Rhena Writes

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  • Career fast track.

    Daily writing prompt
    What is your career plan?
    View all responses

    I am on the fast track to becoming an elder.

    I’m not entirely sure I had any choice in the matter. Wasn’t this always the plan?

    Mere years away from getting to sit down in a proper chair for family photos, being served first at dinner, being offered a hand up and down.

    Before you know it, I’ll be saying cryptic phrases like, “well, no dog ever howled at the moon without a good enough reason”

    In turn, the youngsters will whisper that I’m wise, senile, annoying, hilarious, cute, or just plain ol’ old.

    I won’t mind.

    The backs of my hands will tell my age: roadwork of veins, puddles of pigment, papery pools. “Ah, yes, this is a liver spot, this is an IV scar, another where I cut myself with a butter knife.”

    I will sing and strum and pluck guitar string and perhaps my eyebrows. And I will hand out clippings from house plants and warm slices of quick breads, fresh out of the oven.

    Is aging a career?

    I will slide gently into myself even as I rise through the ranks.

    Boss of self. VP of me. CEO of this whole damn corpus.

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

    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. Oh, and have a great weekend! God helg! (PS I’m learning some Norske.)

  • Is all the world a stage?

    Daily writing prompt
    What was the last live performance you saw?
    View all responses

    Last weekend.

    I went to a local street fest and they had some bands playing. I saw one of them and they were entertaining. Anyway, it’s always nice to be able to hear live music. Sometimes, I wish that I lived some place where there were more buskers and street entertainment. But, alas, sometimes I have to create my own live performances.

    The band played a lot of the classics — like Sweet Caroline and Journey — and I think I remember some Dua Lipa in there? They reminded me a bit of when my daughters were younger. They’d put on performances in our living room all the time — singing and dancing, mostly. They had an imagined backing band and stage names. Sometimes even costumes and something to stand in for a microphone. And performance is still a part of what all my kids do sometimes. Imaginative play is a performance after all, as is the storytelling that they do at the dinner table or around the kitchen when they try to bring some sense of meaning to what’s happened over the course of their days.

    There were two American Sign Language interpreters at the performance this weekend. Honestly, they seemed to be having the most fun of anyway, including the band. I read not too long ago that sometimes ASL interpreters work in pairs: one hearing interpreter who sits with the “audience” and signs for the other interpreter who is deaf and for whom ASL is their first language. This allows for a richer, more detailed and nuanced interpretation.

    I don’t know if this is what the pair of interpreters was doing this weekend. It’s possible that they were both hearing and taking turns simply because it was a long performance. I wasn’t focused on them for long enough to figure it out. I just noticed them because they looked like they were enjoying themselves so much. Was this part of their “performance”? Were they interpreting the band’s aural energy? Does ASL interpretation “count” as a “performance”? I’m not sure about any of this. But I do know that their presence only added to the live performance for me.

    The last time I went to a theater performance, live, was to see The Brothers Paranormal, a few years ago now. It was stunning.

    On Tuesday, I had a guitar lesson. It certainly felt like I was giving a performance. I was even on camera. (ha! The lesson was virtual.) And my teacher asked me to sing along with my guitar playing which made me essentially feel like I was patting my head and rubbing my tummy and walking and chewing gum all at the same time. But, honestly, it got me singing in front of her, which is kind of a big deal to me. I was so focused on the guitar that I couldn’t really worry about what I sounded like. I mean, I didn’t really sing through the whole song, but I say a few bars here and there. Does that count as a performance? I’m going to say yes. Yes. It counts as a live performance. And maybe even my own guitar practicing does too.

    It was the bard himself who wrote, after all, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.” Which is my cue for my exit.

  • “The community” of one.

    Daily writing prompt
    What do you do to be involved in the community?
    View all responses

    I definitely do not understand the what is meant by “the community”. And this is one of things that I do to be involved: I wonder at the meaning of things, I spend time parsing language, and I write.

