Rhena Writes

Tag: nature

  • Keeping the home fires burning

    The deal around this house is that if the temperatures go into the fifties or above, we don’t have a fire in the wood stove. Sadly, today is one such day. I’m still sitting next to the stove even though it’s little more than an empty metal box right now because it’s still a comfy spot, just not quite as cozy as it is when there’s a hot glow emanated from the box.

    The fire is one of the ways that I get myself through the winter, especially in these fewer and fewer minutes of sunlight each day. I know. In this day and age, what’s the problem? We have plenty of indoor electric lighting and, yes, I do turn on many lights during the dark evenings, but somehow the glow of the fire just heals me right up. It sparks something primal and constant in me. It serves as a reminder that my ancestors made it through winters with little more than such a fire.

    The fire is also deeply satisfying because it’s something that I have to build and tend to: splitting kindling, carrying in wood from the stacks outside, making the fire starters. I couldn’t explain how to take care of the fire to someone else, it’s just becoming the second nature that arrives only with much attention and experimentation. Knowing what piece of wood needs to go on next, whether the damper needs to be opened or the embers merely stirred up. Yes, the smoke alarm went off as recently as the last week when I wasn’t being attentive enough but even those moments are becoming fewer and further between. There’s even work for the kids: stacking wood, unloading it, checking the moisture levels. And it’s particularly satisfying when one of them curls up for a nap on the nearby couch, stands in front of the box to warm his hands, or just stares into the flames. Yes, much of the time, they’d still choose looking at a screen (they are human children, after all) but I know that at least having the option of resting their eyes on the fire through the winter months kindles something in their imaginations. I’m guess anyway. And I’m projecting. I know that glow of the fire does something that no screen can do.

    Last week, we heard a strange noise which inspired me to call the company that installed and maintains our wood stove. I call it a company, but it’s a guy and a few employees. Anyway, it turns out that the owner has the same stove model that we have. So on the phone, he was leading me through some options of what the noise might have been and then told me how to remove a part of our pipe in order to take some pictures. Once I sent him the pictures, he said we could go ahead and start having fires again as everything was in working order.

    But two things happened in the course of that morning. The first was that I was able to get the pictures he needed. It feels quite good to be able to take care of things around my own house. The other thing that felt nice was just to have a chat with someone knowledgeable about these sorts of things. We swapped a few stories about our wood stoves and it was just, well, pleasant.

    I know that maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but I’m a stay at home mom. Many of my days, most of my social interaction is with my husband and kids. And while I do actually love my alone time and wouldn’t have it other way, that’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the occasional chat especially one that is about something else I enjoy. Namely: owning, using, and learning about this wood stove.

    I feel competent (in fire building, in home owning, in creating a homey atmosphere for my kids). I feel connected (to both ancestors and other people who are excited about things like wood stoves). I feel cozy and even creative. I get to use my body to build fires but I also use my brain.

    This post is not some sort of an advertisement for wood stoves (even the high efficiency ones like ours). What I’m trying to do here is to examine the things that bring me joy, to break them apart into their component parts so that I might more clearly feel that joy not just when I’m sitting in front of my wood stove. But in every moment. In every breath.

  • Happy Summer Solstice

    It’s a few days late, but that’s what happens sometimes. And the thing about summer solstice is that while it might mark the apex of the sun’s power, it doesn’t switch off the next day. It’s a gradual, six month long shift. So the date, June 21, is, in many ways arbitrary. Like a lot of dates and deadlines.

    On Saturday (the date of the solstice) I sat down at my computer to write a blog post. I’d already been to the farmer’s market earlier in the day. And we’d decided to make some lefse to eat with sausages and hot dogs on the grill at our local pool. It seemed a perfect way to soak up these longest hours of sunlight of the year. Years ago, we were in Norway around the time of the summer solstice. It was striking how few hours of dark there were. We weren’t quite far enough north to experience the true midnight when the sun never sets, but it was certainly difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep. I realized how near-constant light made me crave the dark.

    Of course, last year, the solstice passed without me really realizing it. From what I can remember, I was at the beginning of chemotherapy treatment. The fact of the earth’s movement around the sun faded into the background. So this year, I’m grateful that I don’t need to be so hyper-focused on the granular details of getting through each treatment, each week, each day, each moment. The earth, tilted as it is on its axis, is moving around the sun. And that’s just fine by me.

    So it was that when I sat down to write a blog post on Saturday, that I already had much of the day planned out, just as I had much of my blog posting and month planned out. Somewhere in the back of my head, I was gunning for one hundred consecutive days of posting to my blog. The solstice was meant to be the 90th day of posting, which meant that I would cap off June with a celebratory post about posting to my blog for 100 days in a row. I’d already thought about how I’d write that 100th post about what I learned posting everyday: how I’d built up my confidence as a writer, how I’d learned to write through all of the internalized voices that I’d allowed to silence me. I was so close to that one hundredth day of posting. I’d already put in 89 days of work.

    And yet. When I sat down to write on Saturday, I went to open the correct tabs as had become habit, and a small voice asked, “what are you doing?”

    I just wasn’t feeling it.

