Rhena Writes

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  • Letting my future self off the hook.

    Daily writing prompt
    Describe one simple thing you do that brings joy to your life.
    View all responses

    Sometimes my present self makes pretty heavy demands on my future self, expecting her to be perfect and in control at all times, expecting her to have thought through everything, every eventuality and every possibility.

    But sometimes my present self lets my future self off the hook. It’s not really hard to do. She doesn’t even exist yet, after all. We have no idea what she will be capable of or what difficulties she might have to face. So my present self just lets her be, allows her to emerge how and when she needs to, taking over for us.

    When I can do this for her, when I can let her off the hook, give her the benefit of the doubt, it brings me immense joy. And she feels it too.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • I refuse.

    Daily writing prompt
    How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?
    View all responses

    When I see that my device is one hundred percent charged, I know it’s time to unplug it. To make that happen, I remove it from the charging station.

    I’m not sure I understand the question.

    Because my next thought is that I “unplug” from the internet when I’ve see that I am not trusting myself, that I’m relying more on the internet (for information, entertainment, distraction, etc…) than myself.

    But I think that generally when someone talks about “unplugging” they are talking about from work, from the “rat race”, from the world of competition and comparison. To me, it’s always time for me to unplug from there. Today, I went to pick up some sandwiches from this one shop. The people working there are always nice and helpful. But I invariably get almost pushed down or knocked over or brushed past by customers rushing to get in the line to order or in the door. Needless to say it’s in one of the wealthier neighborhoods in DC and it’s where I always see some of the worst of human behavior. It’s not so much even a meanness; it’s an obliviousness.

    Every time I witness this level of thoughtlessness, it’s a reminder to me to disengage from that kind of life. In other words, unplug. There’s nothing for me there in that lifestyle. And yet it’s pervasive and so it requires a constant unplugging.

    I’m trying to write something here. I’m trying to convey an idea. It’s already late in the day, much later than I usually write. And, yet, I don’t think it’s going to happen today. I don’t think the BIG POINT is going to happen. As much as I enjoy writing here in my blog, I have other things I’d like to do that I enjoy as much or more. Of course, the idea that I “must” reach a point, that I must write a certain number of words lingers and circles around me. This spurs me onward to continue to sit in this chair, at this desk and to attempt to write, to get these ideas out and into the world.

    But I refuse to push past anyone, least of all myself, to get to the end of this post.

    I refuse to take part in that sort of fast paced, stressful world.

    I refuse to listen to that voice goading me onward that I must and I should and for the sake of doing.

    And so I don’t.

    I unplug.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Self centered and self loving.

    Daily writing prompt
    What quality do you value most in a friend?
    View all responses

    The quality that I value most in a friend is that they prioritize themselves and take care of themselves first and foremost.

    I think that people who are deeply invested and interested in themselves make really good friends because they know themselves well enough to be able to communicate their needs well. They give only as much as they are able and don’t expect more than that from anyone else. A relationship not a guessing game with this type of person. The reason why I understand this is because I used to be the kind of person who overextended herself due to a lack of self awareness. I thought that I had to always say “yes” to everything and everyone in order to be a “good friend”.

    I’ve learned, however, to start to look for and qualities that I’d like to see in other people in myself. In other words, I have to be my own friend first before I can rely on other people. If I’m not curious about and interested in myself first, how can I expect anyone else to be? If I don’t care enough about myself to understand my own needs and then figure out how to meet those needs myself, then no one else can.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Would a job by any other name smell just as sweet?

    Daily writing prompt
    What jobs have you had?
    View all responses

    What’s in a job? Does there need to be payment?

    Cash, ducats, affections exchanged.

    Does there need to be an exchange of tangible goods?

    Care, food, health, love.

    I was once a secret keeper. I was terrible at that job. I didn’t know which ones should be kept and which ones thrown away, whispered and carried away on the wind, which ones to bind up in my heart and which to shout out.

    Needless to say, I’m a terrible judge of character.

    I also spent a summer smearing cream cheese on bagels. This was before there were tip jars on counters.

    My first paid job was babysitting. I probably wasn’t very good at this either. Sometimes, I suspect that parents confused “good at babysitting” with “available and cheap, relatively.” Oh, and a girl in roughly the right age range.

    I even convinced myself that perhaps I really had a gift, a purpose. And so I ended up a teacher for a while.

