That’s like thinking that the time-lapse version of a stargazer lily opening is how a stargazer really blooms.
Think for a moment, Beloved, how much simulation we all witness — whether it is via seeing, hearing, smelling, even touching — on a day-to-day basis. This is one of the reasons, aside from the dopamine addiction built into the equation, that the curated (also a simulation, just sayin’) lives that we see documented on social media have such a toxic effect.
I spend almost all my time in front of a computer so I’m no innocent when it comes to this “like life,” but I make a point many times a day to look away from it. Technology is here to stay. And so, probably, is like, but we are charged with living actual lives, not virtual ones.
Actual lives aren’t really curated. They can be seriously messy. They can be full of rapture and equally bursting with despair. They can also be so full of awe that we can barely breathe.
Start to notice your use of like. Are you living too much on the virtual side of life? That’s okay, but now … hug a person, tousle a toddler’s hair, purr with a cat, throw a stick for a dog, read a dead-tree book, smell a stargazer, wiggle your arms and legs and ears (if you can.)
Life only works when we work with it — physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Real life works best, Beloved, when we like it.
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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 …
Reclaim Your Energy: Stop Hidden Leaks and Rediscover Your Power with Expert Insights from Susan Corso | Spiritually Inspired #189 | Claudiu Murgan
Discover surprising ways you might be leaking energy — and how to reclaim your power! 🌟 Susan Corso shares why self-awareness is the key to a more vibrant life and how one small word, “And,” can create powerful transformation. Dive deeper into her insights!
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Jacqueline Retrograde is FINISHED!!! Here is the cover, and the new blurb.
A debut. An auction block. A glimpse at a whole new life.
Jacqueline Bailey is the eldest of the four Bailey sisters, yes, those Baileys. A gifted equestrienne since her papa placed her in the front of his saddle at age two, Jacqueline has been dragooned — oh, not kicking, not screaming, instead unwittingly, almost before she noticed it — into becoming a New York High Society Gilded Age debutante.
The truth is, she can hardly believe it. Viewed through the perspective of a highly private individual, this inside look at the idiosyncratic mixture of the nobs, those of the Knickerbocracy, and the swells, those of the Nouveau Riche, as they take on their allegedly proper social roles, brings into high relief the eccentricities and hypocrisies of all performance-based social behaviors.
Jacqueline is well past disenchanted when we meet her on the natal day which qualifies her as a legal adult. A fun outing, wherein her circus antecedents make their presence both known and useful, leads to a burgeoning friendship, to be sure, or could it be … more, when she’s cast in another unplanned role, this time as hero.
Heroics, to no one’s surprise, are not all they’re cracked up to be, so when a desperate, and jealous, debutante uses the incident to further her nefarious matrimonial aspirations, Jacqueline’s mettle comes to the fore. Everyone already knows there’s more to her than meets the eye.
Entering into this backstage look at the world of the pre-Victorian debutante, Jacqueline is brought face-to-face with her true self, Jaq. No one could predict that being a deb is the trigger to her wildest dreams come true. Perhaps not immediately, but slowly, surely, and inexorably as Jaq steps out upon her true path.
Will Jacqueline implode over the demand to be a fragile feminine flower of flummoxed femininity? Will the girl whirl hoops be the end of Jacqueline? Or are they the dawn of a newly-minted gender freedom that Jaq has unknowingly been seeking all along …
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I am thrilled to show you my new banner for fiction.
As promised, this is the new version of the Fiction Book Banner, which includes Jacqueline.
After buckets of backing-and-forthing, I now have the seven volumes of The Subversive Lovelies numbered quasi-properly, as well as affiliated with their proper ebooks. That has been a slog. There is no provision in KDP for two-volume stories. None. And I can’t (so far) get a referral high enough up the chain of command to make it happen. I’ll keep at it.
Now, may I draw your attention to the little book on the bottom row of the image that seems to be hanging out all by itself? That’s the next publishing project. It’s called The Mex In-Betweens. My bookhusband (and legal spouse) Tony Amato, having edited every single one of my books, started reading the first Mex Mystery, Oklahoma! Hex, again. As he did, he made a list of back stories he thought would make intriguing singles — short in-betweens. There’s a round baker’s dozen of ’em in this volume. Right now, I have an inquiry out to the artist who made the Comedy-Tragedy Masks I want to use on the front cover …
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My review request this issue is … if you love queer romance, would you please read Attending Physician — the permafree book that starts my Boots & Boas Romances? If you love it, would you leave a stellar review? I need four more reviews of four stars and above to do one of my special series promotions … please.
