Rhena Writes

Tag: music

  • My favorite season is the one I’m in.

    Daily writing prompt
    What is your favorite season of year? Why?
    View all responses

    So, right now, that means spring is my favorite season. In Maryland it already feels a bit more like summer, hot and humid, the constant threat of thunderstorms, even though we are still ten days or so away from the summer solstice. The minutes of sunlight are still piling up on each side of the day. School is still in session, but the community pools are open. It would be easy for me to get caught up in either looking forward towards summer break or backwards to the cooler days of spring during this time of transition. But I’m putting a great deal of effort into being in the season I’m in — weatherwise and otherwise.

    I learned a lesson about this just yesterday in my guitar lesson. I’ve been working the same piece of music for a while now — maybe as long as two or three months? — I’m not really sure. In any case, it’s been a challenging piece and the last few lessons, my teacher has worked with me with the same few trouble spots for a few weeks now. At the end of the lesson, she’s sent me off with some thoughts on how to work on those few measures. So at each practice, I will follow her suggestions and work on those few measures, practicing them over and over. And there certainly has been some improvement.

    And yesterday she called me out. “You’ve been working on these other parts of the piece, haven’t you?” indicating the lines and measures that we hadn’t started working on during my lessons yet.

    I laughed and wondered, “How did she know?“

    I confessed that I had been. She also teaches my daughter and she told me that I’m just like her. There’s probably some truth to that. But when I talked to my daughter about it, she said that she has some favorite parts to pieces of music that she just really enjoys playing and so she plays those parts over and over.

    That’s not what’s going on for me.

    As I explained to my guitar teacher, I have it in my head that there’s some sort of deadline or like a “test” at the end and I start to get worried that I’m not going to have covered or practiced that part of the piece.

    I know. There is no deadline. And that’s also exactly what I said to my teacher. “You’re type A,” she said.

    We both had a bit of a laugh over the whole thing. The whole thing forced to me to examine and articulate some of these ridiculous thoughts and ideas that underlie how I’ve been approaching practicing guitar. And it also made me realize that I present as a Type A personality. And I realize that this is a survival/ defense mechanism that I built up in school and probably in life in general. It’s that I always feel like if I’m not three steps ahead, then I’m three steps behind and slipping even faster.

    But in my heart of hearts, that’s not who I really am. It’s just how I’ve been presenting myself. It’s a coping strategy. I practiced those other sections of the music because I was worried I’d somehow be called upon to know the whole piece and I wouldn’t be prepared.

    All of this for an activity that I’m partaking in supposedly “for fun.”

    In the meantime, the few measures that my teacher suggested I practice aren’t really getting that much better. And the whole thing isn’t really that much fun. Or, at least, it’s definitely not as much fun as it could be if I just trusted the process. Just focus on the parts that my teacher told me to. No need to be a super student, to know the whole thing ahead of the class (by the way, there is no class, these are private lessons). I’ve been cramming all of the music into each week, each practice. And in this way of thinking, I’ve ended up not really knowing any of the music that well. I haven’t been giving each line, each measure, each note its space and time.

    I’d like to be able to tell you that since this lesson and commensurate change in attitude, I’ve picked up the guitar and the whole thing has come together. That’s not true. This isn’t some neat little lesson with a change of attitude and a happy reward at the end. In fact, I haven’t even picked up the guitar since yesterday’s lesson. In part because that’s part of the lesson too. I’m doing all of this for fun so I don’t need to practice just to “prove” something to myself. And I also don’t need to “over practice”. I practice once a day for thirty to forty-five minutes. When I’m done, I’m done, I move on to something else. I don’t fixate and obsess and try to perfect it all.

    So what does this have to do with my favorite season?

    Like I said, my favorite season is the one I’m in. And being able to say that means that I don’t spend a lot of time looking forwards or looking backwards at the other seasons, which will inevitably come in their due time. Just as those other parts of the music will get their due focus and attention in their time. In the meantime, I’ll just live in the moment, the season, the measure, the notes I’m in.

