Ampersand Gazette #120

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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There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention

About two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Seneca warned of a crisis of attention. Papyrus had become more widely available, scrolls became plentiful, and wealthy readers had access to more texts than ever before. Seneca observed that the minds of those who read too many scrolls too quickly became restless and unsteady.

This kind of mind was less able, he noted, to “stay in one place and spend time with itself.” The lesson then was no less true than it is now. “One who is everywhere is nowhere,” Seneca cautioned.

On average, we check email seventy-seven times a day, and often it’s not because of a notification—we interrupt ourselves. Two decades ago, a given task could hold our attention for two and a half minutes; today, research shows, we make it only forty-seven seconds on one screen before succumbing to the itch to switch. Our society tends to view this as a technological problem that demands technological countermeasures. We’re overcomplicating a very old challenge that is more moral than digital.

Seneca rightly saw distraction as a failure of character. We don’t need another algorithm or gadget to stop our minds from running around like unruly children, he would have argued. We need to relearn how to sit still with our own thoughts.

How exactly do you do this? Seneca had some practical advice, which he outlined in his “Letters From a Stoic.” Devote your attention to one idea a day.

For the past twenty years, I’ve practiced a simple discipline inspired by this advice. First thing in the morning, I forage in a book for my one idea. I’m looking for a passage that challenges or better illuminates how I see the world. Having found my idea, I take the next step Seneca advises: “to ponder that day and digest.”

Seneca compared the benefits of deep reflection to the alchemy by which bees transform nectar into honey. In the hive, bees repeatedly pass the nectar they gather among themselves, mixing it with enzymes that alter its chemical composition. Think of the nectar as information and the honey as wisdom. Whereas nectar sours within a matter of days, honey doesn’t spoil—not even after being buried for thousands of years in an Egyptian tomb.

I am hardly the first person to appreciate Seneca’s insight that a crowded library is no match for a curated portfolio of deeply assimilated wisdom. Stuffed with facts but starved for meaning, the autodidact embodies the belief that volume of information is a substitute for depth of understanding.

We are often told that more information is the answer, but Seneca knew better. Wisdom is found not in the nectar we gather, but in the honey we take the time to make with it. 

Excerpted from an Opinion Essay by S. J. Murray in The New York Times
“There’s An Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention”
July 12, 2026

 Spending time with oneself is a radical idea indeed. It is, in fact, spending time within the self, aware of the self, listening to the self that has fostered brilliance after brainstorm throughout eternity.  

Why do we go through cycles of forgetting to do this? We definitely do, and it’s both irksome and burdensome. Irksome in the whup-myself-upside-the-head sense. Burdensome in the I-have-made-this-harder-than-it-had-to-be sense. 

Either way or both ways, we are the poorer for it. 

I think several things are operating here. First, we have mistaken the very wise Francis Bacon aphorism Knowledge is power with the sadly juvenile Information is power. And we are entirely wrong.  

Information is not power. It makes us stuffed with facts but starved for meaning. Information is about quantity, and oh yeah, do we love us our quantities. Why? Because quantity can be measured. 

I read once that of the workforce in America, seven percent of people create things, and ninety-three percent of people measure those things the seven percent create. Ouch. 

Second, we have allowed efficiency too large a sway in daily life. Let’s face it. In as much as we work to control it, daily life is not really efficient. It’s a meander, the long way home, the scenic route. 

Without the mundanity of the quotidian, over-committed to efficiency, what we lose is the nuance in life, the texture, the overtones, the undertones, the undertows, too. We lose depth. Depth in the self, of the self, and by the self—and depth in, of, and by the selves of others. 

Buckets of nectar overflowing around us ask to be made into honey. Honey is a substance for the long haul. That’s why it never goes bad. 

Have you got piles of information just waiting to be alchemized into honey in your life? Good. It could very well contain your next million if only you’d pick an idea that you want more of in your life, and sift through the information until it turns to wisdom. 