    I do a lot of other things too, but this is what this daily prompt has inspired me to think about.

    Which community is being referred to here? The neighborhood I live in? The county? The state? The country? The global community of humanity? All of earth and every living thing? Depending on what is meant by “community”, either everything I do is to be “involved” or none of it is.

    I have an uncomfortable relationship with the word “community”. Sometimes I’ll read it or hear it in the context of “Asian-American community”, of which I am supposed to be a member. But I never asked to be a member of that community nor was I ever “invited”. There is no central council of Asian Americans who decide who’s in and who’s out. Or, at least, not that I’m aware of. Maybe there is one, but they decided that, in spite of my heritage, I’m not a member. Of course, the reality is that that term, Asian-American “community”, is usually just lazy, white supremacist journalism or writing or speech by whoever is using it. What the (often white) speaker usually mean is that they spoke to one or two people who they’ve identified as being “Asian American” and decided that they spoke for an entire group of people who may or may not personally identify as Asian American. In other words, when a racialized group is referred to as a “community”, it’s usually white supremacy in action.

    I’ve had to participate in “community building” activities several times for work or school. Are these “the communities” that this question is referring to? These fleeing, temporary groups of people brought together briefly because they all happen to work or go to school in the same place? I never really felt like this “community building” activities ever connected me to my co-workers or fellow students. Primarily, they worked to connect me to the institution or organization or even the manager, administrator, or teacher that was leading the activities. Isn’t community supposed to be about lateral connection, not hierarchical? “Community-building” is often used as soft language to mask a much more nefarious indoctrination.

    So when do I feel a part of a community? Or when do I feel like I’m involving myself in community? Well, blogging, is one way that I attempt to involve myself in the world outside of myself. I have many pages of notebooks and docs that are for me, but when I come here to post and write, it’s for someone else. In other words, it’s for “the community”. (Along these lines, I published a post this morning that included two book recommendations and a discussion of “the white gaze”. It was NOT a response to a daily writing prompt.)

    Didn’t Jesus say something about how he is present anywhere two or more are gathered in his name? If we apply this to this daily prompt, am I suggesting that anywhere two or more individuals are gathered for “the community” (for, in other words, the greater good of humanity) is “the community” present? Yes. I am suggesting that.

    Here’s the other thing I am suggesting: community doesn’t have to be human bodies/ minds coming together. I can experience community with the tree outside my window, the birds that I can hear, the blades of grass, the sunlight. I can gather with someone else by reading their words in a book or, yes, even on the computer. Eating that bagel I had for breakfast? Yes, I am in community with the people who grew and harvest the wheat. All the way to the drivers who delivered it to my local grocery store where. And then some.

    And lastly, of course, I can be a community of one. Jesus did not say that he is ONLY present where two people or more are gathered in his name. Every time I tend to myself, care for myself, listen to myself, I am doing all those things as a way to involve myself in the community of myself.

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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. 

  • Two Book Recs and the White Gaze

    Book recommendation: Heal Your Way Forward: The Co-Conspirators Guide to an Antiracist Future by Myisha T Hill and A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib

    “What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze. … In so many earlier books by African-American writers, particularly the men, I felt that they were not writing to me. But what interested me was the African-American experience throughout whichever time I spoke of.” Toni Morrison

    To be clear, I am not Black.  If you are interested in an essay about the white gaze (and Toni Morrison’s quote above) by a Black writer, please refer to this essay by Tracy Michae’l Lewis-Giggets. What I am is a writer who has much to learn about writing without the white gaze. I’m recommending two books that I recently read and that taught me about two different ways to deal with the white gaze as a writer. Because sadly, one thing that white is going to do is gaze and it’s something that all people who create (which I believe is all of us) are going to have to deal with at some point. 

