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“‘Rarely is there a health care organization that is able to say that we value your well-being as health care providers above our productivity,’ Dr. Becher said recently.”

From an article by Oliver Whang in The New York Times
“A Rural Doctor Gave Her All. Then Her Heart Broke.”
September 19, 2022

The story of the rural doctor who gave her all, and then developed, quite literally, a broken heart is moving, of course, but what grabbed me about this article, which put a human face on a dreadful phenomenon in the world of doctoring and hospitals was the quote above. If a healthcare organization can’t value the people who quite literally provide their product, how is it that we could allow ourselves to think, even for a moment, that the same organization would value its patients (who are also known as customers)?

The short answer is: they don’t. They don’t because, given the business models they’ve chosen to create and follow, they can’t.

And it’s not just one overworked rural doctor.

I lost my Boston-based corporate doctor recently, someone who I have valued and cared about for many years, due to the same administrative grind that the rural doc suffered. Her responses to me, through “the portal”—because God forbid I should be able to call and talk to my doctor if I needed/wanted—got shorter and terser, not sounding at all like the down-to-earth, matter-of-fact, and deeply caring physician that she is. I knew she’d had a tough personal situation as well, but that, along with the extraordinary pressures of primary care set my physician up, not only for burnout, but to prevent her from practicing medicine in a way that her own patients would recognize.

It's not a matter of healthcare, Beloved, not really. It’s a matter of priorities. And, in the United States, right now this minute, the top (and seemingly only) priority of healthcare is to make a profit. Oh, and I suppose, as an adjunct, to avoid lawsuits.

I turn sixty-five in a few days, and so I’ve spent much of the last business quarter attempting to square away Medicare and its ridiculously complicated accoutrements so that my insurance coverage would be contiguous. It turned out that it couldn’t—because I was unwilling to pay double the price of the previous insurer for one month of coverage—so I was without insurance for September. (And, I’ll have you know, re-boosted by a vaccine courtesy of the U.S. government.)

I’ve thought a lot about priorities as I’ve been slogging, and I do mean slogging, through the morass of Medicare offerings. Not healthcare’s priorities, but mine. What do I want with regard to my healthcare? My health insurance?

It’s not a question most of us ask, but I think, if we want healthcare that really qualifies as healthCARE—you’ll note my emphasis—we need to be asking it. It took me quite a while to come upon a satisfactory answer.

Here’s my answer: I want a healthCARE provider who works for me—the patient. I manage my own health, and I do it really well. I want a provider who’ll help me do that, not one who’ll override the wisdom available through my own experience of my own body. I’m also very tired of managing the feelings of my physicians—mostly their fear. I have enough of my own, thanks.

My new insurance kicks in today—it’s October 1st as I write this—and only now am I “allowed” to begin to seek a new primary care doctor. The broken-hearted rural doctor and the total personality transplant my own doctor sustained have combined into healthCARE clarity for me. I’m planning on interviewing physicians to see if they can practice the way I need them to care for me.

Somehow, the clarity means the prospect of finding a new doc isn’t as daunting. What do you need/want in your healthCARE, Beloved? Give it a thought. When we all begin to state our real needs to the healthcare industry, they’ll have to listen. How do I know? It’ll affect their bottom line, and that’s what speaks to them.

&

“I broke things off with the man I’ve been dating for eight months. He is a wonderful person, but we couldn’t make our relationship work. Because of Covid, we quickly decided to date exclusively, and that created an illusion of intimacy that never really existed. My conundrum: I am very drawn to a man my ex introduced me to and with whom he works. (They are both musicians.) I know my interest is reciprocated, but I don’t want to damage their friendship or steal my ex’s joy in making music with his friend. What should I do?

EX-GIRLFRIEND

“Let’s come back to the ‘bro code’ later. I would rather focus on you. Often, when we’re in the wrong relationship, what looks right to us—from the vantage of things not working—can be off the mark. We tend to overcorrect for the qualities that bothered us, jumping from withholding to smothering, for instance, or vice versa.