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    It’s Wednesday, which means that I’m going to include a brief summary of what I’ve been blogging about in this past week.

    Let’s begin with last Thursday where I answered the prompt about my dream chocolate bar, which ended up being an impossible one because what’s the point of dreaming if it doesn’t transcend reality?

    Friday was my shortest post yet about why I wouldn’t change my name.

    Next up, I revealed who I spend most of my time with. (MY answer was unsurprising.)

    I wrote about what I need to live a good life. And, again, not a surprising answer.

    My tagline in a list poem: Rhena, more than this poem.

    Lastly, yesterday I wrote about what luxury I couldn’t live without.

    A bit of silence. And then a discussion of why I shouldn’t actually feel awkward about speaking aloud by 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. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • 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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    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. 

  • You lack discipline!

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s something most people don’t understand?
    View all responses

    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.

  • 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.

  • On AI, John Henry, Likes, and Views

    I have a few pages of handwritten notes for this post and yet I struggle to make the transition from drafting in pen to typing on the computer. When my older daughter was attending school virtually, she made friends with people over google docs. It is her generation’s version of passing notes. She commented once, as she sat in our basement on her computer watching her classmate type a letter to her, live, “You can learn a lot about a person from how they type.” I remembered being in school myself and how familiar I was with my classmate’s handwriting and how much it could, in fact, reveal so much about a person. It’s a different era now. And perhaps this is in part why I struggle to convert from hand to computer. 

    I also remember a song that we learned in school. “John Henry was a steal driving man, oh lord, …” I don’t remember much else from the song except that the final line was something like, “… he laid down his hammer and he died, oh Lord, yes, he laid down his hammer and he died.” I could probably look up the rest of the lyrics and listen to the song and I’d be able to give you a fuller picture of John Henry and the song and my experience with it, but somehow, that feels like it would be a lie. I’m trying to give you the truth of what I can currently recall, which isn’t much, but it’s real.

    I remember learning the song in elementary school. Maybe in the gym/lunch room. Maybe in the wood floored music room/ stage, the one with the cool storage loft with the spiral staircase we weren’t allowed to go up except for special times when we were helping retrieve props, instruments, costumes, or other flotsam and jetsam. Probably both the gym and the music room. Anyway. We were a small, mostly white school in a very white section of a very Black city. Were we taught that John Henry was a hero? I guess we were singing the song that heralded him as such. But I also remember feeling very sad that he’d died at the end. It seemed as though he had worked himself to death. And even though he was also very strong and courageous and determined, did he really defeat the machine if he ended up dead anyway? It was a lot for a kid to make sense of. Even as an adult, it’s still a lot to think about.

    Apparently, the difference between the steam digging machine and John Henry was that the drill kept getting jammed up with all of the rock and stone. In other words, the machine needed to be cleared by hand. It wasn’t just that John Henry was strong, it was that he was able to think and problem solve as he went along. He used his brain, his strength, and what he had learned digging other tunnels. 

    I read once that it’s possible that John Henry was a real person. An historian found a person with the same name on a list of incarcerated men at a prison nearby where it’s believed that John Henry took on the machine. The song that I’m familiar with suggested that he worked so hard to beat the steam drill that his heart gave out. What more likely happened is that he died some time later from the cumulative effects and exposures related to digging tunnels through mountains and hillsides. Tow-may-tow. Tow-mah-tow. I guess.  

    I am not comparing myself to John Henry, but sometimes I feel like his ghost haunts my struggles as I try to move my thoughts from pen and paper to machine. I’m not trying to out-do my computer but I am aware of the existence of AI which has made me somehow even more desperate to assert my humanity from behind this screen. 

    I wrote last week about how I deleted my social media a few months ago and how it made me feel more grounded and more connected to people and in-person community. I never had comments turned on on this blog.  And last week, I turned off email notifications for likes. I stopped checking stats, likes, and views. Prior to this, I had been checking often. And I felt myself starting to bend what I would think about and therefore what I would write towards getting more likes and views. In other words, I was thinking, “how can I get more – or any – likes and views on what I’m writing” rather than just writing. I was like the steam drill, getting jammed up in the very stones and rocks I was trying to remove. 

