Risk and the rules of landing

let's take it back to the beginning

Welcome to the Life Is In Love With Me newsletter if you’re new. If you’re a regular recipient of these reminders of love, welcome back! 🌹🥭🌹🥭🌹🥭

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How are you keeping? your heart? your centre?

Today I am returning to the beginning, which means the first landing place. When I started these letters, I knew that I wouldn’t share my nomadic stories in chronological order. I feel like there is more to learn from the back and forth. Even still, I’ve always wanted to write to you about Oaxaca. Always. We’re taking it back to the beginning, meaning my early intentions for this space and my first lessons on nomadism - a travel essay! I've linked an essay I wrote while in the thick of this landing. Feel free to read it after if you’d like to see how life always has a different plan for you.

On that note, some news. Life Is In Love With Me is now a community of over 1,000 readers, which is hugely beautiful. I celebrated offline for a while and now I’m sharing with you all a thousand thank yous for being here, for allowing me to write to you and for writing me some love back. Your comments, emails, and DMs contribute to my inspiration to write to you. Thank you for your presence. I am so aware that Life Is In Love With Me is a home for stories that come out of my nomadic life. I believe those stories fit into their own categories: love, life, travel. As part of the development of the newsletter, I think I’ll open these letters by letting you know which categories these stories belong to.

Finally, our tea prep returns. June is the start of rainy season here so I am finding any excuse to drink according to the tropical dramatics. My cup is filled with the remnants of clove, cacao, turmeric, black pepper, and vanilla almond milk. What are you drinking today?

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Today’s essay is about travel, life, and love.

I heard somewhere and used to repeat to myself ‘no risk, no magic’. My eyes would widen in dilation every time the phrase found its way to me from another mouth or feed. Because I am a words of affirmation type of lover, I probably wrote this phrase somewhere - everywhere. I might’ve had it as a screen saver and on a note on the fridge I kept in the apartment I used to hold my joy and living in. I don’t remember entirely, but I do remember that it motivated me to quit my job, pivot my career, and become committed to living a life of my choosing elsewhere. 

I recognise and celebrate now how safe I must’ve felt to seek risk. I love the previous version of me, packing the best bits of life into a 32kg suitcase that the airline almost wouldn’t let me board with (has anyone tried to move across the world with a Himalayan salt lamp? Or, as Didion said, has anyone ever been so young? I am here to confirm that yes, they have, and they have the shame of emptying overweight luggage at check-in desks and the journal entries to prove it. I knew though that I was inviting risk so to invite magic on that May morning in London Heathrow airport. 

I did not intimately know risk then and I would not until the time came to leave Oaxaca. The risk was hidden from me the way it would be if you moved to a country you hadn’t visited before but trusted from a gut-deep place, that life was there waiting to meet you. The risk of false friendship, the risk of ignoring your intuition if only once, the risk of staying too long against your knowing, the risk of sickness and other microbiomes, the risk of being seen as lost, the risk of carrying past identities into new spaces, of abandoning so much of yourself that you lose your footing, travel ungrounded. The risk of admitting that you, a woman, are travelling alone, of making the kind of mistakes that are not irreversible but cause medical bills, the risk of being outsider, the risk of not seeing the risk because you have not lived here long enough. All of this happened to me. Most of it within the first few months of travelling. None of it I had foresight enough to greet. 

Originally, I planned to relocate to somewhere that seemed to offer me something fuller than waking up and shuffling to my table to open my laptop and go (digitally) to work. It had been 7 years of living in Birmingham. With seven being a perfect and complete cycle, I handed in my notice, packed up my apartment, filled a storage unit full of my things, and tearfully left my family and best friend on the other side of security. That was before this, my nomadic life of arriving and going as I feel called. 

Oaxaca was many things to me, but it was not going to be home. I heard (God via the gut) that instruction while strolling through the city on that jet-lagged Friday afternoon. I roamed around the way I was used to while solo travelling on the first day, and landed, unintentionally, in the very best restaurant the city had to offer without meaning to. This was a sign and a theme for my time in Oaxaca: arriving where you should and considering if there is more to stay for. I stayed anyway because I had taken the risk and did not know how to name the immediate fret of feeling like I may have made a mistake. In the meantime, I tried to belong and in a way I did and in another, I had simply experienced my first landing. 