    I was a little apprehensive about reading Heal Your Way Forward. Clearly. It sat on my shelf for months. This (alongside many other books that had been on my shelves unread) was one of the reasons I started my randomized book selection process. I had my daughter wrap my (almost 60) unread books in newspaper and label each with a number. She also wrote the numbers on small scraps of paper which I keep in a box next to the books. Each time I finish a book, I select a number from the box at random and unwrap and read the corresponding book. 

    Without this system, perhaps it would have been several more months until I picked up Heal Your Way Forward. I realize now that my apprehension was based on previous experiences in spaces which claimed to be anti-racist but were scolding and abrasive. Even in these spaces, whiteness was assumed and in those even brief moments of assumptions, anything not white was erased. The same old hierarchies came into play. 

    But it is precisely these moments of erasing and of being erased that Myisha T. Hill’s work heals. She does this, in part, by holding a mirror up to the white gaze so that it can see itself for what it truly is. In other words, Heal Your Way Forward invites readers to self reflect. 

    One moment from her book that I think about regularly since reading it a few months ago is when she writes about the feeling of having to be the “smartest” (or other superlative) in the room in order to survive. It was a lightbulb moment for me. I realized how much I had often I’ve unwittingly played these games of competition. But Hill’s framing of this also allowed me to to forgive myself for so thoughtlessly engaging in these larger systems and, more importantly, to be able to see that there are more ways to exist in the world than just the ones created by white supremacy. 

    My other lightbulb moment came in Hill’s analysis of the fairy tail Snow White. She showed me how the narratives that prop up white supremacy are pervasive and the messages are often hidden in seemingly innocuous places. The white gaze demands that we continually affirm that it is the fairest of them all. Heal Your Way reminded me that, as a writer, my stories and words which affirm me are inherently important and valuable simply because they are. The fact that my stories refuse to tell the white gaze what it begs to read is just the icing on the cake. 

    Hanif Abdurraqib’s book was another one that I picked up and read a little bit of some time ago and then, for reasons I cannot clearly remember, I put it down and didn’t pick it up again until it came up on my randomized reading selection system. For a long time, I struggled to read anything at all. My brain was burnt out at least two fronts. The first was, in retrospect, because I had read so much in graduate school. It wasn’t just reading, but it was that I was reading what was chosen by professors. I had little time to read for myself and what I wanted to read. Not only was the book selection dictated by the professors, but I also felt as if I had to read them in a certain, specific way. When we discussed books, more often than not, it was clear that the professors already had some ideas which they felt were correct about the texts. And sometimes we were meant to kind of parrot what they wanted to hear. And, yes, this is all tied up in this whole idea of having to be the “smartest” person in the room in order to survive as Myisha T. Hill discusses in her book. 

    Shortly after graduate school, I was working for a small newspaper and part of my job was to read books and write short blurbs about them. The stakes didn’t feel as high as they did when I was in graduate school, but, still, I was reading several books a week sometimes which I did not choose and I had to then write about them in a way that I perhaps would not have written about them had I not had to do it for my job. And so I remember when I finally felt I had the freedom to choose what I wanted to read for myself, I was a little overwhelmed. And a little lost. It was as if I had lost the ability to enjoy or learn from a book on my own terms. At times, even though I was picking what I wanted to read, when I wanted to read it, and even how I wanted to read it, I would get anxious. It was as if at any moment, someone could pop out of a corner demanding a one-page response paper or 150 words on why everyone should read this book immediately. 

    And so I suspect that perhaps the first time I picked up A Little Devil in America, I might have been still suffering from reading burn-out. So I’m glad I didn’t push it and read through that anxiety anyway. I’m quite sure I would have missed out on a beautiful experience. I would have missed the forest for the trees. Or maybe the trees for the forest. Either way, I would have missed something. 

    The second time I picked up A Little Devil in America, I was dealing with another sort of burn-out. A few weeks before, I’d finally disconnected from the last of social media. But my brain was still over-stimulated and enflamed from all of the rapid scrolling and images and ideas and thoughts coming at it. My attention span was shot. My brain didn’t trust itself. It had relied for so long on the input of fast moving images and ideas that it didn’t know how to rest. And maybe part of me thought that if I returned to social media, maybe that would soothe my over active brain, give it something to focus on, something to consume. Fortunately, I picked up A Little Devil in America instead. 

