The Friday unwind 007: Wealth, ease and the cost of Mosquito bites
Location: Belize. A city girl in the tropics, some journal prompts and a rare real-time life update
Fridays are for unwinding. Inward journeys, outward wanderings, departing flights to nowhere but good memories — all are welcome here. Take all the space you need. In this series, unwind and unravel with me into a daydream, into a place that feels like a Friday spent elsewhere.
Welcome to Life Is In Love With Me if you’re new. If you’re a regular recipient of Life’s honied love, welcome back!
I also welcome you to the first unwinding of 2024 (!) I’ve been busy settling and getting the LIILWM community aligned with my visions, but it feels good to return to this series that I love very much. In case you missed it, this Friday unwind comes fresh from Belize, my resting place and home for now. I’m excited to see how my favourite country in Central America will influence and develop my stories for the Life Is In Love With Me newsletter.
On that note, if you’re reading this on desktop, you’ll notice that this space has had a little revamp! I hope you enjoy this new home. The olive and red feels like the texture and sensation of LIILWM: red roses on a warm day somewhere where the afternoon is hazy and lunch is served outside and much later because we’re all chatting and swapping stories; the air is deliciously warm and the sounds of distant laughter, cheering, clanking pots meet us often. Someone is playing Curtis Mayfield’s The Makings of You; we all exhale a smile that starts in the gut. And of course, we’re reminiscing on some sort of love. I feel this is a fitting home vibe for what we do here.
I’d like to redirect you to the freshly rewritten About page too. We’re absolutely in our reintroduction era. I found the language to express why this space exists and I also articulated my philosophy on paid readers and this newsletter. Endless gratitude to my paid readers by the way. I’ve decided to gift paid readers two things upon subscription, as a way of repaying generosity with generosity. If you’d like to learn more, head over (and come right back).
Today’s letter is about my trip to a village to see a new friend who also lives out here in Belize. Her life reminds me of a slow Sunday far away from everything that bustles and moves fast. As another synchronicity, this week I truly enjoyed
’ letter and her invitation into a Sunday spent perfectly. The writing is a gift and a sweet resonance with what I’m writing about today.
Now for your Friday unwind.
Enjoy x
This past weekend, the city girl in me lived a life, two lives actually, practically at the same time. First, she witnessed abundance. Shortly after she had to hold it down in true city girl fashion, while almost pointlessly swatting away the mosquitos as they silently landed on her bare-backed, halter-necked skin, teaching her how the city people suffer in a space such as this. Where I live there is a constant sea breeze, so nursing itchy mosquito bites is not generally a part of my daily skincare. This week though, I soothed my skin with aloe and tea tree so it is mostly already eased. (Amara 0 - Tropics 21). What hasn’t waned though, is my sheer admiration for the example of a transformed London girl life to off-grid, sustainable livelihood in Belize.
To my delight, this was the weekend I finally met Asli (an interviewee turned real-life friend) and spent an afternoon visiting her off-grid home and farm. Asli, a fellow long-term traveler who opted out of London living with her family, welcomed me into her home in a village about a 10-minute drive from the town I live in. We first met through a mutual friend who also lives a sustainable, semi-off-grid life in a Garifuna village in Honduras. Intrigued by their lifestyles as Black women born in diaspora and making holistic self-sufficiency a reality, I made mental notes while visiting/staying with them. In Asli’s case, I noted how she grows her own vegetables, fruits and herbs in abundance, makes her own natural skincare, keeps bees and makes honey (!) and built an eco-abode using natural materials with her husband. This inspires me in ways our online friendship just wouldn’t do justice. Leaving with 30+ mosquito bites, some handmade health goodies, and a gifted pot of honey with comb felt entirely worth it for an afternoon of bliss.
I’ve been stirring generous spoonfuls of honey into my cacao tea every day and admiring the quiet joy this gives me. The lingering scent of the toxin-free rosemary shampoo that I couldn’t wait to lather into my hair when I got home reminds me now what excites me about this life. There is a new level of curiosity about what it would mean for me to live a truly natural life, to be even more unrushed, even further into my ease. It would mean many things. One day, living life not just as a nomadic, sage-burning, free spirit in the greenest corner of the Caribbean, going to the river to swim, pray, wash my locs (with rosemary forever now), but as a unit, a nomadic family.