Oaxaca | Amara Amaryah

I believe the protocol of landing is this, that you are supposed to do it over and over again. Landing is a sequence, landings would be more appropriate as they are multi-systemed in nature, not singular. Does a sole landing not then count as an entry? A first attempt at gathering yourself towards your destinations? Even in the same geographical space you land in a place or yourself many times. You land only to land again and to land again, each time feeling your knees surrender to the muscle memory, yes, catch the rhythm, we’re about to jump, bend well so we can go again. In the process of landing is the process of protection, preparing the ankles so to not break them upon touch down. Steadying the inhale, the exhale to match the uplift and come down. My landing in Oaxaca was like that, coordinating myself awkwardly, accepting invitations out while still dizzy, steadying myself only slightly in long periods alone, anticipating myself going further up without need to be low. It was 5 weeks of learning the rules of landing in Oaxaca de Juárez. 

Oaxaca | Amara Amaryah

Two weeks in, my first landing partner wasn’t afraid to help me with the choreography of landing, cumbia specifically. The DJ set was in and out of funk, old Mexican classics reworked, and R&B psychedelic fusions and I was still in the belief that I was landed, not landing. I was also 25 and in a new city. I spent the rest of my days trying to see how quickly I could pour my playlist into a new person, driving around the city trying to pick a spot for dinner- the endless night drive of course being more of the outing than anything, meeting friends of friends in restaurants (that one) that drag tables together to seat us, and the whirlwind of names and plans and half-translated conversations and best routes to travel to the coast together. 

This was the Oaxacan rhythm until I realised how I was not quite in sync with something. As much as the loneliness of being new had now abated, I was getting better at remembering which streets connected to which ones, how the street dogs that I had to pass daily on the way to his or my house were friendly, really, and how to read the sky for the coming of rain, but I was not where I wanted to be, anymore. I discovered another risk: the risk of uprooting what had freshly been planted. To prepare to land again isn’t easy or ideal when you think you have plans and have already unpacked the suitcase you hope to live out of. It left me questioning first and then acknowledging why I did not feel grounded while mid-air. 

When you take a risk, it is essential that you take another one. It is a sequence that belongs to the language of intuition. Risk taught me that. It was not clear then, that I would have to choose to land, or have my landings chosen, divinely, painfully, for me. In Oaxaca, I had experimented with making landings permanent, they are not. I had landed in curiosity and in the paths of good dancers and artists, good cooks and kitchen table debaters and awareness that I am not as terrified of starting afresh as I was encouraged to be. That was my launch pad and what would keep me rooted in my travels, eventually¹. All risks, painful and gorgeous and remembered only by the ones Oaxaca brought me to, were worth this in some way.

I’ve decided that a risky life is just life because we are always at risk. The rule seems to be, either you are at risk of living a life that prevents the fullness of your growth or you are at risk of trusting the unknown that keeps you awake at night. We should be prepared to meet risk embodied in everything. A risky life is a life lived in agreement with your intuitive centers, which forever feels shushed in a world that wants and profits from us being disconnected from our inner listening. I consider the permanence of risk a good thing, a God thing, a sweetness that may alter our life course and teach us, whether we communicate with its inner whisperings or not.

Oaxaca, by Amara Amaryah.

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Thank you for being here. I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments or via personal responses to me.

This essay was also prompted by the Invitation to PAUSE’s VIEW WITH A VIEW, a gorgeous space for slowing down and noticing, curated by

Janel

. Thank you, Janel, for creating such a thought-provoking space for genuine connection and wonder/wanders. I’ve shared my postcard from Oaxaca below:

VIEW WITH A VIEW: For Oaxaca

Here is the essay I wrote a few years back for Here Magazine (Away) on ‘belonging’ and moving to Oaxaca.

Thank you to my recent and continued paid subscribers, I appreciate you for your offerings and generosity. This month's new paid subscriber notes have made me tear up and made me feel cherished. Thank you. These love letters and travel memories remain free, always. This is an attempt to keep this space as an offering and resource for all. For a while, I’ve reduced annual paid subscriptions to $48.88 (from $88). I am preparing to show up with my paid readers in a new way and in the meantime, I’d love to grow and increase the paid support for this space. Paid readers receive 111 daily affirmations and a travel backstory upon subscription.

I invite you to join me for the Writing from abundance:: Writers resisting survival mode workshop taking place on Sunday 30th June 2024. I would love to write and resist with you. I’m looking forward to writing with light-minded writers of all genres and meeting new writers to share space with. Spaces are limited and concession tickets are available (just lemme know if you’d like that!) Find out more below.

Thank you, so much, for being here. Below I share some more writings that I hope you will enjoy.

An Origin Story: Food Poisoning In Mexico Turned Me Nomadic

Pisces season and the overstimulated artist, a remedy

The infantilization of kind people

A story about quitting my job to write

Musings on Black nomadism (pt 1)

The Friday unwind 004: When there is nothing to become

Love,

Amara Amaryah

1. Ooof, heavy on the eventually, give thanks.