“Now, you say you moved too quickly the last time. So, slow down! There is no rush here. Take some palate-cleansing time on your own before you think about dating again. Get back to the stand-alone version of you. That’s the best position for considering who or what may enhance your life.

“If you still want to pursue your ex’s friend in a few months, talk to him then. He may reciprocate your interest but not want to jeopardize his work or friendship with your ex. Or he may be keen to date. There’s no reason to let an eight-month relationship rule your life, but you will be doing everyone a favor—especially yourself—by taking a beat to reset before starting something new.”

Philip Galanes, The New York Times’ Social Q’s columnist
“I Broke Up with My Boyfriend. Can I Date His Bandmate?
September 25, 2022

“Taking a beat to reset.” How many times have you skipped that step in your life? I’ve done it hundreds of times, and honestly, I’ve always regretted it. Always.

Not only that but, usually it means that I have created a messy clean-up that I have to do because I didn’t wait and let the silt settle before wading into whatever pond it was.

Mr. Galanes is talking about reactivity really, and only tangentially about rebounding. It’s a principle that an Aikido Master diligently follows.

When an Aikido Master is attacked by Person Plum, the Master deals with Person Plum. If Person Peach attacks whilst she is still dealing with Person Plum, she, according to proper Aikido practice, finishes with Person Plum, returns to self, and only then takes on Person Peach.

The person who taught me this further explained that if the Master does not return to herself before dealing with Person Peach, she leaves twenty percent of herself with Plum. Well, it doesn’t take a mathlete to figure out that five people later, the Master has nothing left of herself. At some level, we all know this. Even the extroverts.

What does that reset do? It brings all of us back into our own power, for one. It lets us finish things, for two. It lets us bring fresh eyes to whatever’s next, for three. It helps us remember where we start and end and where others start and end. I could go on, but you’ll already have grasped my meaning. The return to self. The reset is the pause that refreshes.

I actually believe that skipping the reset is what’s hugely responsible for most of the energy leaks we experience. Mostly because we leave unfinished business all around us. I recently taught an hour’s class at OneSpirit Learning Alliance on How To Be A Chakra Detective, and the thing we focused on was energy leaks.

A lot of energy leaks happen through our own mouths. For real. We say things we don’t mean, or only half mean, or to be nice, and we don’t take the time to reset. Instead we rehearse our own difficulties by telling all our friends about the “bad” thing that happened, when, if we’ll just take the moment to return to self, we can nip most of those bad feelings in the bud.

Energy leaks, because of our social contract to be nice, are going to happen, but how we deal with them is up to us.

P. S. I’m working on creating a Tiny Course—one that’s less than two hours of teaching—on how to deal with energy leaks. If you’re interested, please let me know. Go here and send me your information.

&

“I saw a picture of the royal corgis waiting for their queen’s funeral procession, and my cold American heart melted just a tiny bit.

“Those sad corgis sent me to my bookcase thinking of a line at the beginning of “The Uncommon Reader,” a moving and hilarious novella by the British playwright Alan Bennett: “It was the dogs’ fault.”

“I read the book again that night. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, unreadable by monarchical design, was never as real to me as Mr. Bennett’s out-of-touch sovereign who falls in love with reading very late in life, just in time to become a compassionate human being, a fully human human being. Here was a queen I could mourn.

“This is what great writing has always done for readers. It can transport us and delight us, yes, but it can also open our hearts. “Books are not about passing the time,” the royal convert declares. “They’re about other lives. Other worlds.” The only real way to walk in another person’s shoes is to read another’s person’s story.”

… “Great fiction is a lie that teaches us the truth.”

Margaret Renkl in an Opinion Essay from The New York Times
“The Joy of Finding People Who Love the Same Books You Do”
September 26, 2022

If you’ve been reading these pages for any length of time, you already know that Margaret Renkl, the nature essayist from Nashville who writes Opinion for The New York Times is one of my favorites. Her insights into nature—not my milieu at all—touch me in almost every essay.

But this one touched a much deeper nerve than nature ever does.