I tend to use the major chakra gifts rather than lucky-dipping in books, but it’s the same principle. Each chakra embodies a principle: Life, Passion, Power, Love, Creativity, Intuition, Abundance, and Compassion.

 Choose one. Sit amidst the nectar of information within your precious self. Where do you need more of, say, Intuition, in your life? Where less? Where a different application? I can happily guarantee you a clarity from within that has the potential to be stunning. 

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When nothing goes right, go left.  

The Question: 

How can I make a better vision for myself?  

&mpersand Answers:  

Consider this, Belovèd. When nothing goes right … isn’t a fact—it’s a judgment. True, a judgment you’re entitled to, if you want it. Go right ahead, judge all you like, and be prepared to have to dig yourself out when you’re through. 

If nothing goes right, then the usual antonym is that everything has gone wrong. Again, that isn’t a fact, it’s a judgment. Opinions are cheap. Be my guest. 

The thing is, when you seem to be getting not this, not that guidance from the Universe, it’s time to stop and evaluate what you’ve been aiming for. Most of the time, you’ll figure out that you missed the mark on what you actually wanted. 

Now, get out of your judgments, and look around. What’s left? 

It might look like rubble to you, but out of the rubble and ashes the Phoenix is born. This reminds me of that famous Sherlock Holmes quote: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” 

That’s when we come to what’s left. Most often, the bigger vision is staring you in the face in what’s left. Step out of judgment if you can, and look around you carefully. 

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

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 Twenty-one days went by before I could pick up the threads of Betrayed again post-heart attack and post-dialysis. Most of you know that I am a discovery writer. In the world of fiction, there are planners and what are known as pantsers. Planners write from an outline. Pantsers wing it. 

Well, sort of. Winging it is all relative. Do I know where the story is going? Mostly. Do I know how it will get there? Not at all. Do I know the big arcs I want to create? Yes, except for the ones that surprise me after the fact.  

I re-read the first forty-five thousand words that were already on the page, about a third of the way through the book, and then I sat, as in Don’t just do something, sit there. I sat until the inner swirl of creative ideas began to gain its own momentum. That’s how I know things are ripe for the writing. When I don’t feel that inner eddy, I know that what I’ll write will have to be trashed at one point or another.  

I don’t know if I experience my creative impulses this way because I’m clairsentient, although I am. Mostly, I’m clairaudient. Code: I hear voices. In fact, it was a voice that prompted the creation of Mex. Read on. 

I’d gone to the White Mountains in northeastern Arizona to finish a praxis book on Inner Peace. It happened to be Valentine’s Day that I finished it, and I drove in light, fluffy snowflakes to the post office to send the manuscript off to my editor. On the way home, I contemplated which of the movie musicals I would watch on the VCR. Then I noticed that the snow was getting serious. 

It didn’t matter though. I’d accomplished what I’d meant to and felt great about that. I had enough food, coffee, music, chocolate, and cigarettes to live through a snow-in if it came to that, and I had another week of writer’s retreat ahead of me. O happy day! 

After supper, I sat enjoying my solitude, thinking about principally nothing when I heard a voice say, “So, you gonna write my story now?” At that point, I’d been hearing intuitive voices for almost twenty years, and they didn’t faze me. I said, “Yeah, sure. Why not?” 

Ten days later, a three hundred fifty-page manuscript sat on the coffee table in front of the television that I never even turned on until the night before they came to dig out me and my car. The Birth of Mexicali Rose Stone. She’s led my writing repertoire ever since, which is why, when I finish this Prismatica book, I’m definitely on to the next Mex. I’ve missed her! 

Book Eleven is called Shrew This! and it takes place during the Covid-19 shutdown. Anchored in an all-female production of Taming of the Shrew presented by the residents of a safe-house shelter, it addresses intimate partner violence. The spiritual healing modality is the use of mandala, one of my favorite methods for calming my nervous system. Coloring. Seriously. 

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Please make this indie author happy. Choose one of my series, and read all of them. Then review all of them. That’s the way others find books. 

