Rhena Writes

Tag: dailyprompt

  • Damn, WordPress, you really got me deep into self reflection today, don’t you?

    Daily writing prompt
    When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
    View all responses

    When I was five, I wanted to be an artist when I grew up.

    My parents owned a restaurant in those days and I didn’t go to preschool. I spent a lot of time in the offices on the second floor of their business where my mom would be handling paperwork as the manager. Even once I was in Kindergarten, I usually spent parts of my summer days there.

    There wasn’t much for a kid to do at the restaurant but there was a stack of thick beige paper that my parents used to print menus and flyers on. And somehow, there usually were markers or crayons around. I went through an abstract phase: drawing long looping lines and then coloring in the shapes that emerged as the lines crossed each other. This phase could have been an entire summer or it might have lasted a few hours. Time and memory. You know how these things mix up, and especially in the mind of an abstract artist five year old.

    I do remember announcing that I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. In spite of the fact that I spent so much time in my family’s place of business, I still had a five year old’s understanding of things like jobs and careers. What did I know of galleries and studios and monetization and starving? All of that was even more abstract than my looping lines.

    At times, I told my dad that I wanted to be a doctor. I planned on attending Harvard Medical School. Or so I said. I was mostly saying this type of thing to please the adults. And while “doctor” might have been closer to making grown-ups happy, “artist” was closer to making me happy. This is why what I really think I was getting at when I claimed that I wanted to be an artist is that I wanted to spend my life expressing myself and perhaps that I hoped that as an adult, there would always be space for that.

    Well, I’m not a doctor, so the need to please adults didn’t win out. But has my life otherwise turned out the way that five year old Rhena hoped? Although there have been long stretches where I haven’t, I now paint and draw semi-regularly. And as a five year old, I couldn’t write well enough to picture it as part of my future. But I’m writing now. And while it’s taken me a long time, I’m creating ever more space for self expression.

    In the meantime, my six year old son regularly announces that he IS an artist. There is no future dreaming about it. He is what he is in this moment. And I think I created space in his life for him to express himself now. So, yeah, five year old Rhena is very proud.

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    If you’d like to support this artist in living out her five-year-old dreams for herself, please visit my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! (Also, shares, likes, and poking around the other posts helps too!)

  • You lack discipline!

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s something most people don’t understand?
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    Discipline is something that most people don’t understand. And when I write “most people”, I mean me.

    The word discipline recalls a punishing authoritarianism, an asceticism that leaves little no room for joy. When I got the phrase Kung Fu Life in archaic Chinese tattooed on my arm, I wasn’t really thinking about the discipline aspect of Kung Fu. You see, discipline isn’t the most romantic of notions. At least to my mind. And then there’s the movie/ TV show trope of the Asian elder with a lot of thoughts about discipline (or lack thereof) and who is sometimes the butt of the joke, is always flat and one-dimensional, and who never gets to be heroic.

    But here I am, with this phrase that alludes to discipline in pretty permanent ink in my skin.

    Aside from the Asian elders tropes, my (mis)understanding of discipline where most of my understanding of life was first established: in the halls of elite (and elitist) institutions of higher learning very close to the very center of empire. In other words, I grew up in DC and went to mostly private schools including one Ivy League for graduate school.

    Let me tell you: power does not like discipline. It’s a paradox. You’d think that at the schools where the powerful sent their children, they’d want discipline to be taught. But it isn’t. This is because, in part, much of the power that the elites enjoy was bestowed upon them. It was inherited by their station in life. I know that this is an unpopular idea to have in the United States where a belief in meritocracy runs deep. But you’ll just have to take my word as someone who spent many formative years observing how some of institutions at the center of empire work.

    The paradox continues. Creativity, success, and genius are considered innate in these circles. They are gifts bestowed upon a chosen few. But what discipline does is create a way in which this so-called gifts can actually be cultivated. This is an offense to power. And self discipline also requires saying “no” to certain things (we saw this in the other question of the day about setting goals). Elitism hates being told no. The closer to power one gets, the more one has to say “no” if one wants to maintain a sense of self, a sense of integrity, which is discipline’s bedfellow. Discipline is also self-control. And if it is the self that is in control, then elitism, power, empire has no chance at controlling the individual.

    Every day for the past month, before I go to bed, I’ve been writing three moments of joy or gratitude. I learned of this practice from Alex Elle. This is a discipline. I know because even in this, I sometimes phase internal resistance. It feels like one more task. But I’ve been disciplined. I’ve practiced every day and now it’s becoming automatic. It’s not just becoming automatic at the end of the day when I sit down to do the task, but during the day, I’m becoming more alert to moments of joy and gratitude so that I am starting to be able to find both in smaller and smaller things, in darker and darker times. I don’t require winning the lottery (although that would be nice) to feel joy. I can appreciate the buds emerging on the maple outside or someone’s smile or the way the sunlight hits the side of my house (that I have a house for the sunlight to hit!) or the way that Aretha Franklin sings “freeeeedom!” on “Think”.