“Great fiction is a lie that teaches us the truth.” I’ve said it for years, to be exact 25 years, ever since I started writing fiction. But that’s not really a surprise, is it? I started my professional life in the theatre, which is the champion of lies. It purports to show us something that is happening now, and then replicates that same thing eight times a week.

I have been familiar with great lies since I taught myself to read at age three. There is something quite mesmerizing about fiction—for my money, it allows me to try on worlds that I might never inhabit this time around. It also allows me to keep what I want from those worlds and leave the rest.

I’d never in a million years want a passel of corgis at my feet, but the swirl and the heaviness of ermine around my shoulders? Bring it.

“The only real way to walk in another person’s shoes is to read another person’s story.” There is a deep and significant truth in that, especially since one cannot literally take on the entirety of another person’s life, even with the best of intentions.

There is a huge taradiddle in the fiction world these days about the need for writers to write only characters that match their own identity. Implicit is: any people who are not us people, keep your literary imagination off. I so thoroughly disagree with this that I could literally get rabid over it.

Because this would mean, strictly in my own life:

No Gareth in The Mex Mysteries—I’m not a gay man.
No Butch Brigade in The Boots & Boas Romances—for sure I’m no butch lesbian.
No William Chester Babbitt in The Subversive Lovelies—I’m not a police officer, I’m not a father.

In fact, my darlings, there are a whole lot of things I’m not that I write about … so that I can learn about who and what they are.

Shonda Rimes cheerfully states upfront in her book, A Year of Yes, (which if you’ve not read, you might consider it; it’s delicious) that she lies for a living.

Me, too. I also help people heal, not strangely, through that very same ability to lie. You see, for forty years people have been coming to me to ask for help with their problems. What do I do? I listen to their stories. Then, we rewrite their stories to give a different, more fulfilling meaning to that very same narrative. And we call it: healing.

So think very carefully about all the great lies you’ve read in fiction, Beloved, because I’d bet my quarter (Mex’s top bet; mine, too) that someone who wasn’t that—whatever that was—wrote their story.

And we all healed happily ever after.

Which is, of course, what Ampersand living is all about. Note that little word: all.

&

And in publishing news …

Well, Beloved, when it rains, it pours! Wait till you hear ALL this!!!

It took much longer than 525,600 minutes—625 days, to be exact, which is, for inquiring minds who want to know 900,000 minutes—to get the lyric reprint rights for Rent, but thanks to all sorts of people, wizards, faeries, witches, and sundry mensches, I signed the contract four days ago!

So I am happy to announce that Susan Corso's Rent Rx, the 9th book of The Mex Mysteries, is up for preorder here, and will drop on October 5th! Here's the blurb ...

Rent Rx

La vie bohème is under threat when Mex shows up to say, I’ll cover you.

Mexicali Rose—Mex to her friends—is 525,600 tears into deep grieving when Sergeant Michael Ryan Kelley calls in an attempt to re-light her candle. He needs her intuitive expertise on an international drug case spanning New York City up the Hudson River to Albany and beyond.

A cast member of a performing arts high school tour of Rent is dead. Mex is about to say good-bye love to her grief when a passel of unidentified agents rings the doorbell of her midtown office; it’s become a federal case.

When the opioid crisis moves way too close to home, Kelley has to pull strings to arrange a place for a dear one in a very special, gay rehab run by the eternally fabulous Sisters of Never-Ending Reciprocity. A new approach based on the labyrinth pulls the whole team into their own rehabilitation.

Will the seasons of love win out, or will they all lose their dignity forever?

The Mex Mysteries are romantic mysteries with a supernatural twist. Think Outlander’s Claire Fraser meets Mary Russell Holmes and Mrs. Emily Pollifax. Now add a spiritual basis and a musical theatre setting.

As always, your support for this indie authorpreneur is much appreciated!

&

I had already planned to drop my new series on my birthday, so if a new Mex isn’t enough, Jezebel Rising, Book 1 of The Subversive Lovelies has been up for preorder and drops October 12th. This is the historical fiction I didn’t know I needed to write.

