Rhena Writes

Tag: art

  • Free your mind…

    Daily writing prompt
    What does freedom mean to you?
    View all responses

    …and the rest will follow. — En Vogue, Free Your Mind

    Emancipate yourself from mental slavery

    None but ourselves can free our minds.

    –Bob Marley, Redemption Song

    After reading the daily prompt, I was thinking about different song lyrics that spoke to freedom. A few crossed my mind and I decided I would put them in my post, but first I wanted to listen to the music in my music player. If nothing else, to double check that I had the lyrics correct. But also just because I like these songs and wanted to listen to them.

    I opened up my music player on my computer and everything looked different. Well, not everything, but just enough that I couldn’t figure out how to search for specific songs, something that I’d done just a day ago. Unfamiliar. I was lost and frustrated. I wanted the system to work the way that I was used to, the way that I had expected it to. And it wasn’t.

    I was internally raging at the designers who made this music player, who changed it so often as to make it impossible for me to keep up who made it so NOT intuitive.

    And behind that, I was raging at myself. Annoyed that I wasn’t able to keep up with rapidly changing technology. Regretting that over the years I’ve sold off all of my CDs. It was so easy back then when I could just find the album I wanted and pop it in the CD player. Past me should have tried harder to keep everything the same for future me. Arrrgh!

    I know. It’s ridiculous. Take a breath.

    Because now me actually doesn’t want to have stacks and stacks of CDs to store and maintain. (No matter how satisfyingly familiar the clack clack of jewel case against jewel case sounds, no matter how much I relish unfolding the liner notes.) Present me really, really enjoys the convenience of being able to pull up music.

    No. This internal rage was something else. It was me demanding that I “get it right.” I’ve listened to both songs, Free Your Mind and Redemption Song, perhaps dozens of times in my life. And yet, still, part of me felt that in order to write about them properly today, I needed to listen to them again. In other words, my lived experience is never enough. Even for my own blog.

    Where does this come from?

    Something that someone once said to me popped into my head. I was in high school and I was wearing a new dress. This person came up to me and said, “I liked your dress until I saw that it had pockets.”

    At the time, I didn’t realize what an odd thing that was to say. And I suspect it’s because when day after day, people are commenting (overtly and covertly) on your clothes, the way you look, how you sound, and your body in general, one comment more comment doesn’t particularly warrant attention in the moment.

    But now-me can see how truly strange it is that someone might comment on someone else’s clothes in this way with an air of taking offense that a dress might have pockets and that said-pockets might be used and useful.

    This was far before the “it has pockets!” meme. Perhaps it is was this meme that made me realize just how “out of pocket” that comment was. (Yes. I did just have to write that.)

    So how does all of this relate to freedom and what it means to me? Some days, it feels like I’m caught under this massive pile of these sorts of comments and experiences that make me question myself. Comments from teachers and professors that infer that I’m not trying hard enough or that I’m not enough; implicitly messaging of the society that I live in that disregards bodies that look and behave like mine; the culture of comparison and competition that seeps in everywhere. It takes a great deal of my mental, physical, emotional energy to overcome these comments and expectations.

    But increasingly, I’ve been able to see where I’m getting a helping hand. People who wear dresses are suddenly on-line espousing the benefits of pockets and are genuinely excited about something so simple. This provides the ammunition I need to shoot down the “I like the ‘I liked your dress until’ comment.” Or better yet, to just ignore it. Focus, instead, on how much my daughters enjoy pockets. I’ll read a line from a book and it will feel like the writer reached out and lifted one of these expectations I’ve been living under. (As with Cole Arthur Riley’s reminder, “I am no one’s burden. I am no one’s savior.”)

    Or, yes, sometimes it’s a song. As with En Vogue’s Free Your Mind, “Before you can read me, you got to learn how to see me. I said.”

    In the end, it comes down to me. It’s, in part, up to me to write myself down so that there’s something there to be read, something to be seen.

    In other words, as Bob Marley asks, “Won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom?”

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

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  • I’ll take this as a sign to book my next tattoo.

    Daily writing prompt
    What tattoo do you want and where would you put it?
    View all responses

    I just got my second tattoo Tuesday this week. It’s on my right forearm, where I can see it when I’m writing. That one is the words, “it’s something to do” in my handwriting. I heard the poet Nikki Giovanni say this at the beginning of a talk. The full quote was something along the lines of, “I’m getting old. I don’t mind. It’s something to do.” I was nervous often this past year in the lead up to different procedures, surgeries, biopsies, treatments, etc… and her words often came to mind. They calmed me. She calmed me.