    And so joy is the reward for that discipline.

    I’ve also been trying to be disciplined in making space and time for creativity. I paint or draw everyday — even if it’s just a little pen sketch on the side of a piece of writing. Lately, it’s been painting in drawings of insects in water color. I used to be very “precious” about this type of thing. I’d pull out all my materials and set it up just so and mix colors and all the rest. And this is also a certain type of discipline. But this production meant I wasn’t doing it as often, so I got some discipline. I promised myself I’d do it every day, even if it was just a single brush stroke. The painting I’ve done has been messy and loose. And it’s beautiful. It’s perfect in its imperfection: I’m painting outside the lines. I’m just letting the colors do their thing and the water too. And what has emerged looks so free and open and natural. It was discipline, a commitment to returning to this practice to painting that allowed me to learn and see the beauty there.

    I’ve also brought discipline to learning guitar. I do it every day for thirty minutes. It’s a struggle at times. I pretty sure that at some point in my childhood, I learned how to read music. But somehow I had to start that process all over again learning guitar. (I suspect that perhaps it has something to do with how things are taught in those institutions of higher learning that I mentioned earlier, but I digress.) But slowly, my brain is making these connections. This morning, I sent a few texts to my daughter asking her about notes and half steps and full steps. We exchanged a few texts back and forth. She knows a lot more about music than I do. And it occurred to me how music is like a whole other language and she told me how not every system of music uses the same twelve notes. This might seem pretty basic to a lot of people, but, to me, this was mind-blowing. And it changed the way I think about playing guitar. In a good way. And I was also struck by how the discipline that I bring to playing and practicing guitar, which I’ve largely experienced as fairly solitary, opened up this whole other aspect to my relationship to my daughter.

    And, of course, I try to bring discipline to my writing and, yes, even blogging. I had a doctor’s appointment today and usually that kind of wears me out for the day. And I extend myself a little grace at these times and don’t always force the writing. But I think because I’ve been disciplined about it on other days, I was actually excited to write a blog post in spite of my fatigue.

    Still, I’ll end this in order to practice discipline in one other area of my life that I’ve committed to: rest.

  • Pen, paper, and the word of Doechii

    Daily writing prompt
    How has technology changed your job?
    View all responses

    I admit that one of my current struggles is taking my writing from pen and paper to the keyboard and screen. The problem is that I love my handwriting. And I love the physical sensation of putting ink on to the page of a notebook and watching the words unfurl. So much of writing is living inside my head with my own thoughts that the physical aspects of the process (the job) become magnified. As does my enjoyment of them. And my discomfort.

    When I do sit at the computer (as I am now) to write, it feels decidedly unnatural. I’m sitting upright in a chair (rather than curled up in a chair when I’m writing by hand). I never really know what to do with my wrists. And do I leave my bracelets and watch on or just kind of tuck them out of the way? Excuse me. I’m going to pause a moment here to change my pants to ones with an elastic waistband as I have suddenly become intensely aware of the stiffness of my jeans.

    Ok. Much better. But see what I mean?

    I have loads of handwritten poems and stories and essays and errant thoughts and musings, but until I can transfer them into my computer and send them out in the world, do they have meaning? I’d argue that, yes, they do have meaning. Very deep meanings. All that work, using seemingly outdated technology of pen and paper, has meant a great deal to me. And I’ve come to the recent realization that my job as a writer being meaningful to me and me alone is enough.

    I’m going to stop writing for a moment and think about that (in my awkward upright chair that I don’t really know how to sit in). All of those notebooks and scratchings? They reveal something. And it think it’s a life lived. Thoughts. Dare I say: a soul? It’s the cumulation of thoughts and moments and lessons and exchanges and interactions of a life and mind. But I could burn them all tomorrow, or today, and all of that would still exist. In fact, I’ve thrown out a good deal of my writing. Sometimes I’ve even burnt my writing ritualistically in moments of attempting to let go of something and perhaps to have a better understanding of the transient nature of life. Other times, I’ve just tossed out entire journals in a move or housecleaning. We can’t take it all with us.

    And servers can also go up in flames. Computers crash all the time. Even our technology cannot save us from impermanence.

    So the obvious question is why am I even writing on this computer, posting to this blog? Why use this technology that makes me physically uncomfortable when pen and paper bring me so much joy? And it’s an excellent question, one that I ask myself pretty much every day.