    Because the thing about this book is that Abdurraqib references a good number of still images, movie and video clips, and music, which is a lot of what my brain had burnt out on and was still, in a way, craving. And yet presents all of these in written words (obviously) AND with the historical and human context that my brain-on-social-media had been missing. His words were a balm that soothed my fiery brain. I had no urge to go out and watch the videos he was referencing, so vivid were his descriptions and profound were the information and analysis that he shared. 

    I’m thinking in particular of Abdurraqib’s retelling of Ben Vereen’s performance at the 1981 inaugural gala which is number 15 in his list 16 ways of looking at black face.  I could have predicted that the network did Vareen dirty by not airing his entire performance as they had agreed beforehand. What I could not have known or figured out on my own was the content and context of his whole performance. He similarly includes Whitney Houston’s story, humanizing her in ways that the headlines (of which I have vague childhood memories) never did. His description of Merry Clayton’s performance on The Rolling Stone’s Gimme Shelter had me listening to that track over and over just for that one break in her voice on that third “rape murder”. More importantly, it sent me in search of her solo albums. I was not disappointed. Again and again, Abdurraqib gives Black artists their due. One way in which he ignores the white gaze is by assuming Blackness. He does not explain those cultural touchpoint, histories, and language that might need to be explained to a white audience. 

    I’m going to be honest. This essay/ post took me a very, very long time to write. Just as with these books, I kept picking it up and putting it down, frittering and fretting about. Every time I sat down to write, something else would come up. Or, actually, I’d let something else come up. I struggled to get into the flow. I worried about “getting it right”. All of these delays and struggles are, of course, ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t real. And I know that this resistance that I feel is in large part because I have allowed the white gaze to haunt me. In part this is because I have experienced little else as both a writer and a reader. That is, until I’ve started to wrest control over both my reading life and writing life away from these ghostly, judging apparitions. Fortunately for me, Works like Heal Your Way Forward and A Little Devil in America are like holy water and a blessed crucifix, scaring away the white gaze like the false shadow that it is. 

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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. 

  • Keeper of all knowledge…

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
    View all responses

    … of myself. (If you’ve been following my posts, you saw that coming.)

    I’ve sometimes thought that it would be nice to be a postal delivery person. They walk a lot of miles. I enjoy walking. And I like the idea that maybe I’ll be delivering a love letter or a postcard from some far-flung destination or a homesick lament from sleep away camp. But then I remember that most mail is bills. And advertisements. And I remember how much my dog hates delivery people and that that and the weather must make their jobs very hard. I talk myself out of it.

    So maybe I’d like to be a wizard for a day. Or a bullet proof shield, able to place myself around American and Palestinian children alike. All the children, in fact. But then I remember that one day would not be enough.

    Maybe I’d like to be a fan, strong enough to blow away all the climate change (but not so strong as to throw us back into an ice age). I think it would take less than a day. But is a fan really a job? Or just an object?

    I think I’d like to be a people pleaser and when I say people, I mean myself. I’d like to be a greeter like at Walmart — but just greeting myself, continually all day. Asking myself if I need any help and then giving it to myself.

    For 24 hours, I’d like to be a park ranger. I’d like to be an elder. An ancestor. I’d like to be a child again, imagining like it was my job. I’d like to be a swimmer.

    I’d like, for 24 hours, to be a connector, like of ideas. Did you ever notice that both Joel from The Last of Us and Hopper from Stranger Things are father figures in fraught relationships with super-powered teenage girls and a variation of the name Elle (Ellie and Eleven) AND they both have biological daughters named Sarah who died? I would like to connect these sorts of ideas for people because clearly SOMETHING is going on here and I cannot be the only person who is thinking about it.

