Ampersand Gazette #49
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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In the last issue, I wrote about David Brooks’ two kinds of people: illuminators and diminishers. Here are some of the skills illuminators possess, the ones that are essential for seeing people well:
The gift of attention.
“Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: It creates, brings aspects of things into being.”
Accompaniment.
If we are going to accompany someone well, we need to abandon the efficiency mind-set. We need to take our time and simply delight in another person’s way of being.
The art of conversation.
Be a loud listener. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively you’re burning calories.
Big questions.
The quality of your conversations will depend on the quality of your questions.
Stand in their standpoint.
If I show persistent curiosity about your viewpoint, I show respect.
What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
from an Opinion Essay by David Brooks in The New York Times
“Essential Skills for Being Human”
October 19. 2023
Elections were this week, and it caused me to do a lot of reflection on diminishers, certainly, but also on illuminators. I think it is incumbent upon us all first to decide which of the two kinds of people we ourselves want to be.
Mr. Brooks’ list of illuminator qualities might assist. Let’s ask ourselves these telling questions, shall we?
Do I pay attention?
Mr. Brooks calls it the gift of attention. We might instead ask: Do I give the gift of attention? Most of us think we do, but in my experience, we don’t. We want things to be simple, reduced to their lowest possibility, and finished as quickly as we start them. That desire foils attention every time.
Don’t you think it’s interesting that our idiom is “pay attention?” There’s a cost to attending, Beloved. If I’m paying attention to you, gifting you with my attention, then I do not have my device in hand unless that’s the mechanism I’m using for attending.
Do I accompany others well?
Again, most of us think we do, but in my experience, we don’t. Attending and accompanying go hand in glove, really. Both, given properly, with a full heart, require an open-ended agreement unless we negotiate up front otherwise.
If I agree to help a friend shop for a dress for her special occasion, then I’m in it till she finds the dress … unless I clearly state that I have to be elsewhere in two hours, and if that’s okay with her, then I’ll go, but otherwise, she needs to find someone else whose attending and accompanying is not circumscribed by previous commitments.
This sort of negotiation and accountability take time and thoughtfulness, and clarity of thought, word, and deed. See how it all starts with attention? Even just you … attending to your own schedule.
How am I at conversation?
Am I a loud listener? I loved that!
A speech teacher of mine once said that you know whether you’re really listening by the position of your tongue in your own mouth: unless it’s relaxed, and parked where it goes behind your bottom teeth, you’re not listening, you’re getting ready to talk. Quite the difference, no?
Loud listening—calorie-burning listening—mandates attention as well.
Do I ask big questions?
Big questions are open-ended questions. They’re how and why questions, not who, what, when, or where questions. Those journalistic questions yield facts, but how and why questions prompt feelings, stories, reminiscences, mythologies, and whole host of other fascinating things.
Big questions also bottomline at attention, though. If we can’t pay attention to whatever someone is saying enough to understand that there is a bigger idea behind the details, we won’t get past the mundanity of the quotidian.
Is my curiosity persistent?
A lot of curiosity is based on the need for information: What time? Where? When? With whom? These are the details of everyday life; all of us deal with them every day. Persistent curiosity, though, is a whole other bottle of wine, as my dear friend Annie used to say.
Persistent curiosity is big curiosity. It’s curiosity—a surprisingly neutral emotion—that keeps us out of the swamps of our own psychological filters, our prejudices, our righteousness, and a whole lot of other line-in-the-sand drawing that keeps us feeling separate from one another.
The last question: What would I do if I weren’t afraid? will deliver you on a magic carpet ride right back to attention, which is what started this whole inquiry.
Attention is an interesting word etymologically. From Latin roots, its origin is attendere, from ad- ‘to’ + tendere ‘stretch,’ (same basis for tendon) so to attend is to stretch oneself.
In this our day and age of distraction after distraction, just think, Beloved, all you need do is stretch—a little—to become an illuminator instead of a diminisher.
Just imagine how elections might go if we all were to make this a personal practice.
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Frank Bruni, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, has a piece in his weekly newsletter that aggregates excellent quotes from media around the world. His readers send them in, and he chooses his favorites. This is one of them from a recent piece.
In The Times, David Streitfeld summarized the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried: “It’s impossible to read the sad saga of Mr. Bankman-Fried without thinking he, and many of those around him, would have been better off if they had spent less time at math camp and more time in English class. Sometimes in books, the characters find their moral compass; in the best books, the reader does, too.”
from The New York Times News Analysis
“Sam Bankman-Fried’s Wild Rise & Abrupt Crash”
November 4, 2023
What struck me here as worth comment has little to do with Sam Bankman-Fried or the vicissitudes of cryptocurrencies or its consequences. Instead, it was this:
“Sometimes in books, the characters find their moral compass; in the best books, the reader does, too.”