    The other day, I mentioned to someone that I’m a writer and she said offhandedly something along the lines of, “I guess with AI, there’s not really a need for writers anymore.” I wasn’t offended. This is the reality that writers, everybody with jobs that involve creating are up against right now. If we choose to be. The woman who was speaking is herself a visual artist and we all know that one of the first things that people did with AI when it became commonly available was to use it to render visual art and images.

    The easy answer would be that this blog, me posting to the internet regularly is a last stand against AI. But I’m not really a last-stand kind of person aside from the fact that I don’t think this is really a last-stand narrative that we’re in the middle of here. AI is just the most recent of many tools that have, in the wrong hands, been wielded against the better angels of humanity.

    When I write by hand, I am very much aware of what my body is doing and what my body is capable of. In other words, I feel very human in those moments. And when I say human, I mean all of it, the messy and the creative. I feel as though I am wading into the rivers of my source. Listen to Doechii’s track, “God”, on her album Oh The Places You’ll Go if you want more insight into what that’s like. She talks about her realization that her source is infinite and then the complementary thought that that means everyone’s source is infinite. Each person’s creativity is already limitless. Including mine. Including yours.

    And that is what pulls me out of the just “enough for me” existence. My job as a writer is to, yes, tend to my own humanity first and foremost but it’s also to tell the stories, to share the thoughts and connections, to announce, “I’m still alive and I’m a human” to whoever needs to hear it, and also and maybe even primarily to spread the word of Doechii.

  • Question of the day: goals

    Daily writing prompt
    How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?
    View all responses

    Every day. Every hour. Every minute. Every second. Every moment. Never. Not at all. Not ever.

    I’m going to have to say “no” to answering this question; it doesn’t align with my goal of never divulging my secrets to success, of only writing what is meaningful to me, of not being goal driven, of trusting that the words will come and being at peace when they don’t, of allowing myself only what feels right and good for me, of a little self indulgence now and again, and using my time wisely.

    I’m going to have to say “yes” to answering this question; it aligns with my goal of posting to this blog today, of self reflection, of taking advantage of opportunities and moments presented to me, of living in each moment, of self reflection, of not judging myself, of trusting that the words will come when they need to come, of sitting with the aches and pains and noticing that even the my annoyance at that roaring dumptruck that just rattled my house means that I’m alive, of strengthening that muscle that shoves aside the fears, of being able to complete ten burpees without taking a break, of trusting myself.

  • My Secret Skill: A Prose Poem

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
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    A secret skill or ability I wish I had is to be able to just chill the eff out. No. That’s not it. I wish I could conjure joy on command. No. That’s not it either. I wish I could make a decision. Decisiveness. That’s it.

    No. I wish I could write spells. I wish I had been cataloguing spells with a feather quill in a massive leather-bound book with deckle edged paper in elegant script so that I could open the pages and recite one appropriate to any occasion. No that’s not it either.

    I wish I could fly. No. I’m afraid of heights. I’d like to be able to teleport. Fade into pixels and reappear somewhere else. Maybe even someone else. No. I love myself too much for that.

    I wish I could cure disease. Yes. That’s the one.

    Or that flowers bloomed in my footprints: forsythia and bluebells and hyacinths and all the ones, like plumeria, that I cannot name but remind me earth is my home.

    Spout fire from my mouth and hands. Eyes too. Laser beams.

    I wish for super strength so that I could bend the arc of history more quickly towards justice.

    I would like the ability to style my outfit everyday for both comfort and looks. So that I could walk down the street to a chorus of, “Who’s that?” and “damn!”

    I would like to be able to keep a neat and tidy email account, brew the perfect cup of coffee but just for the smell, extend an invitation.

    I wish I could crochet a blanket or two. Wrap you, perfect stranger, up in its softness on days like these cold and rainy ones.

    I would like my secret ability to be trust. Or maybe trustworthiness.

    I’d like to win the attention of elves so that I can lay my tools and materials out before going to bed and in the morning, a perfect pair of shoes appear in their place.

    I would like to be able to quiet the voices, to slay the dragons, to hold and keep faith, to have the right words.

    I would like to be present to each moment. And mostly to this one. Yes. That’s it. That’s the one.

    Please consider supporting my writing, here.

  • More of this: a practice.

    Daily writing prompt
    What do you wish you could do more every day?
    View all responses

    The sun, the wind, the tree outside my window are working in concert to create a moving shadow on my computer monitor base and desktop. It’s a performance, directed by Mother Nature. On the other side of the window, blades of grass shimmy and shake to the beat of the breeze. It beckons a memory from before language: light and dark, movement, rhythm. I wish I could show you more of this every day so that together, we might feel the same raw, timeless innocence.