    For 24 hours, I’d like to be a weaver. An illustrator. A singer and musician. A storyteller. A shaman. A healer. I’d like a day to heal the world or at least the little patch of nature outside my back door. That would probably be enough for me. I’m no one’s burden, after all. I’m no one’s savior. Are we talking about jobs? Or skills?

    If I had a day to be any job, I’d like be the keeper of the flame.

    **********

    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. 

  • I am my favorite brand, of course.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are your favorite brands and why?
    View all responses

    I mean, at this point it goes without saying that “me, myself, and I” is going to be the answer to pretty much every daily prompt. It wouldn’t be very on brand of me to do anything else.

    To be honest, I don’t really know what a brand is. I think it has something to do with having a product that is recognizable and trusted and to mean something to people. And if that is correct, then I suppose that I really am currently in the process of building a brand of myself for myself.

    My understanding is that the word as we currently understand it comes from the process of burning a symbol onto the flank of cattle so that they could be recognized as belonging to a specific rancher. Enslaved people throughout history (and most recently in the US era of slavery) have been branded. I fear that our modern use of the term “brand” erases that awful history.

    Well, I was quite keen to delve into this term “brand” and how it relates to my current religion of the self and getting to know myself. But full disclosure, I’m about two weeks post final radiation treatment and I’m in a fair amount of pain and discomfort. In addition to the fatigue. It’s making it rather hard to sit up and type on the computer. So, I’m going to hit publish, hydrate, and take a break. And that, friends, is very on-brand.

  • Once again: me, myself, & these writers.

    Daily writing prompt
    List the people you admire and look to for advice…
    View all responses

    I admire myself and I look to myself for advice. I’ve been through some stuff and I’m unlike anyone else in the world, so I’m the best person to look to for advice. No one else understands me as well as I understand myself.

    Just earlier today, I was feeling rather anxious. I asked myself what I needed and then, based on the answer, I sat down and wrote in my journal for a while to sort and sift through my anxiety and other feelings. By the end, I came to a sort of piece of advice for myself. This advice was uniquely tailored to me and this situation and yet, it’s something that I will be able to return to again and again when I feel similarly anxious in the future. And maybe at some point I’ll be able to share this advice through my writing and it will be helpful to someone else.

    I also admire and seek advice from a great many writers. Here are some blog posts I’ve written about books that have helped me over the past year or so.

    Hood Wellness by Tamela J. Gordon

    The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

    Bad Indians by Deborah A Miranda

    Remember Who The F*ck You Are by Candyss Love

    Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley

    Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

    I will be writing about more books by writers that I admire and from whose wisdom and advice I’ve benefited, learned, and grown. If you’re interested in more book recommendations, please subscribe!

    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. 

  • Yes I vote in political elections in spite of…

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you vote in political elections?
    View all responses

    … the fact that I grew up on DC, a place where the license plate “slogan” appropriately reads, “Taxation without representation”. Yes. Residents have no representation in Congress. And, yes, residents pay taxes. And yes, I went to school alongside the children of senators and congresspeople who lived there because they were representing their states or districts. And yet, their classmates and families didn’t have the same representation.

    …. I have to admit that there have been elections when I haven’t voted, when it was too difficult to get a ballot because I was living somewhere else… and, yes, sometimes I haven’t voted because I lived in an area where (due to electoral college or due to the high concentration of democrats)my vote wouldn’t matter (yes, even down ballot).

  • A map towards myself

    Daily writing prompt
    What gives you direction in life?
    View all responses

    I am a cartographer, constantly looking for the streets and paths, coastlines and rock formations that both define me and are markers to the paths into a deeper understanding of myself. All roads lead to me and I’m currently bouncing between three often intersecting passageways on my journey to myself: body, mind, and spirit.

    Body: I listen to my body. Here’s how. I lie or sit in relative stillness or whatever type of stillness my body is asking for. I focus on my breath. The depth. The texture. The smoothness or bumpiness. I do this without judgment. My breath communicates a lot to me about the state of my body. Where is there tension? I center my body.

