The Friday unwind 010: Callaloo
Location: wherever you are and wherever I am. Slow travel or a handful of greens
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 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! 🌹🥭🌹🥭🌹🥭
This week’s unwinding is prompted by a goodbye gift from a friend before I last left for Belize. The Let It Go journal is a guided journal book with prompts and affirmations at the end of the page to greet you once you’ve spilled your thoughts. It was very sweet to receive, even if I do usually prefer an empty, unlined page with space to unfold. This guidance is very welcomed and these days, the journal seems to find its way from my dresser to my sleepy hands as I pack a beach bag for my oceanic morning meditations. I opened the page to this prompt recently and couldn’t ignore it:
Where would you go and who would you become if you wanted to start a new life where *nobody* knows you?
This tenth edition of the unwind series is my response. I should call it a diary entry but I will edit it and make it relevant to the space probably. I share it here, for you, and wait to chat about it in the comment section or via email if you would prefer the intimacy of me as a pen pal.
Also, there are now over 800 of us in this community (and we’re such beautiful company. Thank you, so much, for being here. You know how I feel about the number 8). With so many new readers, I should reintroduce myself and this space. And I can’t wait to eventually make space for that. For now, I’m Amara, the author and chief daydreamer of the Life Is In Love With Me newsletter. I’m imagining a softer existence while I wander the world as a nomad. I’m often in love, I live slowly, I carry a notebook in all my handbags. I’m glad you’ve found your way here.
Affirmations are a huge part of my life/writing practice too. I appreciate when others write them back to me in their own language. Here are some words I received recently through an unexpected observation of a subscriber and dear friend:
My friends and readers are very special with deep hearts (we are in beautiful company).
Tea prep: Since we’re eating callaloo and getting our dark leafy greens in, let’s indulge? It’s Friday. I will have honey and extra extra nutmeg in my warm cacao tea.
I learned that there is a callaloo bush growing abundant around the side of my house. My landlady, Ms Ruby, returned from a long trip and called me into the yard less than an hour after her return, fingers already full of the leaves, urging me to take as many as I wanted. Aside the callaloo, there is another bush that is flowering and seeking to overpower it. Ms Ruby is torn about this; she enjoys having plentiful callaloo to fry with onions and tomatoes but the flowers are very gorgeous while they’re here.
I agree, while gorgeous things are present, it’s always best to enjoy them. I gulp loudly, savour the many momentary beautiful things. They are worthy of my afternoon distracted gaze or the cameos they make in my calls home. In response to the prompt, I should stay here then.
It feels like a cheat, nomadically speaking, but this is the gorgeous mundane that is feeding me.
Actually, travelling rather than sitting in an office dreaming about doing so, has changed my mind about what it means to be in movement and the pace that I need to do it. I love how I am when in movement. By this I mean I love how I move. I’m so greedy for the world. Spacious, exact. I am both nimble-footed and stubborn, feet sunken when I like the way the Earth feels. The decision to pack up my apartment, quit (not for the first time) my marketing job, give away plants, sell sofas, and release everything familiar was because I sensed that new life was waiting for me. A trip at a time, I discovered that my gut instinct was correct. I want more of the world, to live a thousand new normals disguised behind false borders, to be transformed and ever-evolving.
But today, I am full and feasting on the present moment. There was a moment in time when I would’ve torn your ear off to go somewhere new. I would’ve written my response so hard that you could read it through the two or three pages that followed.
If you would’ve asked me 4 years ago, let’s say just after my solo trip to Cuba in February 2020 and before the world stood still in March, I would’ve written Colombia at the top of the page. Cartagena and Medellín in the lines below that. Experiencing Latin America through Cuba was the initiator for wanting to experience more of it. But that was before I realised that I could quit my job and do things that bring me genuine pleasure, that quitting was a part of adulthood too.
If I indulge and really think about it, I could go somewhere where there are horses grazing but not close enough to frighten me from grabbing my fistful of rosemary on my morning walks. I could go where the sun rise is revered and the internet connection is fallen where I stay. I must wake up and give thanks, alone. I must walk the long walk to the town where I feel the shift in my body, of being near to civilisation and technology. I imagine a slight hill. I could go where I have nothing to do, where my tasks revolve around my body and what the weather permits. I wrap a scarf around my neck because the sea breeze is quite strong (I don’t want to get sick so far from home), but it is warm enough for sandals. I carry them in my hand as I walk home and its just grass anyway and its not so strange to be barefoot, it warrants no looks here. I have to learn the language from fresh (because this is the fastest way to be new) and I am learning about the land from the plate I prepare for myself. The soil says much about the land as does the way my gut responds to the crops taken of it. I sleep with curtains wide open to see the stars, no one knows my name but today, someone called me ‘dear’ in the language and it made me feel a nearness, belonging.
I don’t know where this is. Sometimes I think India because I hope to one day learn about Ayurveda in the land it comes from. I’d love to learn and feed off plants and spices. I once felt very certain about making a journey to Ethiopia. Otherwise I am not able to locate this imagined place.
What I know is that this fantasy doesn’t motivate leaving, it motivates assessment. What do I need right now? How can I be provided with it?
If I’m honest, I believe I would only need to go and come back to this place, wherever it is. I’d go to retreat, return with more resources. The journal exercise reminds me that travel is a medicine, just as anything. Nomadism is an extension of being unmistakably my own, going where the world feels like teacher or friend. It reveals a lot, gradually, like the privilege of being happy right where I am. The privilege of safety. The privilege of having taken myself to the places that most inspire me already at the age of 28. I made a point of choosing to take a path of anonymity and from it, I have found my place, one of them, where I feel immense love and grounding.
There’s nothing wrong with reinvention and disappearing if you feel called (I’ve been there) and there is medicine in that too. Also, the space I’m in, which I hadn’t seen so clearly without this prompt, is one of unmoving, of appreciating the medicine that grows from the ground that you tread, that being in a body that wants to be still and refuses to be stagnant in unlearning, is something I am capable of nurturing. I live in a routine of being generously gifted mamey or extra bananas at the market, or being already at the beach when I open the gate. I’m being called urgently outside, to look and marvel at what sprouts from the ground that’s now home, thick with surprise.
Further reading on travel and movement:
This caption, from what my 2018 self sensed I needed fresh from a trip to Morocco.
I also highly recommend Tea’s essay on Making the Most out of a 10-hour layover in Mallorca, but start with the above first before giddily accelerating through Spain with Tea.
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
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
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~ If you’re interested in furthering your approach to rest and inner-listening, The Intuition School* offers mindful, land-respecting, and intentionally curated retreats in Costa Rica. Black women and non-binary individuals are invited to join to be guided to deeper self-loving. Feel free to reach out to me if you are curious to learn more!
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Gorgeous writing as always. 🌹 I really feel like I am in the places you take the time to describe so colourfully.