Ampersand Gazette #71

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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The Household Chores You’re Avoiding
Are Key to a Deeper Life

We have a modern-day obsession with efficiency. It wasn’t until I read “The Wisdom Way of Knowing,” by Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest, that I began to wonder if something was getting lost in our culture’s emphasis on time management.

In the book, Ms. Bourgeault describes her rationale for how she organized a retreat for participants seeking to deepen their spirituality: “We could have doubled the instructional time and hired out the cooking and chores. It would have been vastly more efficient. The only problem—at least if the road maps we were following are correct—is that none of the sacred alchemy would have taken place.”

Such an idea isn’t new; it finds its roots in many ancient spiritual traditions, including the  Benedictine monastic order. Indeed, it lies at the heart of the unofficial Latin motto of the Benedictines, “Ora et labora” (“pray and work”). Today, Benedictine communities could outsource their domestic labor with the proceeds from visitors who go on retreats in their monasteries—but they don’t.

On my recent visit to the Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine monastery, I asked one of the brothers why it was so important for them to hang on to their domestic responsibilities when most of us find them to get in the way of more fulfilling and meaningful pursuits. He responded that their labor was a form of their bodies praying, in that way strengthening their spirituality.

Ms. Bourgeault’s theory that we must activate and nourish all three modes of learning—mind, heart and body—allows us to deepen our wisdom and spirituality. Our minds need intellectual stimulation, our hearts need to grow in emotional awareness and empathy, and our bodies need to labor for the well-being of ourselves and others.

I now approach my domestic labor differently. While I used to consider the work I needed to do around the house utterly expendable, I now see it as integral for my and my family’s happiness. Through my body’s daily offering, I bear witness to the belief that my private sphere is just as worthy of my attention as my public sphere and that my inner life is just as worthy of my care and labor as my outer one. And with each sock I put away, I trust that a sacred alchemy is unfurling. 

Excerpted from an Opinion Essay by Rev. Lydia Sohn in The New York Times
“The Household Chores You’re Avoiding Are Key to a Deeper Life”
August 31, 2024 

I am always surprised when theologians divide things into threes. Oh, there’s a longstanding tradition of it, but it has never made sense to me. In this case, Rev. Sohn delineates mind, heart, and body. It can also be body, mind, spirit. 

Many years ago a dear friend of mine turned fifty, and realized that one of the ancient female threesomes—the Celtic maiden, mother, crone—didn’t work for her. Urban shaman Donna Henes then penned one of my all-time favorite books, The Queen of My Self, wherein she squared the triangle to be Maiden, Mother, Queen, Crone. 

I feel the same way about humans. The three-way divisions always leave out something important. That’s why I say humans are fourfold: body, heart, mind, and spirit. These four match perfectly the four elements that combine and recombine to create the forms of our reality.  

Body is Earth. Heart is Water. Mind is Air. Spirit is Fire. In order of densest to finest.  

Given that structure, I fully agree with Rev. Sohn’s premise even if she doesn’t stretch it far enough. All four parts of you need to pray when you pray. Just like all four parts of you are fed when you eat. 

Body prayer feels like the most radical, although it’s been a part of monastic tradition for centuries. It doesn’t matter if you’re helping a scared three-year-old with a scraped and bloody knee or having sex, honestly. Our bodies are holy, and we do them a disservice when we treat them like cars. 

Heart prayer touches your emotions. If you’ll think about it, the usual reason for prayer is that we feel crummy about something. Offering your less-than-swell feelings in prayer is a fast way to change them. You know by now my bottomline prayer: Change me or change this. That’s what I pray when I’m out of ideas. 

Mind prayer affects your intellect, most especially, your belief system. You know if the beliefs you hold work for you or if they don’t. You can tell from your feelings! But it’s the thoughts, and the beliefs they create, which create your feelings. Getting to the belief level of cause helps things change. 

Spirit prayer is a different animal altogether. For me, mostly it’s sitting in The Silence, not asking, not feeling, not thinking, not anything else but Being. It’s the communion of meditation. Sometimes called waiting upon the Lord in Christian circles, often a feeling will arise that nudges me in one direction or another during Spirit prayer, and all I need do is turn toward it to get the next step. For me, it’s how the plots of my books are born. 

I live with a remarkable teacher, my husband, Tony Amato. He’s the one who has shown me how maintaining the bits and bobs of life, socks, too, is valuable. I used to resent the time I had to spend maintaining myself and my home. Now, instead, I show up, and use it for prayer time. 

