Rhena Writes

Category: Uncategorized

  • Untethering from Social Media

    I deleted Facebook years ago and Twitter a few after that. A few weeks ago, I the last of my social media apps: the mostly image-based Instagram and their partner text-based Threads. Social media, the whole of the internet, is, I believe, mostly a gift to the world. But my brain, my whole person was formed before the internet, much less social media, existed. In other words, I’m not equipped for handling it. My mind simply doesn’t move fast enough to keep up and, in attempting to, I was doing damage. It was as if I was lining up on the track next to Florence Griffith Joyner each and every day and expecting myself to keep up. My hamstrings – nay my whole body would have taken a beating if I ever even dreams of going up against Flo Jo but, more importantly, my self-esteem would have been obliterated. And it was. 

    I wasn’t too keen on the idea of deleting social media. The other day, my six-year-old son was staring out of the car window into the massive sky above. “Mom,” he said, “I don’t like to think about the universe.” I told him I get that. He confirmed that it’s the vastness that makes him feel small. It’s dark and lonely out there in the universe. I was so used to having and being on social media that I thought that deleting it would untether me from the earth and send me out there into the universe, alone, cold, and in the dark. 

    When I first came across posts on social media by patients in cancer treatment, it made me feel less alone.  Somehow, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t really looking for it, I’d come across people posting about their experiences with cancer. There was even a woman preparing for her mastectomy at around the same time that I was. I wasn’t alone. 

    Perhaps you can see where this is going. As soon as I clicked on a couple of cancer posts, the algorithm latched on. Soon, a good portion of my feed was cancer. And I couldn’t help myself but read and click. I’d try to close the app and just the c-word alone would catch my eye. I felt an obligation to consume it all. 

    One of the prayers that I had when I was going through treatment was this: that my suffering makes someone else’s a little less. There are certain aspects of Catholicism that are engrained in me and that’s one of them: offer it up. Offer up your suffering so that it has meaning if not for you, then at least for someone else. For the most part, I was thinking about my daughters in those moments, praying that somehow me going through all of these trials would save them from a similar fate. In the early days of my treatment, the genocide in Palestine was dire and so my prayers were also for mothers there. In my moments of pain rooted in my own body attacking my breasts, all mothers and children and their bonds and their bodies and suffering all became mixed together. 

    And some of that responsibility and connection carried over to my fellow cancer patients on social media. Somehow, it was my duty to keep reading all of these threads. But reading, engaging them seemed to created more until everything was cancer content. It’s about as much fun as it sounds. 

    This was all in the midst of me, in-person, going with some regularity to a literal cancer center where I would sit in waiting rooms nearly full with other people who possibly also had cancer. And at one appointment, my doctor mentioned (without violating HIPPA) that he’d been recently seeing more of the type of cancer that I have. Later, as I moved into the recurrence prevention phase, he mentioned that he had a patient in a very similar situation to me. At the very least, it’s possible that the doctor was able to use some of what he learned treating me to better care for the other woman. 

    These are connections that I couldn’t get on social media. 

    And so it was that I had it all wrong. When I finally cut the tether, I didn’t float out into the vast, cold universe. Rather, I floated back down to very real, solid, warm earth. 

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  • The Doctrine of Chai

    “Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundation on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.” –James Baldwin from The Fire Next Time

    Most of my mornings begin with making a cup of chai. Actually, it’s more like four cups: two for me and one for each of my two daughters. My son has yet to show any interest in having his own and my husband has never been a warm beverage drinker. (Yes, that includes coffee. Cast aspersions as you will. He’ll never know.)

    Here is where I explain the process of making chai. And perhaps a little bit of the history. But this isn’t really that type of essay. What type of essay is this? Let’s find out. 

    First, I pour about two cups of water into the pot and set it to boil. I pull out my round, lidded chai box packed tightly with smaller also round containers each holding a different component, which varies only based on what has been available at the Asian market (where spices are cheaper than at the “regular” grocery store). Cinnamon sticks, fennel seeds, rose petals, cardamom pods, star anise, candied ginger, whole cloves and, of course, black tea leaves. I’d like to say that I choose what to add based on some sort of higher sense of what my kids and I need that day. Extra rose petals for love. Cinnamon for protection and boundaries. Star anise for good luck (especially if I find a rare nine-pointed one). But the truth is that I mostly do it by rote: scooping small amounts of whatever is available. This is with the exception of fresh ginger, which I will pull from the fridge, slice thin, and toss in the pot if any of us has a cough or cold. This makes me feel like an apothecary. Or a witch. 