With all the backing-and-forthing about humanities education lately, this made me think about whether I have found my moral compass in any books, and the answer was and is an unqualified affirmative. Of course, I have, and of course, I will continue to do so.
Interestingly, I connect far more to my own morals as a reader when I read fiction than when I read nonfiction.
Then, the logical question became: do I write to propose moral issues? Here, too, the answer is an unqualified affirmative. Not only do I write about moral things, but I intend to address social ills in every book I write.
I think the purpose of reading—even vampire popcorn (my latest secret non-guilty pleasure)—is to make us think. And think a lot. About hard things.
What would I do? Is a far more provocative question to me than what Jesus or Mae West would do. Much.
I am known for placing the blame for my fiction squarely on the shoulders of Diana Gabaldon. She wanted to read a series about a marriage, not a romance, although there’s plenty of romance in her Outlander saga, so she wrote it, because there weren’t any.
In the same vein, I wanted to live my life, this time around, on a spiritual basis in an everyday way. Not religious, although I did try on those shoes for a while—blisters! Not only on Sundays, every day. Not for the purpose of conversion, for myself.
That meant I wanted to read books about people who are spiritual, and who consider their spirituality in their daily decision-making. There weren’t any books like that when I started so I wrote them.
So that got me wondering … does every one of us have something that we wish was in the world that it is our task to make into form here? I bet we do.
My mystery protagonist in The Mex Mysteries lives her intuition in a big way. So do I.
My chosen family in The Boots & Boas romances, lives their chosen family choices. So do I.
My Bailey siblings in The Subversive Lovelies live their class-busting values. I try to do the same.
What’s your special manifestation project for the Divine?
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Don’t forget this bottomline prayer. It works every time …
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And in publishing news …
As you know, I finished Gemma Eclipsing on Friday, the 13th—perfect. I’m still in The Evil Word List, but I’m having a new experience with it this time. Always a good thing.
I decided to take my time with them instead of trying to hurry-scurry through the process, and I realized that I need to rename the list. It’s not evil words, not really. It’s lazy verbs.
What I’ve discovered is that there is a series of verbs I, essentially, default to and in order not to bore myself or the reader, they need to be changed before I send the MS to my editor.
Why should he have to slog through them when I already know what they are, and it’s best that I send him my best version of the MS rather than a lazy draft. Once I’m done, I’ll reread it, and send it off.
Tony, my editor (and if you need a good one, find him here), and full disclosure, my much beloved husband, bless the man, will then clean up whatever messes are left. He calls himself a BookHusband, and it’s the best description I’ve heard of his remarkable gift.
So while I’m taking my time with the lazy verbs, I’m up to my eyeballs in debutante books for Jacqueline Retrograde, which is already nagging at me. These subversives are determined to have their stories told, and soonish! Plus, I’m missing writing.
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I’m a Founding Member of a website called Shepherd.com, which I’ve written about herein in earlier issues. Ben Fox, the originator, came up with a new idea for authors on the site. He’s asked us to list our three favorite reads of the year.
Here is my list:
I got in touch with R. A. Steffan to let her know I’d chose her whole series: Circle of Blood. She was totally pleased to hear from me—told me I’d made her day—and said she’d share it with her lists. It’s a series of four.
Misogyny is one of the best books I’ve ever read, bar none. By the late Jack Holland, it tells the history of what he calls “the world’s oldest prejudice.” Brilliant. Anyone who is a woman or knows one ought to read it.
Madame Restell was a book I thought I was reading for Subversive Lovelies background but it turned up in the foreground instead.
Go have a look at these. It’s a great website as well, especially if you’re tired of slogging through the mess that is GoodReads these days.
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One last thing before I sign off … although it’s not technically publishing news. I’ve been doing some work lately for real estate agents that I’m really enjoying, so I thought I’d tell you a little about it, and see if you know anyone who might benefit.
I got a call from a realtor I’d worked with before. She had two properties on the market for more than 120 days which hadn’t sold. She wanted me to clear the energy in the homes, and sent me the listings.
Clearing can be done from off-site, quite the boon, so I flew around, talked to her for an hour, and knew what needed to happen. I gave her some simple feng shui suggestions, but more, I worked for three days, clearing the two properties energetically.
One was caught up in some legal and moral tangles in an estate. The other was caught in some deep family grief. We’ll see what happens, and the signs are good. The first property is the focus of a new buyer coming into town just to see it, and the second is having a second showing Sunday after touring it on an open house.
The last time I helped her, happily, she sold the house in two days.
So, if you have a property that’s playing stagnant, or you know a realtor who might benefit from such a clearing service, please get in touch with me here, or have your realtor do the same.
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Speaking of writing worlds, here is collage by my friend scholartivist, Rev. Dr. Angela Yarber of The Tehom Center. Clearly, Gloria Anzaldua had the same thing going on that Diana Gabaldon and I both do. What world are you making these days? I am, of course, more convinced than ever that And is the solution to everything, and so, Be Ampersand, Beloved, until next time.