And you know what? The sheets get washed. The bed gets remade. The car gets inspected. The bills get paid. If I didn’t devote some part of myself and my time to these things, life would, rather quickly come to a standstill. That’s why Tony calls me the C-Alphabet-O. Because whatever shows up for me is what I show up for, too. 

The next time you’re crabby about maintenance chores, stop. Think of a prayer you need to pray for yourself or someone else. Then show up. It’ll go faster, be done better, and your world—and thus, ours—will be a better place for it. Sacred alchemy, indeed. 

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In Praise of Overstuffed Bookshelves

My husband reached retirement age this summer, but instead of actually retiring, he decided to stay on and teach part time. The only downside was his stuff. The books stymied us. Every bookcase in the house—and there are a lot of bookcases in this house—was already stuffed beyond budging.

Print is not dead in this house. We write in books. We dogear pages and underline passages and draw little stars in the margins. Before the objections commence, let me say that I am 100 percent in favor of every kind of reading there is: e-books, audiobooks, Braille books, graphic books, you name it. I’m for it all.

Whether a story or a poem or an essay or an argument comes in through your ears or your eyes or your fingertips doesn’t change the alchemy that happens in reading: the melding of writer and reader, one human heart in communion with another, and with all the others, past, present, and future, who have read the same book. That magic is unrelated to the delivery system of a text. It happens whenever and however a person reads.

When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.

By looking at our bookshelves, I can tell you who my husband was, too—the hardly-more-than-a-boy who read “A Brief History of Time” on our honeymoon, the young teacher who learned he was about to be a father by reading the inscription I wrote inside a copy of “The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America,” the doting son who memorized Irish toasts to please his aging father, who still had cousins back in the old country.

Our books ensure that I am still surrounded by all the selves I have ever been, and all the selves my mate has been, and the selves our children were when we held them in our laps and read aloud from the poetry collection I gave my husband when our oldest son was on the way. In that book are some of the same poems my father read aloud to me as a child.

I prefer the messy shelves, the dogeared pages, the notes inscribed in a familiar hand. Someday, a long time from now, a child may open a book of poems and find the note I wrote to her grandfather on the flyleaf: “For Haywood, to read aloud (beginning in about nine months).” Maybe she will save it, too. 

Excerpted from an Opinion Essay by Margaret Renkl in The New York Times
“In Praise of Overstuffed Bookshelves”
August 26, 2024 

I love books. I love reading them, of course, and I love writing them, even more. Books were my friends long before I had any others. One of the best things my mother ever did, in my opinion, was to put no limits on what I read. If I could lay my hands on it, I could read it. Yes, it means a lot of books totally whiffed me, but that is beside the point. 

I too write in books, especially books that I am learning from. Stars in the margins—oh, yeah. Underscores. Highlights. Exclamation points! Sometimes snark. You name it, I’ve written in it—including in my personal copy of the Bible. I buy all kinds of used books, and I love to see what others have highlighted in them. 

Tony doesn’t like to read books with the notes of others in them. He wants to have his own thoughts about the texts first. It’s just another way to read. Everyone has their own reading preferences.  

One of my few good memories from high school is sitting in my bedroom with my best friend, Sara, both of us rapt in whatever we were reading, and no, it wasn’t schoolwork, in total, comfortable silence. Delicious. 

One of the things the publishing marketing wizards say is that one must have an ideal reader when writing books. I disagree. Maybe I need an ideal reader when marketing books, I’ll give you that, but when writing? No. When writing, the alchemy happens between the author and the story. When reading, another kind of alchemy happens between the author and her reader.  

It’s the alchemy that has me intrigued. The word comes to us through late Middle English: via Old French and medieval Latin from Arabic al-kīmiyā', from al ‘the’ + kīmiyā' (from Greek khēmia, khēmeia ‘art of transmuting metals’). Allegedly, the practice of alchemy was about turning lead into gold. 

I think alchemy is what goes on every day when one thing becomes another through human action. A bunch of flowers becomes an arrangement. A pile of words becomes a sentence. A basket of ingredients becomes dinner. I could go on and on and on. 

Alchemy is part of what metaphysicians call manifesting. Turning ideas—say, a perfect holiday dinner—into form, following the guidance that gets you to that result. That’s why I love writing. In fact, I’m happiest and the most myself when I am writing. 