    A few months ago, I started to take guitar lessons. I’m going to not equivocate or judge my abilities. This isn’t about that. I try to practice every day and I enjoy it, immensely. Every so often, I am able to enter that coveted flow state with guitar where I am able to focus on that one singular task, moment, note, chord, song, skill for a moment or two. Maybe even a few minutes. I enjoy the routine of the daily practice: stretch, meditate, scales, work on the assigned piece, and maybe learning a few new notes or a cord. I enjoy that each day I can see a little bit of my progress and a deepening understanding.

    I recently figured out that the tempo I play a given piece is only as fast as my slowest transition. The same way a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Rather than try to speed up the transitions that I most struggle with, I slow everything else down. This has allowed me to actually enjoy both the “easier” parts as well as the trickier ones. I can luxuriate in each note and cord, letting the easy, open notes ring a little longer. Inside those notes is where I find grace. This is where I learn that slow, fast. One is not better than the other. They just are.

    But I do not wish I could play more guitar everyday. In fact, each day, I set a timer and put down the guitar when it goes off. I do not obsessively try to “fix” whatever I’m working on. My goal is not to extend my practice to the length of the timer. My goal is to limit the time. And in doing so, I trust that there is always tomorrow’s practice. I trust my own faithfulness to the practice. I do wish that I could bring more of that trust throughout other parts of my day. Every day.

    I’m also finding time for exercise and movement each day. I do stretching and a few sun salutations when I wake up. (The moon was particularly beautiful from my kitchen window next to where I roll out my yoga mat this morning.) My dog and I enjoy a walk or two through the day. And this past month, I’ve started to integrate some Barre Empowered routines into my week. When I think about exercise, it’s something I kind of dread even though moving my body is something that I quite enjoy. And so I look for the moments of grace when I exercise too. Can I take it a little easier on myself today if I’m low on energy? Yes. Sure! I’m grateful for Maya, the founder of Barre Empowered, whose messaging is more supportive and, well, empowering than most exercise videos I’ve tried in the past.

    I don’t wish I could do more exercise everyday, but I do wish I could extend more gratitude to my body.

    I write, too, everyday. And I read, because otherwise my writing would just be a monologue rather than a conversation. Last year I read The Word: Black Writers Talk About the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing (edited by Marita Golden). In his chapter, Nathan McCall said, “Yeah, I had a notebook. You could buy little things from the canteen, and I bought a notebook and started writing down what I was feeling. Prison ain’t exactly the best place to be telling somebody your deepest feelings, talking about your pain. So I was writing stuff down. And I realized that it made me feel better, whatever I said, whether it was a paragraph, whether it was a page. Sometimes I would just write and it would be disjointed and everything, but it would make me feel better, So the more it made me feel better, the more I did it. Then the more I did it, the better I became at it. Then I began to see it become a challenge to get my feelings down with the depth and preciseness that I felt.”

    My wish is that everyday I believe in the value of my words, my feelings, my stories and my writing that emerges.

    Please support my writing here.

  • 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.

  • The second time they ask, “Where are you from?”

    “No. Where are you really from?”

    It’s in the “no.”

    Or it’s in the really.

    Or it’s in the emphasis on from.

    It’s in the asking the question the second time.

    It’s in the way they mean to say my first answer wasn’t correct.

    As if to say, “You don’t know yourself.”

    As if to say, “I do.”

    As if to say, “Nobody is where you’re from.”

    As if to say, “You have to have come from someplace else.”

    As if to say, “Being born here isn’t enough. How many generations back can you go?”

    As if to say, “Ooooooh. So exotic.”

    As if to say, “Ching chong ling long. Do a little dance. Sing a little song. You know kung fu? Pad Thai? Hoochie coochie? Ho-chi-minh?”

    What do you know about skipping stones in the Rock Creek?

    What do you know about the smell of warm track grease inside a windy underground tunnel?

    What do you know about working the walls in a hot high school gym under cowbells and congas?

    Because even without these bona fides…

    …if you know…

    …you know…

    where I’m from.

    Daily writing prompt
    What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
    View all responses

    If you like what you read here or in other posts and would like to show a little gratitude for this hard working writer, please drop a tip in my cup. Here.

  • Failure? I don’t know her.

    The only failure I’ve observed is on the part of the editors, agents, judgy mcjudgers, publishers, et al who have failed to see my writing as the gift that it is. Their loss, my gain. In other words, the bouncers were so busy keeping people out that they failed to see that outside is where the real party is happening. As for me? I stopped looking for their approval and started approving of myself and here we are. So, yeah, that’s a success by another name.

    Daily writing prompt
    How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
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  • Heart of Empire

    Daily writing prompt
    You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
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    I only consider my invisibility a super power because of where I grew up: the heart of empire.