    The artist Bibi Abelle drew this one. She’s local and does single needle tattooing. Her work is beautiful. I’d read in an article that she also had cancer. It’s comforting to be in the presence of someone who you don’t have to explain things to, especially when that person is doing something as intimate as drawing on your body.

    The tattoo didn’t involve a whole lot of planning. I wrote the words on a piece of paper with the pen she had out for me to sign the consent form. I didn’t even pull out my favorite (if you know you know) pens that I had in my purse. I was a little nervous. No. I think actually it was excitement. I’m finally in a place where I’m able to differentiate between the two. And maybe my hand shook a little as I wrote. But part of my promise to myself was just to write it, tattoo it. One and done. Extend myself grace. Whatever came out of my hand on to that piece of paper was going to be tattooed on me. Bibi did give me some options of different sizes and we discussed it. She said, “bigger is always better when it comes to tattoos.” So I went with a slightly bigger size. It seemed apt also as my eyesight is getting worse and it would be easier for me to see it and read it. Part of this whole experience was to accept my imperfections and to let go of trying to make everything perfect. That was achieved.

    As my daughter pointed out when I showed her my new tattoo, “It’s also the answer to the question, ‘why did you get a tattoo?”

    My first tattoo was only about ten or so days before my second and also inspired by Nikki Giovanni, who had the words Thug Life tattooed on her left forearm. I’ve read that she was inspired by Tu-Pac’s tattoo across his abdomen. Mine is the words, “Kung Fu Life” in archaic Chinese. Here are the themes that I pulled from Nikki Giovanni’s tattoo: reclaiming words that contain entire codes, lives, meanings, philosophies, and ways of being but have been weaponized against us and people who look like us.

    It was designed by Candy Wang who’s based in the other Washington (I’m near DC) so I was looking for someone local to do the tattooing. I found Ariyana Suvar who is about thirty minutes from me in Clarksburg, MD. The truth is that in the back of my head, I was also looking for someone who could do a large chest tattoo where my breast used to be. I’m not getting reconstruction. A tattoo just seems a lot more fun? Beautiful? Unique? Meaningful? Collaborative? All of the above. Ariyana and I first video chatted. One of the first things she asked is, “Are you Thai?” I think my jaw dropped because she quickly said, “I saw your last name on your email.” She then explained that she uses Suvar for convenience but that her actual last name is also a longer Thai one. Relatable. Not only are we both negotiating using our long Thai last names in spaces that aren’t generally very open to that sort of thing, but it turns out that one set of her grandparents are also from China and immigrated to Thailand just like mine. In spite of how countries might try to contain and control their borders, migration isn’t that unusual in most parts of the world. But if you can see that something bigger was at work here to place me in her tattoo studio to get my archaic Chinese characters on my arm, then you get it.

    Do you know what it’s like to spend most of your life having to “explain” (ie justify) your family’s history in almost every space you enter? Do you know what it’s like to, on the other extreme, have that same history be ignored in almost every other space you enter?

    At that same appointment, Ariyana started designing my chest piece. Turns out, I’m going to have to put it off until after summer is over because (cancer) reasons. I do not have the words to explain what it means to have someone, an artist, look at your changed and scarred body and see potential.

    This morning, I was thinking about writing a blog post today. It was really bothering me, this question of: what am I going to write today? I’m trying (see “it’s something to do” tattoo experience above) to be in the moment with all things, but perhaps most especially with my writing. I’m trying to shut out all the voices that demand perfection and meaning and beauty and profundity in every word and sentence and paragraph, the voices that tell me that the only way to write is to brainstorm and outline and draft and revise and edit and on and on and on and anything less is not worthy of being seen by anyone else.

    I am working on trust. I am working on trusting that if I show up to my notebook or computer, something will come. The thing that’s needed will be come. It’s in the returning. It’s in the faithfulness. It’s in trusting that I have practiced this, this putting on words on the page over and over.

    And so it was, that I came to my computer. And there was the question of the day. The thing that had already been on my mind.

    And that, friends, is why I’m off to book my next tattoo with Bibi, one in which I’ll show up at her studio at the appointed time and we’ll just see what comes up, what we decide needs to be put on my body in that moment and that time. And that, friends, is Kung Fu Life.

    If you’d like to contribute to these and future tattoos, please click here.