So where do you practice your best alchemy? Are you doing it regularly? Bravo! If you’re not, is it time to make some time for alchemy? My best venue for alchemy is books. Writing them, reading them, sharing them, shelving them, and even donating them. 

What’s yours? I ask because you must not doubt for even a second that we need it. We do. Because your alchemy is uniquely yours, and without it the world will be a poorer, sadder place, which means, of course, that with it, the world is a richer, happier place, and ain’t that grand. 

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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 … I am thrilled to be able to show you my new banners for fiction and nonfiction.

A BIG SHOUT-OUT and BUCKETS OF HAPPY GRATITUDE … to those who have read Oklahoma! Hex. I met the goal I needed, so on Friday the 13th of September, I did a huge promotion of The Mex Mysteries to 637,000 households all over the world. Here’s one of the amazing results: 

That’s right. Oklahoma! Hex is number one on an Amazon Bestseller list, so that makes me a #1 Amazon Bestselling Author. And isn’t that a wow? 

If you haven’t read it (or Jezebel Rising, or Attending Physician—the three permafree books that start three of my fiction series,) would you please? Go on Amazon, “purchase” a freebie, and post a sentence or two.  

Reviews really are the engine that powers the career of an indie author.  

It’s quite exciting to be on one Amazon Bestseller List, let alone three, and my books are! Oklahoma! Hex and Gemma Eclipsing remain on the Top 100 Metaphysical Fiction List, and Gemma is still on Women’s Historical Fiction, and Historical Literary Fiction.

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My top secret series now has a name that I can reveal to you here. It’s called: 

It’s an alternative retelling of the AIDS crisis with one major historical revision, that being that humanity, instead of doing what it actually did, which was a tsunami of devastation to a whole generation of creative people, chose to do the right thing. I’m already over 78,000 words into Book One of the eight-book series, and one morning last week, Spirit woke me up, told me to get the hell out of bed, and start Book Two!!! That’s never happened to me before. 

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I am always amazed at the variety of work that clients bring to my husband, Tony Amato, book editor, book coach, or, as he calls himself, bookhusband, and here I’ll add (because he never would,) extraordinaire.  

Once when I’d been stuck in one book for more than a few years, a sit-down conversation with him renewed my investment, gave me energy and purpose once again to finish the book, and I (finally) sailed through it. 

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. 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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I very rarely recommend books whilst I am still reading them, but in this case, I had to make an exception. Here’s the blurb from Amazon (which I also could not resist—can you blame me?): 

“Who Cooked the Last Supper? overturns the phallusy of history and gives voice to the untold history of the world: the contributions of millions of unsung women.
“Men dominate history because men write history. There have been many heroes, but no heroines. Here, in Who Cooked the Last Supper?, is the history you never learned—but should have!
“Without politics or polemics, this brilliant and witty book overturns centuries of preconceptions to restore women to their rightful place at the center of culture, revolution, empire, war, and peace. Spiced with tales of individual women who have shaped civilization, celebrating the work and lives of women around the world, and distinguished by a wealth of research, Who Cooked the Last Supper? redefines our concept of historical reality.”  

Yes, it does, and … when I read Gerda Lerner’s great treatise, The Creation of Patriarchy, one thing that left me stammering was that we women don’t know our own history because it was deemed too unimportant to record it. As a result, we have had to reinvent the wheel over and over and over and over again. Did I say over and over again? 

That’s not totally so for women my age and younger, but it hit me hard in the gut when I read it. No wonder we have constantly felt the need to overexplain, justify, and defend our choices. This book is rollicking fun, yes, but also a sober witness to all that has not been recorded of half the history of more than half the human race. 

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

Think of something you read lately.
Anything.
The newspaper.
A blog.
A book.
A meme.
A post.
Anything. 

Did something inspire you?
Good.
Dwell on it, be grateful for it, enjoy it,
sit with it, cook it inside you.
Share it with someone. 

Inspiration can come from anywhere.
Instead of consuming it
(since we’ve been taught we’re consumers)

Instead of that … relish it
Doodle it
Draw it
Paint it
Write it on your hand
In the margin
On the blackboard. 

INSPIRATION
is what keeps us happy, curious, interested
and engaged in life. 

SEEK IT.
FIND IT.
KEEP IT.
SHARE IT. 

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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