Reviews really are the engine that powers the career of an indie author.
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Let’s talk about “bad” reviews for a moment, shall we? There are some on Attending Physician. As if I didn’t already know that butch-femme can be quite the in-your-face topic within the queer community. When I was coming up, and coming out, into that same community, there was NO place for butch-femme. In fact, I didn’t even learn those words until after I turned 40! For real. Fortunately, I met a for real butch who knew what I was instantly, and said as much. I was running a meeting when she said it, and I remember having to hold onto the table in front of me to keep from passing out — that’s how deeply the word femme resonated for me.
Anywho, back to “bad” reviews. I’m usually relieved when I receive one. I know that sounds hard to fathom, but those reviews merely tell me who my book isn’t for. Let’s be honest, darlings, butch-femme isn’t for everyone. I say, yippee, more for me!
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Besieged is finished! I typed the last words on the 27th Anniversary of my mom’s death. That seemed significant to me because, when she was alive, she was the person responsible for creating the county AIDS program that was copied all over the United States, and for which she won an Unsung Hero Award from DIFFA.
Book One is now called:
And I know in my bones that she’d have loved this retelling of the AIDS crisis in which, for once, humanity does the right thing instead of what they did in fact.
Who knows what I’ll write next … will it be … Jaq Direct, the final book of The Subversive Lovelies? Likely. Or Impending Decision, the fifth book of The Boots & Boas Romances? I think maybe this one too. Or Shrew This!, book eleven of The Mex Mysteries? Or the second Prismatica? Or a new chakra aid to clearing energy blocks? So many books, so little time …
The day is definitely coming when I’ll be writing two books at one time. I keep finding articles pertaining to the Jaq book so the literary weathervane seems to be pointing that way for sure. Also, I think Impending Decision is calling to me.
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Now that Besieged is written, Tony and I have moved into the phase of world-building for the rest of the seven or eight more books in Prismatica. That first book of a series is always a little fraught for a discovery writer like me. Because I don’t plan it all out. Ever. My conversations with Tony help me keep focused on what’s important, and what’s not, as I go forward into editing, and the rest of the series.
Do you have need of someone to partner with to help you with your book ideas? In all seriousness, I know a guy. He’s edited my books for twenty years, and counting. Tony Amato is a singularly outstanding (and much sought after) book coach and editor.
May I encourage you to reach out if you need book-husbanding? He’s worked on fiction, micro-fiction, memoir, science fiction, metaphysical fiction, young adult fiction, erotica, singles, series, audio scripts, and nonfiction in realms from business to the spiritual, and everything in between. Oooh, also in-betweens! Really, you name it, he’s done it. Like I said, if you need anything in your writing life, Tony Amato is the person. Find him here.
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“This poignant account shines a well-deserved spotlight on Catholics who chose compassion over fear.” Publishers Weekly
Michael O’Loughlin’s account of the Catholic heroes who stood in the shadows against their own institution’s hypocrisy is exemplary. He’s telling the tales of those who rebelled, those who acted against the express wishes of bishops all over world, those who braved the loss of their own professions, chose love over policy again and again.
Set against the backdrop of the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the late twentieth century and the Catholic Church’s crackdown on gay and lesbian activists, journalist Michael O’Loughlin searches out the untold stories of those who didn’t look away, who at great personal cost chose compassion — even as he seeks insight for LGBTQ people of faith struggling to find a home in religious communities today.
This is one journalist’s — gay and Catholic himself — compelling picture of those quiet heroes who responded to human suffering when so much of society — and so much of the church — told them to look away. These pure acts of compassion and mercy offer us hope and inspiration as we continue to confront existential questions about what it means to be Americans, Christians, and human beings responding to those most in need.
In sharp, kindprose, Mr. O’Loughlin seeks his own peace with his Catholicism, and his queer nature, as he illuminates people who, despite all things to the contrary, did the right thing.
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Are you waiting for a sign?
How about this one?
Isn’t this just stunning stained glass?
I loved that it seems to include all the colors of the
R A I N B O W !
Stained glass works by using a combination
of light, color, and glass to create a visual spectacle.
Life works to surprise us in the same way,
through combinations, connections,
adding things together
that have never been together before.
What can you connect this week to surprise
the world with something new?
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,