Last week I wrote about my past selves, my inner 8-year-old, and this week, it seems I’m writing, with gentle curiosity, about my future lives. I can’t help it, I’m in a season of imagining, and Asli, her husband Frank and her two amazing children were generous enough to show me what they didn’t know I had been imagining: abundant generational ease.
I came home smiling and ready to have a conversation with myself: what did my version of abundance or my daydream of future easefulness look like?
Asli’s family prefer to live as close to wildness as possible, eating eggs from their own chickens, also having a set of their own raised chickens to eat, unafraid to grow herbs and vegetables known and unknown to them with the help of Belizean neighbours. Living so far out means self-reliance, solar panels, a well, and back-up generators. The children are home-schooled but have an abundance of Belizean friends’ parties and karate lessons to attend, the golden hour sun pours through the home they imagined and built for themselves, plus they live in a home filled with things from their nomadic life (Somalia, Kenya, England and more).
I see this too, a home filled with things that remind me of my global lifestyle (rugs from here, plates from this other side of the world, a painting I wouldn’t leave X country without) and that inspire me to increase my curiosity. My love for herbalism would spill over many bookshelves, take up drying and tincture space in the home and of course surround and fragrance the gardens. I see myself having land to grow my own food to align with my love of mostly plant-based eating, and still being a member of my community to buy locally-owned produce - honey, eucalyptus leaves, guava jam if I do not feel like making my own - thanking vendors in their language and wishing them well until, God willing, we meet again. But I will have to live by the ocean. I will have to gaze upon it every morning, walk a few steps out with nothing but keys in hand and accidentally spend the entire morning there. I see us as a family who, even before school, spend our risings saltier than most, in a giddy but inevitable rush to arrive on time. I see yoga mats, surfboards, and bicycles regularly needing to be put back in their places.
As far as off-grid life goes, I would like to live a life that rejects the hustle-culture I was raised in, I would like to be away from it. Disconnected. Does that count? I want to hear only birds. I want an unsettling amount of mosquito netting. I wish to develop ease enough (and patience too) to deal with generators or to sit calmly, reading probably, while the electricity falls. I would like to be offline as often as possible but always inviting friends to stay with us in our little tropical abode where the verandah steps are lined with conch shells and the heavy guard dog acts like a pet cat. It wouldn’t be Amara without some need to know; I want to know how to compost even better than I do now, how to make coconut oil/soap/milk (coconut everything), and waste no part of whatever I use. As someone who might be new to the land, I do not want to use my privilege to act like an expat2. I want to be someone who respects the place in which I tread and dwell, giving back, listening, and minimising waste and the impact of being a foreigner. May I add to all the places I enter.
This is part of my dream (part in that the entire dream is precious, a prayer, not for everyone’s knowing). I hope you will share partial daydreams with us too, the parts that you can. It’s nice to have new blueprints and templates for evolutions to come. I’m thinking again about what generational wealth means. How beautiful it would be for later generations to only know ease, to inherit it. I welcome that. I’m following that daydream by picking up what I can hold so ease becomes embedded in me first. Always offering gratitude to the muses and friends I encounter on the way.
Of course, if you’d like to learn more from Asli and her lifestyle, I invite you to check out her offerings here (retreats, workshops, Belizean-made natural products).
Journal Prompts & Questions
What legacies/lives do you want to pass on to your future generations?
What legacies/lessons do you want to pass on to your future selves?
What is your ideal daydream of living ‘off-grid’? or rather, living away, in retreat. Redefine it so it fits you.
If you live off-grid/a more low-waste, natural lifestyle, I’d love to know, how was your transition? Do you have any wisdoms? Does anyone else share my curiosity?
Thank you, so much, for being here.
Below I share some more writings that I hope you will enjoy.
The Friday unwind 006: A Final Pep Talk Before My Year Of Audacity
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
The distinction between being an expat and an immigrant always bothers me and feels like a privilege that should be intentionally addressed by those of us in the travel community. Maybe a post for another day.
Thank you so much for sharing your partial daydream and inspiring me to indulge in my own. ♥️
#3/#4 - honestly, I was in the military, extended field training is/was as far off grid as I care to get. And, I’m old now and I’m too damn spoiled to live off grid, but I promise, when you get your eco-resort up and running, I will be your first and best guest!