    My daughters have helped me on occasion. One such time, my older daughter commented, “This is what I think potion-making is like.” The other daughter recalled when they were younger playing in the yard, they would mix up batches of something that seemed, in their imaginations, to be both nourishing and magical. Our morning chai feels a bit like that with the added benefit of being also drinkable. 

    While the tea and spices steep on medium heat, I can step away from the stove to feed the dog or take my medicine, cut up an orange or make the bed. The next step requires my full concentration. I pour the two cups of oatmilk into the pot and watch the white whirl into the dark brown (“clouds in my cha-ai, clouds in my cha-ai.”). The liquid starts to bubble. It reminds me of the edge of the ocean where the surf breaks and kicks up sand. It’s a similar sandy color and, at least for this moment, similarly unappetizing. But then just when I start to think, “am I really going to drink this?” the roiling becomes suddenly light and almost airy. Just the right amount of foam. This is point when I have to watch carefully as the liquid climbs the sides of the pot. I keep one hand on the handle of the burner and the other holds my measuring cup which I use to scoop and pour the chai, thus aerating it further. I want the drink to bubble up as high and for as long as possible without it spilling over. I have no idea whether this is the goal or whether this is good chai making technique. I’ve found I just kind of enjoy the challenge. 

    On more than one occasion, I have let the pot boil over, not only wasting the precious tea, but creating a sticky mess that needs to be cleaned. Once or twice, this happened when I let myself get called away from the stove during this crucial stage. Shockingly, it’s also happened when I’ve been right in front of the stove, hand on the burner knob, eyes on the pot. How is it possible that my body can be in the right position, my eyes laser focused on the pot, and yet still it boils over? There are times when allowing my mind to wander, perhaps to even dissociate from my body was perhaps something of a gift. But dissociating is not the doctrine of chai. 

    One day, after I’ve been practicing this for years, will I be able to space out? Will I be able to let my mind wander and still be able to keep track of the tea and the pot and the foam and the heat? Do I want that day and moment to arrive? I do not. Dissociating is no longer a gift. Embodiment is. 

    Ritual is routine made holy and some call the product of this particular chai ritual “liquid gold.”

    This winter, I watched by daughter play a lot of basketball. Observe a player take to the free throw line and you will see ritual. It’s not just that the shooter has her own pattern of familiar actions (dribble three times, line up knuckles on the ball, place toes a set distance from the line, breathe), but the crowd also participates. At one of my daughter’s games, every time a player on her team found herself at the line, the cheerleaders would all silently extend their hands and twinkle their fingers in the direction of the shooter. I could almost see the fairy dust flit through the air. When an opposing player was on their line, the cheerleaders were less quiet. “Rebound!” they’d chant while stomping their feet on the stands. These rituals were all familiar to me from my own days in high school, save one thing. The noise the fans used to make when the opposing team was on the line used to be aggressive —  hissing and booing meant to intimidate the shooter. But the “rebound” chant of today’s young people encourages their own team rather than trying to disrupt the opponent. I love this generation. Each time I observe them practicing the power of approaching the world from a place of support rather than tearing down, this Gen Xer is a little more healed. 

     Are you with me here? Do you see the magic in the mundane? Do you see how there is no doctrine of chai? Do you see how the ordinary is not a kingdom? How ritual creates a bubble around us pulling us away from time’s awful teeth?

    At least some of the magic is in the returning, coming back to this pot, this stove at this time each morning. Yes, even coming back to the foul line. Day after day like a miner returning to the depths of the earth, digging a tiny bit each day in search of that seam of gold. Here. This writing is a bit like that too. I’ve returned to this piece day after day first in my little notebook filling up with my sprawling handwriting. Twenty minutes at a time. I set the timer and drew the habit tracker to keep me honest in the moments when my faith in the ritual of return faltered. And here we are because reading is the other side of that. A partnership. 