    Here’s an example from my morning walk with my dog of prioritizing my body. It’s very hot here right now. In spite of my light clothes and my hat and it still being relatively early in the day, I was sweating and uncomfortable as I walked along the sunny sidewalk to the nearby park. I was looking forward to walking through the cool freshly cut grass in a shady spot of the field. There was a couple already at the park with their dog off leash. Past mornings, when I have seen an off-leash dog in the park, I have gone another way even if that other way is less comfortable or convenient for me. But today, my body was insistent, craving the shady spot on the field, so I continued on. I listened to my body. There was no run in with the other dog or her owner’s. My dog and I got to enjoy the cool air of the part of the field lined with trees. The people there watched me the entire time I was walking through the field, but I just kept doing what I was doing. And here’s what I learned: I am allowed to take up space with my body. I am allowed to enjoy a walk through the park. And I can trust myself and my body.

    Mind: My mind is curious. I keep it engaged with reading and learning. And lately, I’ve been learning more about my mind by engaging more actively with my sleeping dreams. Here’s how I do it.

    1. I prime my mind both during the day and right before I go to sleep, telling myself that I am going to remember my dreams.
    2. I keep a notebook and pen next to my bed.
    3. When I wake up — whether that’s in the middle of the night — or in the morning, I jot down a few notes about any dreams that I remember.
    4. Later in the day, I use the notes to write a more detailed description of the dream. I focus on both the images and the feelings. And then I free write about what the dream is revealing to me about me. It’s both a very informative and liberating practice. And it turns out, I’m pretty fascinating.

    There are variations to this practice including priming myself to lucid dream (in other words to realizing that I’m dreaming and to consciously control the dream) and to posing a question or a problem to my dream self. It’s pretty remarkable the answers and the solutions that have come up in my dreaming state.

    Spirit: My body has created life and now I offer my spirit opportunities to be creative too. I write. I make music. I create art. I create moments and myself too. I daydream. And I return to my body, my breath, my dreams. Yes, I know that those are pathways I’ve mentioned above under “body” and “mind”. But these three parts are always connected, like a three-legged stool creating a solid base for the center of 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. My writing is offered freely here and I’m also grateful for financial support. 

  • …making self into its own new religion…

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
    View all responses

    “For how else can the self become whole save by making self into its own new religion?” Audre Lorde, New York City, 1970

    This is the quote I wrote on one of the first pages of (one of) my 2025 journal/ notebook. It’s a hard question to internalize into a mind and soul full of demands to be selfLESS. It begs the question: How can one be less oneself? Or more importantly, why would one want to be less than oneself?

    I do not.

    How does one make self into its own new religion?

    I wrote a bit about this here in this blog post: Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!

    And I wrote a bit about how important Audre Lorde’s writing has been to me here in this blog post: Tomorrow, I Will Learn to Whether I Will Become an Archer.

    Yesterday, I wrote about my holidays and posted rather late in the day. I’m reposting it here because it’s connected to this quote about making the self into its own new religion. Celebrate This Breath and Then the Next.

    I’m sitting here trying to figure out how I can write a longer post on this topic. Why? There on no word counts here. This post will not be graded or assessed in any way. There’s no one watching over what I write and telling me “not enough!” Well, except for me.

    So I have to dig deeper. What do I want? Do I want to have a longer post? Do I have more to write about this topic at the moment? I must be quiet and listen to that deep, deep inner voice: the self. What do I want? What do I need? I need rest. I’d really like to read a little bit. I’m in the middle of two books that I’m really enjoying right now. And I’m rather hungry, so I’d like to get some food. And I’d like to get a few sentences written in a few other projects. I’d like to play the guitar. And I will do all of those things at some point today. None of these things feel like they are particularly selfish, even though they place my self (my needs and wants) at the center. And nowhere is my deeper self asking me to write more in this post. So I won’t.