    I’ve been an assistant editor, a research assistant, a sandwich maker, a camp counselor, a guide for a group of teenagers traveling, a creator. Those are things that I’ve more or less gotten paid for.

    Is getting paid a requisite for a job?

    Because the job I’ve had the longest is a mother but I don’t get paid for that. I’m told it is its own reward.

    I don’t get paid for this either.

    Still, one must carry on. Job or no job. Paid or not. And so I do.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • The religion of practice.

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you practice religion?
    View all responses
    Two minutes of unplanned, semi conversational monologuing. (Monobloging.) In spoken English.

    I practice guitar pretty much every day. Sometimes I work for ten or fifteen minutes on just two or four measures of the song I’m currently working on. My progress is slow, but it’s there. Sometimes I’ve recorded my playing each day, then there’s a record of my progress. I can hear it.

    I practice writing every day too. At the very least, in my journal and, as of late, here in this blog. I can feel this getting easier too. The more and more I practice, the fewer blocks I face. And the more rewards there are. When I’m facing a particularly sticky problem, I know that I can go to my journal and write through it. Even if I don’t always arrive at a solution exactly, I often get a new perspective or a new way of thinking about the situation.

    At the very least, these practices (along with a few others including reading, walking, learning something new) give me something to return to when things feel difficult. When I’ve had to wait on a response from a doctor or for a test result this past year, I’ve been able to turn to these practices as a way to calm my mind.

    With both writing and guitar playing, they’ve become things that I look forward to each day. And my brain has needed that after this past year. My calendar and days have been full of appointments, treatments, procedures, medications. All of those are things that I had to do, but I dreaded all of them. I dreaded their aftermath. And I think that my brain has been stuck in that mode of dread. Practicing writing and playing guitar has kind of gently nudged my brain out of that one-track thinking and feeling.

    Having grown up in a Buddhist and Catholic household, I’m comfortable with practicing religion. But as an adult now living in this modern world with its difficulties and distractions, I don’t so much practice religion as much as I have made my religion practice.

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    And as it’s Wednesday, here’s a weekly round up of posts.

    My most prized possession? My body, mind, and soul.

    What do I collect? On spoons and hurts, words and truths. (A prose poem sort of a thing.)

    Who would I like to talk to soon? Myself. (Spoiler alert: I had the chance to meet myself in a lucid dream. This isn’t so much a “how to lucid dream” as much as it is this is how lucid dreaming happened to me.)

    “Having it all means” being present to myself.

    Practice, Practice, Practice. Clearly this is something that’s been on my mind a lot lately.

    Of course I remember life before the internet!

    ****************************

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email (like this one!) to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Of course I remember life before the internet!

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you remember life before the internet?
    View all responses

    As a kid playing outside in the yard, I had a pretty vivid imagination. I don’t remember the specifics of what I imagined, but I do recall mixing potions, that one specific tree was my house, and a tree stump was a friend’s house. I could spend a lot of time outside, alone, just entertaining myself and at the same time learning about the world.

    Still, even with my vivid childhood imagination, I don’t think that I could have ever imagined a future in which the internet was a thing.

    Even in high school, when I first heard about the internet, I don’t think I really understood what it was. I was on the school newspaper. I remember many late nights at the printers where we had to bring printed copies of the paper and lay them all out by hand. Of course, we had computers and software to lay it out (maybe abode?), but the final print and review had to be done by hand. Sometimes this meant that if we found a mistake very late in the process, we’d have to figure out a way to correct it with the pages we had with us and an exacto knife. Sometimes we were there until 2 or 3 in the morning. In retrospect, it was pure folly on my part that I put that much time and energy into it.

    Later on, in college, I remember we had a class in which we made a website. I still didn’t quite understand what I was doing or what it would mean. I just remember a least one instructor being quite excited about the potential of the internet for education. As I was creating this webpage, though, the way I understood it was just an alternative way to feed students information. And that the consumption of that information was rather passive.

    Of course, today, I’m sitting at my computer at this very moment creating, as it were, content for passive consumption. But what I’m thinking about now is that I’m not creating this content and engaging in this process for students to consume and learn from. This is for me. And, for me, it’s not passive at all.

    My kids, of course, have a completely different relationship to the internet. They’ve never not had it. I look at how technology is used in education now and I think to myself that even if I wanted to get back into teaching, I’d never be able to catch up.

