Training four new Living Words team members gives me a gift I wasn’t expecting. I am witnessing the work in action on mass and it enables me to see its corners. I see the trust in the process that the writer has to ‘hand over’ to sit with a person. I see how speedily connections are made and bonds are built. I see the big difference between waiting and being; to do the work you have to just be and if the listen out loud technique is followed, an outcome is inevitable (most of the time!). It’s that trust again. I see how open and fierce the writers need to be. I see the love and commitment. When we come together for our reflection time, each new member of the team uses the word ‘privilege’ in relation to the experience of working one to one with these individuals who are experiencing a dementia. Looking back at a journal from my early days doing Living Words, I see this word repeated over and over by me. Today I feel privileged to be enabling more people to do this work, so more people will be able to participate.
This Re:New training process has the care home days punctuated by rehearsal room reflection. I am so thankful to the new team, they each have both feet in the circle as we all share our fears, joys and concerns. We have our spades out and we are here to dig. We have our journals to read from and our work to share. But we are digging for questions. Digging to open up this enquiry. Digging to reveal the big stuff.
One of our trainees has a back problem following an operation, with migraines on top. Sadly, she has had to pull out of the project, for now. Self-care is paramount to this work and Katherine is very aware of this. We will keep in touch throughout the process and the team will welcome her with open arms on her return. Katherine generously shares her journaling, her digging with the group. Her questions, reflections and searching feed in to the mix of the group reflection. And Bojana has arrived to join us all, a new trainee with a new energy and enquiry of her own. Today, Bojana mainly listens and responds, soaking up who we are and how far this small group has come in just two weeks.
The questions that come up today are around endings, responsibility, self-care and boundaries; sexuality and loneliness; editing and internal/external personal narrative; the desire to learn more about dementia. My colleague Danuta Lipinska will be coming to our session next week, to talk about dementia and the brain, and as luck will have it she is currently writing a book on sexuality and dementia. This means Danuta is well placed to answer and respond to the trainees questions and concerns around this area too. We have a very small ‘library’ of books to read from and we are all encouraged to follow our own reading trail around this topic and to share findings in our journals and recommendations with the group.
We are writing our questions on paper with felt pen and laying them round the room. A bit of open space work, to help with the dig. We will continue digging each week, using this method more and more. One of my questions I voice out loud is ‘Will I ever be able to write ‘proper’ grammar again, after so much time doing this work?!’ It is part tongue in cheek, part serious. The self-expression through words of many of the people we work with is ordered to make sense in a non-sense grammatical way. It is ‘poetic’, but it sits amongst prose.
The time for our session disappears in the flow of the collective dig.
We close the session by watching two films – two films that show people at possible and unimaginable counterpoints of living with a dementia. Here are the links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf8Z4Qsjxzk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrZXz10FcVM
Simplistically put, the people we are working with during this project are somewhere between the two.
In my journal is scraps of paper from books, newspapers plus my questions and reflections, my fears laid bare. Here I’m a bit more shy. This publishing blog business is a bit scary for all of us. But I’m intrigued to see how we open up on here. We might have to come up with a formula, a framework for blogging. We might need to get our hands in the soil and chuck it onto the screen.
Susanna Howard