Field Notes: Glimpse of life with dementia + David Whyte poem + do-then-rest visual reminder

"You must note / the way the soap dish enables you, / or the window latch grants you freedom."

Mountainous clouds on a day in the margins of winter and spring

Hello, dear friends,

Happy spring! We’re well into spring, supposedly, though it’s still clammy and frigid in New York. I find this pseudo-spring/winter to be the hardest season — the air is still chilled and my body feels constricted. I can’t wait for days like this one, “etched in sunlight,” as Billy Collins writes. Do you feel the seasonal difference in your body?

Here is this week’s Field Notes, 3 interesting things I’ve run across lately: something insightful, something you can do today, something to reread:

1} Something insightful: How dementia might feel

When someone you love has an illness, it’s hard to imagine what it feels like to live with it, even if you read thousands of words of explanations and clinical definitions. You need something more transportive, something more like a story, to allow a heartfelt glimpse.

Dementia is particularly difficult to convey, because of how it warps memory and communication. Nearly 1 in 10 people over age 65 have dementia in America, according to one study, as do more than a third of people age 90 and older.

Kimberly Mitchell offers a kaleidoscopic view of dementia in her affecting essay, “Who I Am,” in the journal Intima. Tidbit by tidbit, she lists the thoughts of Alice, who has dementia, and her family and care team, allowing us to see different sides of the same scene with compassion.

It gave me a better sense — and greater empathy — for what dementia could feel like.

Read “Who I Am.”

2} Something to do today:

Read “Everything is Waiting for You” by David Whyte.

Friends, this is one of my very favorite poems from the wondrous poet-philosopher David Whyte.

No matter where I am internally on a given day, this poem delights by reorienting the world.

It begins:

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
…

David goes on to describe the details of the world surrounding us, the way the cheerful objects and items are here helping us, the way the living creatures are doing their thing, and you are doing yours, and all is there for you.

To me, the poem cuts cleanly through all the noise and grime, the aches and irritations, and illuminates the ordinary beauty of our surroundings like a piercing ray.

Read the full poem here.

3} Something to remember:

I recently found the art of Britchida (through

Amy - The Tonic

— thanks, Amy!) and this reminder of the necessity of rest was so simple and compelling:

britchida

A post shared by @britchida

See more of Brit’s art here.

I hope you have a rest-do-rest-do-rest week ahead with moments of letting the soap dish, and all the wondrous things around us, enable you.

To our journeys,
Brianne