About Us

Rod Ensor is a team of two collaborating behaviorists, a network of professional associates, and a bit of the (borrowed) wisdom contained in what Jung called the collective subconscious.

 

He, a physician, research scientist, and manager of health systems for years. She, Aída Lucia Herrera, is wife, mother, friend, counselor, writer, a great cook, and a Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist. Shown here in a photo taken in 1993.

 

They have lived many interesting lives - a good part with the US Air Force's Aerospace Program; later in industry, and in private practice. They make their home in Los Angeles, California, returning often to San Juan, their birthplace, and to Salamanca, their spiritual home, where they began LinkedIntheir adult life while studying medicine.

Plaza Mayor de Salamanca

Their objective is to help bring about positive change to those who ask the right question. They help find the answers via personal contact in their clinical practice and through their books, writings, and chats, mostly tertulias. They use these means to share ideas and experiences; to stimulate thought and for intellectual challenge.

Forever amused by life, its ironies and requirements, they love a good time with family and with friends who can carry a decent conversation. It is life at its best.

Nobody will want to pick up a book that does not enlighten, entertain or thrill. If in the process, a Trojan Horse will open up at night and “good warriors” will steer enlightened minds of any age along paths of virtue and motivate growth by opening new options, so much the better.

Their aim is not so much for literary excellence as it is for telling good stories with a message that may lead us to insight without moralizing. It’s all about suggesting opportunities to discover id, ideas, places, and interesting characters, real and fictional. Magic realism is present in their fiction, often trading places with history, which one must understand to value it.

Without fully embracing their liberal philosophies, Rod Ensor tend to agree with Spain’s greatest thinkers, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Miguel de Unamuno to the extent and with the caveats  discussed.

To Ortega, man has a duty to question beliefs in order to promote new ideas and to explain reality. And, in order to accomplish such, one must leave behind prejudices and previously existing beliefs; and investigate the essential reality of the universe. Well said, but Ortega suggests that there is no “me” –ego and id– without “things,” and things are nothing without “me.” It is true that our nature resists detachment from our circumstances, false as they may be. Therein lies a major obstacle to enlightenment.

Unamuno, on the other hand, incarnates the spirit of modern Spain, a spirit that we have inherited –and that Rod Ensor also lived– the eternal conflict between faith and reason, between life and thought, between spirit and intellect, and between heaven and civilization –whatever they are. 

How do Rod Ensor deal with the conflict?  Achieving it has been their quest – and the beauty and value of the more spiritual thinkers that inspire them. Their work, some of it collected in this site, tries to elucidate it, within the constraints imposed by personal history and culture.

 

After writing “medical stuff” for years (research proposals and reports, etc.),  Ensor started writing fiction ―determined to vent; "to get the word out” ―not to the scientific community, but to the real people―el hombre de carne y hueso ― one way or the other. One thing followed another and after three published novels and a couple other pieces in the pipeline, here we are. It keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously, but most notably, it has enriched our tertulia, expanded our circle of friends and associates, and changed our worldview ―the Weltanschauung of German philosophers, or the cosmovisión of the Spanish thinkers.