Ampersand Gazette #126

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 Something Better Than Happiness

… lapping waves … subtle breezes … the forest … the mountains. You found what therapists and yoga teachers call your happy place. Nothing against such pleasures, but if they concentrate your vision of ultimate happiness, that’s something you may need to reconsider. Many of us think that the goal of life is to work hard, succeed and live softly for the rest of our days.

This, many think, is happiness. And plenty of prominent thinkers would agree. Yet there are others who think that happiness of this sort is, if not to be avoided altogether, then taken in guarded doses. I’m with them.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer warns us that human beings have two main enemies: pain and boredom. By their nature, our minds cannot rest. The problem with that happy life we’re pining for is that it will inevitably breed boredom, and boredom begets trouble.

Schopenhauer’s solution? Find something to occupy your intellect. Do not let the mind succumb to idleness. Most scenes that people associate with happiness—the golden beach, the splashing waterfall—are boredom traps.

Simone de Beauvoir also argues for activity over passive forms of happiness. Like her collaborator Jean Paul Sartre, she thought that the most dangerous temptation was what she called “being-in-itself” (in French, être-en-soi).

Is successful conformity a form of happiness? It can appear to be. But in its sterility and confinement, it’s akin to spending every day sitting on a beach.

As an alternative, Beauvoir commends “being-for-itself” (être-pour-soi)—a commitment to being active in the world. The person Beauvoir commends may not be happy, but she has embraced her freedom, which gives her a life of meaning.

Both Beauvoir and Schopenhauer turn away from the life of recumbent happiness and toward something more difficult.

The last witness in my case against happiness—at least, happiness as perfect contentment—is interested in the enlightenment of humankind as well as of individuals. Friedrich Nietzsche’s archetype of the “last man” is the type of person who arises in a culture that encourages the pursuit of drone-like happiness. The last man is cautious: He has his “little pleasures for the day” and “little pleasures for the night.” He lives for tiny satisfactions.  

I don’t mean to malign every form of contented happiness. I only want to say that overall it may be better to seek meaning rather than pleasure.  

Excerpted from an Opinion Essay by Mark Edmundsen in The New York Times
“There’s Something Better Than Happiness”
September 7. 2026 

I’ll cop to thinking happiness is a good idea for all of us. In fact, one of the great metaphysical secrets in life is that happiness is a choice. Whether water laps or eagles soar overhead or not. 

You can be happy just cuz. No real reason. 

But I also agree with Mr. Edmundsen. Just generic happiness can be a bore. His essay made me think long and hard about happiness as a choice. 

I’ll still make the choice for happiness daily, but I’m adding something to it, too. Happiness … because of meaning.  

Meaning is the metaphysician’s stock-in-trade. Much of the time I’ve spent with clients over the years has been teasing out the meanings in persons, places, things, and events. 

I liked the idea of “tiny satisfactions.” Small things that become bigger as we appreciate them. Here’s one. My dialysis treatments started out at a lengthy 3 ½ hours, during which I must hold still, can’t ever get up, can’t use the loo, nothing. Three months in, my time has been reduced to 3 ¼ hours. What a difference a quarter hour makes—fifteen little minutes—a tiny satisfaction blown up to the size of its importance. 

Think through your recent days, Belovèd. What tiny satisfactions bring a smile to your lips, and light in your heart? Focusing on those will give meaning to your life, and, despite Schopenhauer, de Beauvoir, John Paul Sartre, and Nietzsche, I’m with Victor Frankl, the world-renowned psychologist. “Humans can live without a lot of things, but we can’t live without meaning.” I wholeheartedly agree. 

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I Am Here to Live OUT LOUD.

Anonymous 

The Question: 

How can I live out loud? 

&mpersand Answers: 

Let’s approach this from the opposite end first, shall we? In what ways are you living in secret? In whispers? In I-don’t-dares. Now, why? 

What about those things makes you NOT want to shout it from the rooftops? 

Now, if it’s a good secret, no problem. The ones I’m looking for are the ones that make you smaller rather than larger. 

Living out loud means living so that you’re seen. Andy Warhol was famous for saying that everyone would ultimately have their fifteen minutes of fame in a life. 

Fame is relative, though. If you’re the star of the school play in your town of six hundred, you could very well be famous. If you’re the star of the school play in your city of six hundred thousand, you most likely won’t be famous. 

The point is: you get to choose your living-out-loud moments. Pick them well. Not everyone needs to be famous, but everyone, no exceptions, needs to be seen sometimes. 

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

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 I finished Betrayed! On Sunday, October 18th, a relatively significant date in my life. It’s the date I earned my D. D.—Doctorate in Divinity—in 1993, 33 years ago. I’d known how the book ended for about two weeks, but not quite how to get there.  

And that’s the plight, and delight I might add, of the discovery writer. I find out what’s happening in my stories as they appear on the page. I’ve tried to write from an outline, really tried, and it kills the process for me. Kills it dead. No, thanks.  