    What I was feeling is that it was the weekend, my kids and husband were home, we had plans to make lefse and go to the pool to enjoy the extra minutes of sunlight.

    I had nothing to prove to anyway, least of all myself.

    Besides, I’d already done 89 days of blogging in a row. It wasn’t as if all the lessons I’d learned and momentum I’d built would just disappear because I didn’t blog on the 90th day.

    So I shut off the computer and went to spend summer solstice with my family. And it was glorious and lovely. I ended up going for two swims that day. I ate well. And enjoyed time with my kids and husband. I slept better than I had possibly in years without the aid of pharmaceuticals.

    There’s inherent tension between having goals and being in the moment. And I’m working through some of that. I fear that if I don’t set goals, then I’ll never get anything done. And I grew up in a culture where self worth is toxically intertwined with productivity. 100 looks nice on the page. And maybe it would garner more attention than 89. But it’s also arbitrary. And I’m not doing this to for attention. And now I just realized that I’m also not doing this (writing this blog, posting daily or regularly) to prove anything to anyone. I’ve already proven everything that I need to the only person I need to answer to: myself.

    And what have I proven? That I’ll always be here to take care of myself, to spend time doing things that make me feel good: to make lefse, to eat good food, to night swim with my kids, to soak up all the hours of sunlight that I can.

    As with many goals that I’ve set for myself over the years, the number one hundred is ultimately arbitrary. What isn’t arbitrary? That the earth circles the sun once a year, that once a year we get the most number of hours of sunlight in a day, and me.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Thank you!

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

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

    … in each and every moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    But I will never know.

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

    And on this post.

    And this is what I mean by having it all.

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

  • Hawai’i

    Daily writing prompt
    What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?
    View all responses

    Here are a few paragraphs from an essay I wrote (and didn’t publish) a few years ago:

    I am not immune to the romance and draw of travel. In fact, I spent a fair portion of my twenties moving from place to place, exploring a few different countries and towns. My husband and I recently calculated that we had one year that we travelled twice internationally (Norway and Japan) and at least three or four domestic trips, all with our two kids, one of whom was preschool-aged. But in recent years, I’ve grown a bit more wary of travel and, perhaps, a little embarrassed at how thoughtlessly I travelled in my earlier years. Of course, I grew and changed as a result of traveling. I’m possibly even a better person because I travelled (there’s no way to know, obviously, as there’s only one of me and no telling how I would have turned out had I not travelled). But the question that I am really considering is this: were the people and places I visited better people and places as a result of my having been there? I’m having my doubts. At the very least, the carbon impact of the flights, cars, and even boats that I used to get places is irreversible. (The trains I travelled on feel not only more charming but less polluting per mile travelled.)

    Let us take a closer look at the example of Hawaii. In July of 2021, a former Hawaii state representative Kaniela Ing tweeted, “Stop coming to Hawaii. They are treating us like second class citizens.” According to an August 13, 2021 article in SF Gate by Libby Leonard, locals on Maui were facing water rationing and shortages due to water supplies being diverted to support tourists who were traveling to the islands in numbers which exceeded those pre-pandemic. I observed out-spoken indigenous Hawaiian activists on twitter asking mainlanders to stop visiting as those who live on the islands were facing both water shortages, which in turn impacts food security, as well as housing shortages. Of course, the response from many is that tourism brings in money and creates jobs. According to the Hawai’i Tourism Authority’s website, visitor spending in Hawaii in 2019 amounted to $17.75 billion and typically accounts for approximately a quarter of the state’s economy. But what is the trade-off between dollars and quality of life for the local people? In the same SF Gate article Napua-onalani Hu-eu, a Hawaiian activist and kalo (also called taro) farmer indicates that before water was being diverted away from farming, “much of Hawaii’s food was grown in east Maui.” Today, 90% of the food on the island is imported. Former Representative Ing also tweeted, “Tourism is a servants’ prison that keeps local people in a permanent underclass, in our own home. It’s a system that literally only works when the people who play here are richer than us who live and work here.” 

    I went to Hawaii about twenty years ago, before I’d taken the time to inform myself about the dynamics of the tourism industry there. It was beautiful and relaxing and I felt at home, in a way. Primarily, this is because being a multiracial-Asian person is not unusual there — or at least it’s not as unusual as in other places. When you’ve spent most of your life feeling like a bit of an odd duck because of the way you look, it’s very comforting to be amongst people who look like you, even if it’s just surface interactions.

    Still, my comfort is not a good enough reason to go back and visit when the indigenous folks there have asked that we not and when the dollars I would spend there wouldn’t necessarily be going to support and help locals.

    This daily writing prompt came at just the right time for me, as I’m currently reading the last few pages of issue #119 of Bamboo Ridge, Journal of Hawai’i Literature and Arts. This issue is titled, Kipuka: Finding Refuge in Times of Change and was published in 2021. From the introduction:

    “When volcanoes erupt, variances in topography create kipuka, islands of turf untouched by the flow of lava. While Pele’s fiery rivers caress its borders, its plants and seeds remain. It watches lava cool, then blacken. It witnesses pahoehoe break down into rich volcanic soil. And when the time comes, it seeds its surroundings, sets free former boundaries as genesis and legacy join. Na kipuka preserve and regenerate. They survive and persist. They anchor and hold life, ensuring in the end that nothing is forgotten.”