    And that just is part of my ambivalent relationship with the internet. Just this morning, I was feeling really fatigued. I thought that maybe it was I was still feeling the effects of radiation treatment. So I ended up googling a bit. Regrettably. Because of course, it’s just going to be confirmation bias. Because of course people still get fatigued a month after finishing radiation. It’s regrettable because I wish I had just listened to my own body, taken a minute or two to think about what I’ve been going through recently and then just laid down to rest.

    Sometimes I look up directions to places that I’ve been dozens or even hundreds of times. I just don’t trust my own sense of space and direction anymore.

    And that’s a part of my current relationship with the internet right now — I allow it to do a good chunk of my thinking for me. And the result is that I don’t use those parts of my brain enough — my mental maps, my ability to check in with and understand what’s going on with my body, my feeling of competency and confidence in my own knowledge. Those are just a couple of examples.

    So, yes, I remember life before the internet. I’m grateful that that, in a world where the internet is not a constant presence, that pre-internet life is still part of me.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Practice. Practice. Practice.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are you good at?
    View all responses

    I’ve been thinking off and on about this question since I read it last night. And each time, when my mind has started to wander towards figuring out how I’m going to answer it when I eventually sit down at my computer, I’ve gently tugged it back to the present moment.

    Am I good at this gentle tugging? Maybe. But “good” is a relative term isn’t it? Certainly it’s something that I’m trying to practice regularly, this gentle tugging of my mind to the present moment. I don’t think that there’s a way to grade it or assess whether or not I’m “good” at it.

    But even here, now, I’m sitting at my computer answering this daily prompt. My mind will start to wander towards trying to guess at what I’m “supposed” to write. My mind will wonder, “What are other bloggers writing in response to this question?”

    Tug. Tug. Gently. Gently.

    I can feel the keys underneath my fingertips.

    Ah! The miracle that my muscles, sinew, neurons remember where to place each finger in order to get the desired result. How is it that I remember how to spell the words: memory, gentle, mind, and wander?

    I might consider for a moment going down a google rabbit hole to read the science behind this process of what I’m doing here.

    But, remember? Tug. Tug. Gently. Gently.

    My chair is uncomfortably out of alignment from my desk and screen. I rearrange myself. The chair squeaks.

    Gentle tug.

    I hear the car tires on the highway outside of my house; a flare of frustration at the speed everyone seems to be driving.

    Tug. Tug.

    I worry. Is this enough words? Did I answer the question? Will someone read this and feel or think something?

    Tug. Tug.

    My feet are resting lightly on the stack of blankets under my desk. I stretch my toes.

    I pull my mind back to my breath. Breathe.

    This. This is what I’m good at.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • “Having it all” means being present to myself…

    Daily writing prompt
    What does “having it all” mean to you? Is it attainable?
    View all responses

    … in each and every moment.

    Is it attainable? With a lot of work, absolutely.

    I feel as though I have a lot of distractions away from myself, a lot of competing demands, a lot of voices telling me what I should be doing, attaining, being, thinking, making, taking, giving, living, watching, fearing, hearing, seeing, feeling, having, owning, buying and all the rest of it. The work of it is learning to say no to those demands. And figuring out how to say yes to myself.

    For me, this has required a lot of grace extended towards myself. It has meant allowing myself to be who I am without judgement. I try to practice this presence to myself every day. I fail a lot.

    When I go for a walk. I try to just go for a walk. I pull myself back to myself again and again. This is hard for me to do because my mind is continually scanning for what might be coming next even on a walk around my own neighborhood.

    But I pull my attention back to myself again and again as I walk.

    The other day. I saw a bird in front of my house. It had something in its beak. Maybe it was going to take it back to build its nest.

    If I had not been in a mode of slowing down, I think I would have missed seeing that bird. And then I would not have had that bird in my mind as I sat down to write this post.

    If I had not slowed down to observe the bird, would the bird still exist? Would it still have built its nest if I hadn’t seen in? Probably.

    But I will never know.

    And so I’m glad that I slowed down, that I came back to myself to observe the bird, building its home. Now the bird lives in my head.

    And on this post.

    And this is what I mean by having it all.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Myself.

    Daily writing prompt
    Who would you like to talk to soon?
    View all responses

    I wrote last week about three books about dreams and dreaming and an experience I had with learning more about myself and creative problem solving through my dreams.

    I’ve been writing down my dreams when I remember them. From time to time, I’ll think about what I want to dream about and remind myself to try to write them down after I turn out the light and as I’m falling asleep.