    The first few times I checked my email after turning off the notifications, I had forgotten that I was not longer receiving them. In my forgetting, I felt a little sad for a moment. But in the next moment, I remembered and a whole world of possibility opened up. What if I’d gotten 10,000 likes? It didn’t matter whether that was the reality or not. I could imagine it and so it was true where it mattered: in my mind. 

    When I imagine John Henry, I do not see him looking over at the machine. I see him focused on his task at hand. Part of me thinks that for him, it wasn’t really even a competition. It was that the steam drill inventors stuck their contraption next to him. It was doing its thing over there and John Henry was doing his over here. The company men were the ones who wanted to have a competition. For John Henry, it was just another day on the job. I wonder if he even thought it was something he was good at. Did he know he was going to become an American folk hero? Was he imagining songs being written about him? Probably not. I think he was just here to do the work. I hope to do the same.  

    Even though I don’t see them, I still appreciate shares, likes, and views. I also appreciate (and see!) tips. Show your appreciation for this hard working writer here at my ko-fi page. Thanks!

  • This is the post where I ask for tips…

    … beg for money but where I don’t come right out and just ask for it. Let’s start with a scene. Madison, Wisconsin. First warm day of spring. Class has just gotten out and so I cross library mall to State Street. The sound of a guitar reaches up and down the block around Gilman or maybe Gorham.  The scent of incense and patchouli and just a soupVon of weed is in the air, but this is not exceptional. This is just Madison. The outdoor seats are all full of people eager to enjoy the weather after a long Wisconsin winter cooped up inside. These are the moments that it felt like I could never take anything for granted.  

    Except for, I could and I was.

    When was the last time I lived someplace where I could encounter someone playing live music in public on just an average day? The city is too pricey and the suburbs where I do live don’t have that kind of culture. 

     A few months ago, my daughter and I were waiting for our order at our local filipino bakery when a man carrying a guitar and speaker approached us. I think he must have been performing out on the sidewalk before coming inside. But that area doesn’t really have a lot of foot traffic. He held out his cup to us and I put a few dollars in. “You want me to play you something?” We said sure and he warned us it was going to be loud, gesturing to the speaker he had just set down. Our halo-halo arrived before he could plug into his amp and we had to be on our way. That’s the last time I remember dropping a tip in a musicians jar. 

    Back in Madison, Catfish Stephenson, a musician who often played on State Street once told me that a big crowd is actually worse in terms of income. No one wants to step out of the crowd to throw money in. Or else everyone assumes someone else is going to do it. People just don’t know what the protocol was. Catfish always threw a few bills into his guitar case when he was first setting up and before he started to play. Get the ball rolling. Show them how it’s done. No one wants to be the first. 

    At the end of last year, I started taking guitar lessons. It’s fun. I enjoy it. I’m working on Let It Be. I’m not bad at it and I really enjoy it. It’s already paying off dividends. Just yesterday, I had a bit of a panic when I realized that a prescribed medicine I’d taken was counter-indicated for another prescribed medicine. I put a call into the answering service at the cancer center. “I’m going to go play guitar while I wait for the call,” I told my husband. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to focus enough to do my other calming activities like reading and it was raining too hard to go for a walk. 

    But it’s been two months that I’ve been working on Let It Be. Give me another month and I’ll be confident enough that I’ll be able to take it out to the sidewalk and open my guitar case for some dollar bills. But, well, it will be the only song I’ll be playing. I’m more likely to earn tips to make me stop. 

    The point being that I have an appreciation for the work, time, energy, and effort that goes into performing on the street. And I wish I had taken the time to appreciate it more when I was living in places where it was more commonplace, like Madison. 

    I hear that tipping culture has gotten out of hand these days. At least, that’s what people say. And to be honest, if my mother knew I was out here busking on these internet streets, she’d probably be pretty embarrassed. I don’t know. I don’t mind the opportunity to show my appreciation for the hard work that people are putting in. And I’ve never felt like I have to tip. It’s just a nice thing to do.