So now comes … re-read the whole book for tweaks and continuity, fix any glaring errors, do Evil Words, send it to my editor, wait till he’s done his magic, then make those corrections. Meet with that same editor to go over any notes I didn’t understand. Fix those. Then it’s time to read the whole MS aloud. Tony reads; I make the fixes in the Final MS. Then onto the publishing protocol.  

It will not surprise you to hear that I’ve begun Book 3, Bereaved. Because of course I have. And the research just keeps finding me. Seriously. I can’t make this stuff up.  

More Phoenix Initiation tidbits are finding their way to me, too. Plus, I’m champing at the bit to get into the next Mex, and a couple of the Boots & Boas novellas are calling my name.  

So many books, so little time! Still, I’ll keep showing up at the page, and the books will get written, I promise. This is why I don’t schedule time for writing. It’s because I’m writing all the time, and if I’m not actually at the computer, well then I’m dreaming about writing or thinking about writing or wondering if this will fit in Book X or Book Y. I’m never not writing. It’s my favorite thing in the whole wide world to do. 

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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. 

Is your cuppa one of the five butch-femme romances in Boots & Boas? This is an ongoing series about a chosen family in Boston, with many more planned.  

Or, you could start with the Mex Mysteries … the first one is Oklahoma! Hex. There are eleven of them so far, please, be my guest! Oh! And it’s still on the Metaphysical Bestseller List!!!  

There’s also The Subversive Lovelies, which is a completed five-book series about Gilded Age women who simply refuse to follow the rules. 

And soon enough, the first two books of the nine-book series Prismatica will be published for your reading pleasure. 

There’s always the option of starting with one series and reading them all! That’s what I do when I fall in love with an author. 

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One of the things that I like best about working with Tony Amato is his versatility. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing an essay, or a novel, or a letter, or an email, or a spiritual teaching, he has the ability to meet whatever I’ve written wherever it needs to be. It’s uncanny how that changes my work, and, as a result, his. 

Being able to envision where a final product belongs is vital in an editor. He has to hold the vision that the writer is holding. That takes insight, sure, and a whole lot of intuition. Context changes writing.

His first session is exploratory for you, and for him. Find Tony Amato here. 

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The Magdalene Revolution: The Return of the Sacred Feminine and the Birth of Radical Equality by Andrew Harvey  

A new book on Mary Magdalene is always a treat for me since I’ve read almost everything about her that there is to read in English. When a well-known Magdalene scholar dissed this book, I knew I had to read it. 

Here is an excerpt from the blurb: 

In a radically fresh reading of Mary Magdalene’s story, a renowned scholar of mystical traditions sheds new light on the Divine Feminine as a force for change and healing.

For more than 20 years, Andrew Harvey has trained his fine scholar’s eye on sacred texts and mystical truths to illuminate the message of inspired activism that they hold. Today, we need this message more urgently than ever. In The Magdalene Revolution, Andrew takes a fresh, impassioned look at the story of Mary Magdalene and Jesus to distill its meaning for our world and show us how to embody this truth in our own lives.

Andrew invites you to examine how Mary Magdalene is presented in the New Testament—

sometimes splendidly, but also absurdly and even dangerously. He undertakes a radical reclamation of the Divine Feminine by recognizing Mary Magdalene as the bride to Jesus’s bridegroom—a female and co-equal Christ in her own right. Finally, the reader is escorted into a new paradigm of fully embodied divine and human love that each of us can live out in our daily lives

“We are in the time of the Second Coming,” Andrew writes. “The old story is dying, and a new story with Mary Magdalene’s and Jesus's love at the radiating center will be born.” In Mary Magdalene's great spirit of healing and transfiguration, this book offers you this new human story—together with sacred practices that will allow you not only to integrate its contents into your life, but to begin your own transformation. 

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I have to add: if you dare. Andrew’s take on the Magdalene is spot-on, refreshing (even to someone who has studied so much about her,) and thought-provoking, to say the minimum. His ideas are so radical, and resonate so well, that I already know I will re-read this book. Quite the kudos from someone who almost never re-reads.  

What if he’s right? What if the Divine Human Love that Jesus and Mary Magdalene came to Earth to show us is the way out of what he calls our “global dark night of the soul?” I think he is. Right, that is. If you are considering ways to help save our world right now, this book is a must. 

P.S. I find that I am so drawn to this book that as I am organizing my notes from it, I’m falling into re-read parts that wowed me. Now that’s pull. 

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

Sometimes life feels like a slog
up a steep stairway like this one.
Others, the stairway path,
as Alpine as this is,
feels like a nothing.

What makes the difference? 

It all depends upon your
perspective. 

Namely,
If you think it’s hard,
it will be hard.
If you think it’s easy,
it will be easy. 

That’s up to you. 

Think about a situation
that feels like a long, hard slog.
What would make the difference? 

Good.
Now put that in play.
Try the stairs again. 

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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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P.S. There have been some inquiries about donations and tax deductions. Sanctuary, the organization which umbrellas all of my work is a 501(c)3, and donations are fully tax deductible. Donate here using this address via Paypal. Or send a check snail mail to: Sanctuary, 16 Van Gaasbeck Street, Kingston, NY 12401.