The Rough Rock Project: Love and Truth

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. 

Tao of K-drama: The Rough Rock Project

In Season 3 of Dr. Romantic, teacher/philosopher Dr. Kim Sabu, speaking as images of disaster scroll past, says: 

Abnormal climate, natural disasters, the climate is rapidly changing for the worse, forest fires, earthquakes, and wars. Many unexpected incidents, accidents, and man-made disasters. We will be engulfed in these suddenly and without warning. At this point the world has become a place where, no matter what happens, we wouldn't find it surprising. Now, we have to prepare for that kind of world. Our Rough Rock Project will become the cornerstone for that. 

During the season, various people pause to look at notebooks labeled "Rough Rock Project," but it is a loose thread that is never tied up -- maybe something that will be taken up in Season 4, should we be so lucky. I found the proposition irresistible -- that our work is to prepare for a world in which nothing, however outlandish and horrifying, would surprise us. 

Whether we are surprised or not, we will have to name the things that are happening. Listening with friends and family to Donald Trump's inaugural address today, we heard a long series of policies he plans to implement that run counter to the kinds of acts that would prepare us to meet the unexpected. Perhaps chief among them was his pledge to "Drill, baby, drill." 

As one colleague remarked, that is running towards Death -- Sigmund Freud noted that EROS and THANATOS form a major dialectic in human life. This offers a useful frame for the emphasis on LOVE offered by the clergy gathered with Bishop William Barber to respond to the inaugural address. 

Teacher/philosopher Dr, Kim represents passionate and uncompromising love for his patients, colleagues, hospital and community. He is completely committed to the fight against death -- he is ready to operate on a woman with dementia, and cries when she says she just wants to sleep. He demands this level of commitment from his team, as well. Older surgeons from Seoul are terrified by what they see as his recklessness. Their practice is to avoid malpractice charges by walking away when patients have little chance of survival. 

Dr. Kim doesn't see it that way: he wants to take the risk, because the patient might live, and he is dedicated to that. This commitment is what brings him to the new Rough Rock Project, as the path to survival will be made complicated by the unexpected. Just as the trauma center, founded on sound study of surgical and emergency procedure, is the outcome of the Cornered Stone Project, some new way of organizing and thinking will be the outcome of the new project. I am with Alathe, the Dramabeans recapper, who wrote:

But highs and lows aside, I still get shivers down my spine when our doctors race to the OR in determined slowmo! And so, against all better judgement, I’m invoking the jinx. It sure is quiet here without a Season 4, huh? (Somewhere, perhaps, a distant studio executive’s phone rings…)

I do hope there's a Season 4, which lays out the Rough Rock Project.

But I don't think that lets me or any of us off the hook -- Dr. Kim is talking about the world in which we live -- all of us. And therefore, the Rough Rock Project has plenty of room for us to join. How is Rough Rock different from Cornered Stone? What tools are the tools for worldwide levels of destruction and upheaval beyond any we've ever seen? These are open questions, left for all of us to take to heart and to our offices so we can do the work -- the work of being on the side of LOVE and LIFE for all.