    I’ve wanted to lucid dream and I’ve tried a few practices towards that goal. A few times a day, I checked in to ask myself, “am I dreaming?” The goal here is to prime my brain to ask myself that question in a dream state. I also read that one way that people lucid dream is that they prime their brains to recognize that they are in a dream. Things are often “off” in dreams and if we can recognize that things are not quite right, then we can recognize that we are in a dream and assume control of the dream. As for the things that are commonly off in dream (apparently, according to what I read) is that dreamers are in buildings that no longer exist, they are conversing with people who had already died, or their hands aren’t quite right — they might have too many fingers or not enough or they might just look a bit wrong. (Apparently, hands are so complex that we have a hard time recalling them in all of their detail.)

    I often dream of my childhood home, which has since been torn down. I thought that this was the perfect way to get myself into lucid dreaming. And I tried to prime my brain to remember that when I see that home, it’s not real and therefore must be a dream. Several mornings, when I wrote down my dreams from the night before, I described dreaming of my childhood home followed by the question, “Why didn’t I recognize that was a dream???” I was getting a bit frustrated.

    So I set aside all of that. I didn’t really set aside the “goal” of lucid dreaming but, rather, I decided to trust that my mind was doing what it needed to do whilst dreaming regardless of whether I remembered or not and regardless of whether or not I knew I was dreaming. I still was writing down dreams when I remembered them, but I wasn’t letting it bother me when I didn’t. I was confident that I was still dreaming. I was confident that my mind was still doing what it needed to do to take care of me regardless of whether or not I could put the experiences into language.

    In other words, I let go.

    This letting go, this distinct feeling of ungrasping, this trust in myself …. all of that is central to what happened to me next.

    Last night, I dreamt that I was in the driveway of my home. There was a lot going on. Different people visiting, all these cars parked all over the place, more people arriving with camping chairs. I was getting progressively annoyed by all of this. In the dream, I was talking to a few people. As I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t really matter who these people are in waking life. They are all dream representations of different parts of my personality or different things on my mind. I was talking to one person and suddenly I looked up at my house. We renovated our house a few years ago but in the dream, the house looked like it did PRE renovation.

    I started to say that to the person I was talking to, “look, my house looks….” and then I’m pretty sure I gasped in the dream. “That means I’m dreaming!” I said. Even though I was dreaming I still said “excuse me” to the person I was talking to and then I launched myself into the air and started to fly.

    Especially when I was younger, I’d often have flying dreams, but they involved a fair amount of effort. And I was often flying to get away from something threatening. In this dream, it was completely effortless and exhilarating. I wasn’t trying to escape. I was simply being.

    In fact, I think that I was SO excited that my excitement woke me up.

    Dreams in general feel like I am speaking to myself. I’m having conversations with different parts of myself often towards getting to know them all better and, as I mentioned before, often towards some sort of problem solving.

    Prior to this experience, I wasn’t even aware that I felt that part of me was unavailable to myself. I think that this is a very western freudian belief system — that we have a “deeper” self that is actually controlling us. In other words, this whole idea of repressing our true selves and feelings.

    I woke up realizing that this isn’t true. It was as if this dream dug out and released this false belief system that had been implanted in there by western “culture”.

    Last night, my lucid dream felt like a “break through” in the sense that I can talk to myself, my WHOLE self without words or language. I experienced a sense of wholeness in the lucid dream, a feeling that has carried over into my waking self.

    I am not a mystery to myself.

    ****************************

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • My body, mind, and soul, of course.

    Daily writing prompt
    What personal belongings do you hold most dear?
    View all responses

    Deep breath. Come into this moment.

    What else needs to be written about this?

    I suppose I could write about how not to be attached to objects and possessions. I could consider whether or not my body, mind, and soul actually fall under the category of “personal belongings.” Certainly, I’ve had experiences where it’s clear that people around me do not think any of the three belong to me.

    But I cannot dwell in those moments.

    So I won’t.

    I could carry on writing here, sharing my ideas and thoughts. Offering my words up on the silver platter that is this platform.

    I could dig and excavate myself in search of something worthy of sharing. A bold statement or truth. Or perhaps a particularly poetic turn of phrase.

    But I will not do that work.

    Because if I do that work, then it will undermine the truth.

    The truth of my value. The truth of my worth. The truth of my being just by being.

    I am my own most valuable possession not because of what I can offer. But because I am.

    *******************

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!