I had cataract surgery today (first of two) and watching K-drama was impossible. Netflix only offers Korean dramas, which makes sense because that's all I watch. But with a bandage over one eye that is too big to allow me to wear my glasses, I can't read the sbtitles. I needed a movie in English, something I didn't really need to see and certainly didn't need to read. I went to "search" and Netflix offered The Guernsey Literary and Potto Peel Pie Society, a great favorite of mine. It seemed perfect.
the thought was not in my mind that GLPPS would offer insights into the Rough Rock Project -- RRP. I don't even know what the RRP is. This is the true definition of "beginner's mind," that state the Buddhist's suggest we should always hold on to, this state of not knowing. I was describing the effort to understand the reapir of society when we faced the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. The core of it was that we -- Jen,Lourdes and I -- didn't know what it was, so we asked everyone we knew, we batted ideas around, we read. And we worked from points that we could establish -- truths, if that is not too radical a term in the age of T2, aka 47. One of the truths was the organizations are the mesh of cities -- might we be able to ask organizations of al kinds to integrate social and emotional caretaking in to the work that they were going to do anyway? Not new work, but slightly reconceptualized work, like a Christmas Party, that included a healing element or a grocery sale that emphasized vegetables over comfort food. Things like that.
In the case of the Rough Rock Project -- RPP -- it occurred to me that GLPPS was showing me how people got through a very hard time, and how they regrouped in the aftermath of that. It was like waking up and realizing I was in the middle of technical lecture on recovery and restoration and I was supposed to be taking notes.
The alarm bell was the line, "Elizabeth knew that we really needed was connection."
Oh.
If divide and conquer is the core process of American governance, then connection is constantly, always the antidote. What we really need is connection. It starts, I think, at the level of daily life. I was floored. y this beautiful quote from Mirabai Starr that appeared in Father Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation:
One of the things it means to be an ordinary mystic is to bow at the feet of your everyday existence, with its disappointments and dramas, its peaceful mornings and luminous nights, and to honor yourself just as you are…. A mystic finds the magic in the midst of the nitty-gritty, the crusty spaghetti sauce pot in the sink and the crocus poking out of a spring snowfall, the unsigned divorce papers on the kitchen table and the results of your latest blood work on your computer screen.
If I connect with my own everyday, then I can connect with other people's everyday. A friend asked me if I had decided on near or far lenses. I had forgotten that was a defining characteristic of what was to be in my eye from now on. So I called her after the surgery to say "near" and she said "of course," Because I have to read so many things, like subtitles, food labels, The New York Times. The miracle of my own everyday was pretty miraculous today and I needed to say to someone else that it was so.
Connections grow, as we know, because things spiral, mushroom, blossom, expand. And that would be a ghood yellow line in the Connections game.
And so, as T@ swirls around us, it is essential to find the wonderful in the day and tell it to somone else. It may seem silly and small, but it's potential for getting us through in the best possible shape is much greater that chagging off in desperate little groups to fight every little thing -- T@ can cause chaos much faster than we can fix and the real target of the chaos is our connection. So let us protect that, restore that, honor that, dedicate ourselves to that.
That is my first conribution to the Rough Rock Project, as a result of my interesting day.
ps. I can't see well enought to fix the typos. I might just leave them as part of the story of today, January 22, 2025.
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