You could start with The Mex Mysteries … the first one is Oklahoma! Hex. Or, one of the five Boots & Boas Butch-Femme Romances … perfect summertime reading. Or, The Subversive Lovelies, speculative historical fiction. Or, there’s always the option of starting with one series and reading them all!

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“Theater, at its most powerful, refracts truth through fiction so its force can be viscerally felt.”

Believe it or not, those words were in this morning’s New York Times essay about the testimony given by Dr. Anthony Fauci in a congressional hearing.  

It made me think of all the work that Tony has done in the theatre over the years. In fact, the first time we met was in a theatre in Boston. It was one of those wider than deep spaces at BU, I think. He was at one end of the audience, and I at the other. Anyway, someone pointed him out to me, and me to him. We started to work together on my books almost immediately thereafter.  

What got me going in the quote was the idea of truth being refracted. That’s what Tony Amato does for authors, no matter the genre. He’s like a gentle hound, giving authors the space, the time, the focus, the energy to write their truths, the ones that make us write in the first place. 

To be honest, I don’t know what might have happened in my career as a writer were it not for this gentle, fierce, persistent man, the one who stood, sat, listened, spoke as the refractor that he is, a prism to show us our own light. 

So, do you need a refractor? I know a prismatic gentleman who has that exact skill. This is the guy, I promise you. Find Tony Amato here.  

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 Exceptional Sophia Beaufont Complete Series Omnibus (Book One of Twenty-Four) by Sarah Noffke & Michael Anderle  

I finished the first twelve in this massive series of series only to discover that the next series has twenty-four volumes—I’m not going to run out any time soon. I like the characters, and I’m curious about dragons … 

Thus here’s the Book One blurb for The Exceptional Sophia Beaufont:  

The first dragon rider in over a hundred years has been born. And it’s a girl.

Never before has a female been chosen to ride a dragon.

The Elite, a guild comprised exclusively of dragon riders, is dead according to most. No one has seen a rider in decades. The problems they used to fight overwhelm the world. Dragons are thought to be near extinction.

However, the Elite aren’t dead…

It’s just that a bunch of crusty, old men who do nothing that benefits the world at large are easy to mistake as useless corpses.

Sophia Beaufont is about to change all of that.

When the dragon egg that magnetized to her hatches, it sets Sophia on a new course. The Elite are immediately notified. She’s expected to train. To defend. To fight.

Sophia is ready to conquer evil, as the dragon riders should have been doing for centuries.

However, the Elite have been turning a blind eye, allowing the world to be overrun by criminals.

That’s all about to change.

S. Beaufont isn’t a girl who will be told to sit down and relax when a war is brewing that only a dragon rider can extinguish.

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The books are utter fluff, YA, every paranormal you can imagine, popcorn. Still, I was captured  enough by the first series to pick up the second. There’s good world-building, enough intrigue to stay interested, and decent character development. Besides, don’t you just love it when a young woman kicks the asses of a buncha crusty old men? I do. If you need a mental holiday from thinking, try Sophia Beaufont and her sibs. 

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Are you waiting for a sign?
How about this one? 

Sophie Park

This is an excerpt of an image
from a small town in Maine.

I loved its message: 

Hopeful. 

People lament their own loss of hope
often these days.
It’s hard not to. 

At the same time,
if you and I do not hold out hope
for our planet, for our country,
for our neighbors, for our families,
and for ourselves, 

WHO WILL? 

To borrow from sagacious Hillel the Elder, 

“If not now, when?” 

I’d add to this, 

“If not me, who?”

The thing is, if I hold out hope,
And you hold out hope, and we all continue
to hold out hope,
What we hope for is bound to appear. 

So how’s about … 

An Ampersand World—
a world that works for everyone.
No exceptions. 

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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 

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Post Scriptum:

Members of our community are in the process of constructing an opportunity for financial support during this time when I, you can imagine, can do very little work. Please expect an appeal letter with more details soonish, and let me thank you in advance if you feel moved to donate.  

All donations to Sanctuary are fully tax-deductible. 

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