Changing the world one love note at a time has always looks like this.

I spent the weekend before last with my parents, an unexpected gift of canceled flights and generous coordination by my sister and sister-in-law. The weekend was an opportunity to shift to the pace of my parents' gait and memory.

My dad spends a lot of time in detailed accounting through snippets of stories from his growing-up years, an unexpected gift of dementia. He regularly repeats stories, unaware of his audience and or their attention. My parents' world is, like mine, created from their memories and the horizon they gaze toward; it is a world all their own, punctuated briefly with encounters with the worlds of those around them.

To connect with my parents is to find a bridge in the liminal space between our worlds; it requires slowing to the pace of care. It's part adventure and part a practicality to find ways to connect with them. 

After visiting with my parents, I listened to Rebecca Solnit in conversation with the New York Times where she reminds us that despair and amnesia go hand in hand, as do hope and memory. Meaning, we don't have to rely just on our own sense of what was to define what could be. We can source the memories of others and the memory of our past selves to guide us away from despair and towards hope, as a method for finding a new horizon.

My parents' horizon is short. They talk of their inevitable death and how they want to live between now and that unknowable death date. 

In this same conversation, Solnit says, "Changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. But too many people still expect it to look like war." 

Changing the world one love note at a time is the tag line of LoveYou2, the horizon being one filled with connection, love notes mapping the space between us. 

Fences and bulletin boards are one type of horizon I'm constantly scanning for the opportunity to surprise, to disrupt, to shift a gaze.

Love notes redirect the gaze through invitation and resonance.  

My dad's stories are a kind of memory I can enter, if I slow down enough. Love notes are memory artifacts, too. Small yet undeniable proof that someone was here, that a bid for connection happened, that the space between us can be filled with connection rather than fear. 

We've been practicing this together, you and I. 

Changing the world one love note at a time has always meant: care is the horizon.

What care-full horizon might you create?

Take good care,

Shannon Weber