    Showing up to the stove is not dissimilar from showing up to the pen and paper or keyboard and screen. And it’s not dissimilar from sticking it through to the next paragraph or page. These are acts of devotion. And devotion always transcends doctrine. These commitments to these rituals. We are not kingdoms. Nor are we the foundation. Whenever we choose to return, to focus ourselves to a particular task, to a particular ritual, to a particular moment, we become an ally to time. And together we rend kingdoms. Here. A pause. A slurp of chai. The steam creeps up in front of my screen. I made this pot a few hours ago this morning between my morning stretches and morning writing. I reheated it just now so I could have the creamy comfort here as I venture back down into this particular mineshaft. Liquid gold to fuel my search for that seam of gold somewhere in these folds of my brain. Oh! Here it is. 

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  • Overheard on the elevator to and from the 7th floor (oncology and hematology) (a poem)

    What floor?

    I like your outfit. 

    Comfortable chic.

    What floor?

    Thank you. Have a good one. 

    I like your earrings.

    What floor?

    Did she just fall down?

    They’re made of wolf fur, sustainably harvested.

    What floor?

    At least I’m not underground. 

    You get what I’m saying?

    Do they just brush the wolf?

    What floor?

    Did you just come from the seventh floor?

    I’ll pray for you.

    What floor?

    What floor?

    Thank you. 

    Seven please. 

    What floor?

    Thank you.

    Seven. 

    What floor?

    Seven.

  • Another Moment

    What emerges from a moment of silence? from stillness? What words need to be written right now?

    These are the questions that I’m asking right now. I know that there is an inner voice, deep inside of me that has been silenced and covered over by chaos. I spent a good portion of the morning on the phone with the pharmacy, my insurance, a pharmaceutical company, trying to get my latest prescription filled without having to fork over $120 each month. I felt like the ball in the old pinball machines slamming between those pop bumpers. By the end of the morning, the “notes” section of my weekly planner was filled with numbers and vague notes, none of which had anything to do with healing. Three or so of those minutes were spent listening to various messages, menus, and selecting options before I realized that I’d mis-dialed (I’d replaced the 888 with 800 because I apparently never left the 80s behind). It wasn’t until after I responded “yes” to the voice asking “can you hear me?” that I realized that the whole thing had been a recording. I’d been primed to talk about medicine and the scammers on the other end were prepared with an offer of a free medical alert device. As I hung up, I inwardly cringed for their real targets: those perhaps slightly older than me who also misdialed.

    So, yes, this is all part of the chaos that I have to dig through to get to some sort of silence. The stillness.

    I’m trying to establish some new habits and routines. This morning was my first time doing some stretches on my kitchen floor. The sun wasn’t up yet and so the lights, dim as I’d kept them, were reflecting off the glass of the windows, so that the pendants hanging from the ceiling seemed to be overlapping with the tree branches outside. I think that this will make me grateful for the next time I look directly at that tree, unhindered by the reflections.

    And that’s a bit of what I mean about the chaos layering over the silence, the stillness. I’d like to be able to hear the trees. But there’s so much noise.

    I set a timer when I stretch. Ten minutes. There’s no preset sequence. I just try to listen to what my body wants and needs. Move where it needs to go. Ten minutes is incredibly long when my body is in charge.

    I decided at some point that this would be a blog entry where I would just sit down, set a timer, and write what’s on my mind. That’s what this is then. I’m trying to …

  • Knitting and Cancer

    “You can sit and knit while receiving your infusion.” The physician’s assistant who conducted my chemotherapy orientation (yes, just like for freshman newly arrived on campus but with fewer ice breakers) made the whole process seem almost pleasant. And I was, in fact, a knitter, the type of knitter abbreviates “works in progress” to WIPs and, at the time, had no less than three WIPs in various, extremely cute project bags and one yarn stash large enough to require a big bin. But it had been months, maybe even a whole year or so since I had knitted. I had let that particular hobby drift to the wayside. I didn’t really think that cancer treatment would be the time that I was going to pick it up again.