    While I was going through chemotherapy last year, I was often exhausted but paradoxically, I also experienced a bit of insomnia. This was possibly due to the steroids I’d been prescribed to help with the nausea. Regardless of the reasons, I often found myself awake late at night. This can sometimes be a lonely time, vulnerably time. I suppose it’s possible that it was in this state that I reached out on line. I don’t remember what I searched for specifically, but I found Bamboo Ridge on the other end of the line I’d cast out. In a flurry, I ordered six of their volumes and promptly fell asleep. Since then, I’ve read two of the six that I’d ordered.

    I’m not going to say that I feel as though I’ve vacationed in Hawai’i each time I’ve read one, because it’s something much deeper than what I could have experienced in a few weeks in a resort. I feel like I’ve come to know and connect to the parts of Hawai’i that the tourism industry ignores or, worse, feeds off of.

    I visited Pearl Harbor when I went to Hawai’i. The way that it’s set up now, for tourists and visitors, it feels as though Pearl Harbor is some sort of historical past. That it actually doesn’t exist in the present. In his three poems, Lee A. Tonouchi, brings the reader into Hawai’i’s militarized present.

    I’m sitting here typing, trying to figure out how to finish this post in a meaningful way. But the truth is that I’m in the midst of radiation treatment which has made me very fatigued. And I just took one of my anti-cancer medications that, if I don’t time it out, causes waves of nausea. Even if I wanted to travel somewhere like Hawaii, even if locals had not requested that tourists not visit, my body is currently demanding that I stay home. So I’ll retire to the couch to finish the last pages of this issue of Bamboo Ridge which I ordered in the lonely dark of the night. And art, words, poems, and stories will distract me and, yes, in a way transport me right when I need it. And for that I am grateful.

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

  • Final Fire

    I spent a portion of last weekend high off of a few sunny, warm days. I directed this new energy towards organizing a little around the house and setting goals for exercising and writing on my computer in my office closet on Monday. A classic case of early spring energy. But when Monday rolled around, the forecast indicated that it wasn’t going to get out of the forties. Fifty and above is our top end cut off for fires in our wood stove. So, change of plans. Or should I? Could I enjoy a fire and also make good on all my ambitions? Could I just write on my ipad in front of the computer? Could I do a work-out in front of the stove? I could… but I didn’t want to. The glow of the screen is the very antithesis of the one emitted from a fire. I knew I couldn’t truly cultivate hygge with an iPad and exercise sweat. 

    I threw aside my plans for a “productive” day, ignored the obnoxious voice in my head saying that I was being lazy, built a tower of logs and kindling and ignited one of our homemade starters. I tucked myself into the couch for a day of alternately reading and staring into the flames. It was a lovely, luxurious, morning. 

    It was an unusually cold winter here in Maryland. One furnace went out during a cold snap so we’ve been using and relying on the wood stove a lot. We have two furnaces, so it wasn’t as dire it might seem at first glance. Using a wood stove for a heat source is this lovely balance of yin and yang energy. Cleaning the stove, chopping kindling, carrying the wood inside, and building the fire are all yang. The sitting back, admiring the fire, and resting in its warmth? That’s yin. 

    One of the cold stretches was right when I was recovering from my mastectomy. The snow fall meant the kids were home from school. Having them around helped me heal faster. (My surgeon said I didn’t look like someone who had just had surgery at my follow up.) And I’m confident that the snow alleviated some of the guilt I might have felt over taking time to rest and recover. 

    And so I’m grateful that mother nature sent us one last coldish day to enjoy a fire. But as the morning turned into afternoon, it grew warmer than I’d expected and I let the fire die out. My husband mentioned that it’s always nice to have a fire once it’s dark outside. (We’d lost electricity for about an hour on Saturday evening in the middle of dinner and we were all surprised at how much light the wood stove provided once we’d lit it in the complete darkness.) So I attempted to get it started again once the sun had set. The fire was finicky by which I mean that it smoked to the point that I had to open the sliding glass door. Eventually, though, we got to enjoy another nice flame. But it somehow seemed perfect that our last fire would be so imperfect, so troublesome in a way. It was as if mother nature was reminding me that there’s a time and season for everything, lest in my longing for beautiful fires in our woodstove, I miss her other gifts and blessings. 

    My six-year-old son was home sick a few days this week. He asked to go for a walk. We searched for signs of spring and found snow drops, crocuses, robins, and onion grass. The next day he observed that the snow drops looked different. They’d opened overnight. He held up his hand, letting three fingers droop to illustrate how they’d changed. As much as I love the fires, I also love to see what’s there when the smoke clears. 

    This is not paid advertisement, but if you are looking for a wood stove, this one is great and it’s one of the few that’s EPA approved to burn with lower particulate emissions.

    Also, not a paid ad, but if you are looking for fireplace and wood stove installers and maintenance in the DMV, I cannot say enough about Traditions Chimney Sweeps.

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