Here is the introduction to the series:

Everyone knows that long before trends are established enough to be noticed,
someone always goes first.
Four sisters—variations on Eleanor Roosevelt, Sarah Bernhardt, Jane Addams, and Oscar Wilde—they’re teachers, sponsors, fairy godmothers, referees,
nannies, midwives, coaches, besties, double-darers,
and the aunties every single one of us wished we’d always had.
The Subversive Lovelies seed change, passion, healing, and power wherever they go.
The Subversive Lovelies are historical fiction with a speculative twist.

And the book-specific blurb …

Jezebel Rising—

someone always goes first

Four sisters. Four buildings. Four visions of what women can—and need—to be, do, and have.

Jezebel is the youngest of the Bailey sisters. Yes, that Bailey of Barnum &— fame. Heiresses to multimillions of their father’s nouveau riche wealth, the four have been raised in direct antithesis to the fainting flowers of womanhood to be found in the notoriously fickle, corrupt Gilded Age Society in which they live.

These women think for themselves, dream big, speak up, and take no prisoners. Four towering yellow-brick buildings on Chelsea’s 23rd Street across from turn-of-the-century Manhattan’s Millionaire’s Row inspire Jezebel to propose that the four go eyes-wide-open into the business of vice to mask their real purposes, their true callings, their nefarious agendas, their mystical imaginings—to answer and fulfill the four real greatest needs of women in their generation.

Their journey takes them deep into The Tenderloin, that vice-iest of downtown neighborhoods. There they navigate the machinations of Tammany Hall, the dreaded slums of Five Points, the gangsters of the Lower West Side, the relentless tide of ongoing, daily despair in their charges, and a greater emergency than they’ve ever faced in their lives as they pull together to dream, create, inspire, and train their team to profit from who they’re really meant to be.

Will Jezebel’s faith in herself, her sisters, and their visions be justified or will all four and their team be vanquished by the social forces ranged against them because of who they are?

If you’d like to make a girl’s birthday even better … by all means, settle down with the new Mex and Jezebel Rising …

&

As if two books in two weeks isn’t enough … THERE’S MORE!

And, because it took so very long to get the Rent rights, I’ve already written Book 10 of The Mex Mysteries! Within a week or so, I ought to have it up on Amazon for pre-order as well. It will drop on November 1st—just in time for gifting your favorite mystery reader.

Here’s the blurb for …

Christmas Presence

Jacob Marley isn’t the only one rattling his chains this holiday season.

Mexicali Rose—Mex to her friends—is directing this year’s cash cow production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to raise money for a major cathedral renovation in upper Manhattan. But Scrooge can’t remember his lines, the sky is increasingly visible through the church ceiling, and Mex is chained to a miserly budget of $100 for the whole shebang.

While Mex is deep in placing, costuming, lighting, and taming Phantoms, Fezziwigs, and Cratchits galore, there’s a ghostly wisp of financial impropriety. Mex’s trusty assistant, Gareth B. Hawkins, takes lead on the case to stop the threat to thwart the holiday generosity they’re all counting on to bless them, every one.

Will Mex close this case and find a miracle or two way north of 34th Street, or will the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come leave them all in a holiday humbug?

&

In addition to all the book news, I’ve been diligently doing podcasts for the Energy Integrity Workbooks (I’ll tell you more in the next issue), and I’m thinking of the First of the New Year for starting a first cohort of students who want to learn to do the chakra work I do.

In rough outline, the class will take students through all eight chakras, learning their own chakra systems, so that in the final four months of the year, they will apply their knowledge to helping others to heal through chakra work.

I’m relatively certain that the cohort will be intimate, deliberate on my part, so that I can make adjustments to the teaching as I go. It will involve two two-hour teaching calls per month, and one private coaching call for an hour per month. Plus whatever time the student dedicates to study outside our times together.

By the end, I intend that each student will be able to work with others and the chakras. If this is calling to you, please go here and send me a message.

Let me leave you with these words of Miguel de Cervantes (29 Sep 1547-1616) noted on Anu Garg’s A.W.A.D.

Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!

Nah, give me life as it should be anytime! It’s called fiction.

Till next time, be ampersand, Beloved,

S.