    I love knitting. There’s a certain satisfaction of language fluency in reading and successfully following a pattern. And there’s the return to a WIP again and again, the gradual progress.  I love, of course, to finish a piece and then to give it to someone knowing that I already squeezed maximum enjoyment in the making. Any further happiness on the part of the recipient is mere extravagance. There’s also a human connection: not just between me and the person I’m giving it to, but between me and the shepherds, the spinners, and the dyers too. Perhaps most of all there’s the connection to the pattern maker, who spent countless hours converting the image in their head into yarn and then paper words for me to read and then reverse the process. I don’t personally know any pattern makers. But I know pattern makers. Know what I mean?  What a remarkable thing: to be able to spend weeks inside someone else’s head without every having met them. In science fiction, there’s often some sort of machine (in Star Trek it’s a transporter) that dematerializes an object and then rematerializes them somewhere else. Sometimes knitting is like that. 

    A few weeks after my orientation, I was sitting in my oncologist’s office with my husband for a pre-treament check-in with my doctor and his trusty medical transcriber. My eyes were closed and I was rubbing my fingers across my forehead. All I could think was complete darkness. Just blank. It was probably only seconds but it felt like minutes of just… nothing. Somewhere at the back of my brain, I felt there was a word or maybe a question that I was trying to retrieve. I felt the doctor and my husband waiting. The medical transcribers fingers poised on his keyboard. Finally, the doctor’s voice cut through. 

    “Are you having trouble recalling words?” he asked. 

    “Ya’ think?!?!” I wanted to reply back, but while the snark was there, the language to convey it was gone. 

    “Yeah,” I said. “I think I had a question, but now I can’t think of it.”

    The doctor reassured me that this is normal and that words would come back. What could I do but believe him?

    As it had been explained to me, chemotherapy targets rapidly dividing cells. Ideally, this means that it wipes out cancerous cells. Realistically, hair follicles, the digestive tract, skin and immune cells can all be collateral damage. In my own way of thinking about it, while on chemotherapy, my brain also wasn’t able to form new neurons. This is how I explained the language loss to myself. Or maybe it was the stress of the whole situation. Or that my known information was being overwritten by new cancer patient vocabulary: HER negative, dexamethasone, neuropathy, taxane, and a dozen other that I realize now I never actually learned. Somewhere along the way, I decided to leave it to the doctors and nurses. My own language became much more rudimentary: sleep, pain, eat, poop. At times, I was an infant once again. I could feel people around me internally cheering when they could illicit a smile or laugh from me, just like they do with babies. 

    I never did bring any knitting projects with me to chemotherapy treatments. Knitting is a relaxing pastime but it is also an act of resistance. It is all the things that modern, western society and capitalism looks down upon: feminine, slow, collective, inherited knowledge, sustainable, creative and nourishing. In our culture, it takes time, energy, and focus to maintain those types of activities. So does cancer treatment. The second months of my chemo involved Benedryl, which would usually make me sleepy, and ice packs on my hands to help prevent nerve damage to my extremities. I couldn’t have knit even if I’d had the energy to open up my WIPs and figure out where I’d left off. Besides, in the midst of all of this, it was impossible to prioritize knitting. All those years of learning and doing and making, I shoved it all to the back corner of my brain. Would I ever return to it? It didn’t matter. 

    But no, there’s more to it than this. I just admitted that my language abilities are greatly diminished. And yet here I am, writing and asking you to trust me that this is all going somewhere in spite of my reduced capacities in the very medium in which we are currently communicating. Am I an unreliable narrator then? Are we all? Here. Let’s go back. I trusted the doctors to know the words necessary to eradicate the cancer. Now, I need to trust myself that I have the words to tell this story. It’s not an easy thing, trust. 

    Spoiler alert: I’m knitting again. This fall, I made a charming green hat for my charming nephew. (I’d drawn his name in our family gift giving.) It’s been a pleasant little surprise each time I’ve picked up my knitting these days. It’s so easy! I remember all of it, each of the little steps from balling the yarn to casting on, checking gauge to reading a pattern. And where I’ve forgotten, there’s someone on-line or a book with the necessary information. How did this happen that I can still do all of this? I was recently doing an Old Norwegian cast on and it felt so natural that I wondered whether my ancestors from there weren’t gently working through my bones. 

    The question that I had in the doctor’s office popped into my head one day. I’d wanted to ask if he thought I needed to start on the antibiotics he was prescribing right away or just have them on hand in case of infection. It turns out that he’d already explained that and my husband was there, paying attention where I could not; his brain forming neural connections while my own cells were otherwise occupied. 

