research｜read the literature on the mental state of the patient's family｜reading poetry
- isziiis
- Nov 16, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Dec 6, 2022
Mental and physical illness in caregivers: results from an English national survey sample
Facts about carers
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2003-05349-011
Differences between caregivers and noncaregivers in psychological health and physical health: A meta-analysis.
The Scottish Poetry Library will host an exhibition of paintings and poetry, combining nature, poetry and translation.
Being
Don Paterson
Silent comrade of the distances, Know that space dilates with your own breath; ring out, as a bell into the Earth from the dark rafters of its own high place –
then watch what feeds on you grow strong again. Learn the transformations through and through: what in your life has most tormented you? If the water’s sour, turn it into wine.
Our senses cannot fathom this night, so be the meaning of their strange encounter; at their crossing, be the radiant centre.
And should the world itself forget your name say this to the still earth: I flow. Say this to the quick stream: I am.
After Rilke
Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors
Tools of the Trade is a pocket-sized anthology of around 50 poems, to help think about compassion and about personal resilience in the challenging situations faced by all junior doctors.
It is edited by doctors, includes poems by doctor-poets, and the first edition was made possible entirely by private donations, many from GPs or their families, and the support of permission holders for the poems included; the second and third editions are also supported by the Royal College of General Practitioners in Scotland, and The Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland.
A Tight-Rope Act
Holding our breath
in apprehension,
we grasp life.
Listening for Lost People
Still looking for lost people – look unrelentingly. ‘They died’ is not an utterance in the syntax of life where they belonged, no belong – reanimate them not minding if the still living turn away, casually. Winds ruck up its skin so the sea tilts from red-blue to blue-red: into the puckering water go his ashes who was steadier than these elements. Thickness of some surviving thing that sits there, bland. Its owner’s gone nor does the idiot howl – while I’m unquiet as a talkative ear. Spring heat, a cherry tree’s fresh bronze leaves fan out and gleam – to converse with shades, yourself become a shadow. The souls of the dead are the spirit of language: you hear them alight inside that spoken thought.
by Denise Riley
from Say Something Back (London: Picador, 2016) https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/listening-lost-people/
‘Keeping and forgetting time…’
Gael Turnbull
Keeping and forgetting time, my pulse to your pulse, rhythm and rhyme
The Art of Listening
Veronica Aaronson
Hunt out wild flowers, reach out, not to pick them but as an offer of intimacy. Stay open-hearted, don’t put your ear to the ground to listen for sap or soil, instead tune into the words written between the lines – visible in the way bluebell, pink campion, stitchwort 以风信子、
粉红坎皮恩、缝线草 offer up their secrets, have made themselves vulnerable against pale and dark greens. This is an offering – last chance to hear this moment’s prayer.
a book of water
Thomas A. Clark
Healings 2
Kathleen Jamie
At midnight the north sky is blues and greys, with a thin fissure of citrine just above the horizon. It’s light when you wake, regardless of the hour. At 2 or 4 or 6am, you breathe light into your body. A rose, a briar rose. A wild rose and its thorned stem. What did Burns say? ‘you seize the flo’er, the bloom is shed’. To be healed is not to be saved from mortality, but rather, released back into it: we are returned to the wild, into possibilities for ageing and change.
Beannacht / Blessing
John O’Donohue
For Josie, my mother
On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you.
And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of loss gets into you, may a flock of colours, indigo, red, green and azure blue, come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays in the currach of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours, may the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life.
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