    And here we are, at the end of this post, ready to bind off, having sustained each other’s attention against all the odds and distractions. And still here. 

  • My young self …

    …loved the yesterday that I made. I woke close to 7am and baked banana bread. The children had a late opening to school so this meant the bread was ready before they had to leave. My young self was proud that the timing had worked out. My old self felt I should have had it done even earlier so that there had been more time for it to cool before cutting it. Fortunately, my young self is louder than my old self and loves to watch the steam float from between the slices.

    My young self enjoyed the extra time with my kids in the morning. My old self lambasted the ice and cold even as my young self successfully stoked the fire. My morning involves a “create before you consume” ritual. Usually I write, but my young self counted building up the flames in the woodstove and baking banana bread as creating. My old self does not think I should think of these activities as “creating”. My young self thinks my old self can be a bit of a puritanical asshole. She’s not wrong.

    I had errands to run that took me near to a Michael’s craft store which my old self thinks is an uninspiring chain warehouse full of plastic and trendy crap. My young self’s heart leapt when I granted her permission to buy some beautiful sets of markers which we have the money to afford. Sometimes both of them are right.

    My young self marveled that I could make the choice to practice guitar for thirty minutes in the middle of the day just because I could and at the improvement I made even in that short a time. My old self reminded us, “loosen up!” when my shoulder ached from holding it in one awkward position for an unnecessarily long time.

    When I realized our family had overbooked, I did the grocery store trip, driving one child to and from various basketball practices, and started dinner (beef stew!) prep. My young self was very impressed by my adaptability, but it was my old self who had the sense to ask my husband to finish making the dinner when I knew I needed rest. It was all three of us who let out a long, hopeful sigh as we sat down next to the fire.

  • This Moment

    I spend a lot of time thinking about writing. I also spend a lot of time actually writing: it’s often one of the first things I do in the morning. I have pages and pages and notebooks and notebooks and digital docs full of words in the specific combinations that I’ve come up with. And, yet, relatively few of them have made it into this blog. What’s up with that?

    I’m writing on my iPad in my living room on the couch next to our woodstove which is lit (by which I mean there’s an actual wood fire in there; not like “this party is lit”). It’s somewhere around 17 degrees (farenheit) outside right now and our furnace went out a few weeks ago. Fortunately, we actually have two furnaces and we got the broken one fixed right away but in the process of getting it fixed, we discovered some larger electrical problems which have made us skittish about using the furnace. Our woodstove was expensive and, honestly, it’s kind of fantastic to be using it for more than aesthetic reasons. And by “fantastic” I think I mean all that expense feels very justified. Plus, fire is a beautiful thing to be able to stare into.

    I have various notebooks and journals, one of which is dedicated to this blog. I like to write longhand, in cursive. This probably has something to do with how I learned to write in school and my age and the history of technology and my specific brain development, but I won’t bore you with trying to piece together the timeline. I also used to be an English/ Language Arts Teacher so this step-by-step process of writing (brainstorm, outline, draft, revise, edit, etc…) is pretty deeply engrained me. But I’m not doing this blog post that way. I think the young people these days would say I’m “raw dogging” it which is a term which I’m assuming comes from something sexual and which my kids would cringe to see me using. So what I really mean to say is that I just sat down and started writing this post — no brainstorming or notes or even an idea much less drafts.

    Who the hell gave me permission to do that?

    Well, I did. This is my blog.

    This is revolutionary thinking for someone like me who has spent much of her life feeling like she has to get permission or approval for, well, pretty much everything and specifically for writing. And yet writing is one thing that I’ve been doing a lot of. I’ve been overly precious about writing though. It only counts if it’s in certain publications. It only counts if I’m getting paid. It only counts if I’ve gone through a certain number of drafts and covered the whole thing in blood, sweat, and tears (my own, of course). It only counts if it’s beautiful and perfect and inspired.

    Ugh. How insufferable is that inner monotonous voice counting every bean and bob, jot and tittle?

    Every word I put down here is shouting over that annoying inner voice. Every time I click the “publish” button, I’m punching those gatekeepers. Each time I write here, I’m reaching out.

    I’m here. Welcome.