We need many
a letter on ease, written out of hurricane
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! 🌹🥭🌹🥭🌹🥭
Today’s essay is about life and travel.
As I write this, we’re preparing for the effects of Hurricane Beryl in Belize. I’ve never been in the Caribbean while a hurricane passes through it. Someone asked me if I’ve ever experienced a storm before. I said yeah sort of, remembering the way the wind and rain comes lashing through the UK sometimes, snow storms, wind storms, and the rest. A Belizean holds out a phone for me to watch. The storms are not like that in England, I confess watching palm trees bending lower than I’ve ever seen possible. Dat dah play play storm.
These play play storms in England are handled and prepared for worse than in Belize. Belizeans speak about it so bluntly. Fuck man, category 4 nah fi play wid. I have heard that quite often this week. Even still, no one takes more than is needed when doing their hurricane reserve shopping, there is an unspoken code that there is abundance, enough for everyone. Yesterday night I watched families on the beach, playing music from cars with doors left open, bars on the beach packed with reggae sounds and empty beer bottles before they will have to be utterly vacant for a while, an aunty going for her evening run, minding the puddles and branches that have been sawn down for safety.
Right now in this town, there seems to be ease, there is no panic despite us being a coastal town and being put on alert. We should be fine but the alert is not to be taken lightly. Many are still devastated by what Hurricane Beryl has done to our brothers and sisters across the Caribbean. Carriacou, Grenada, St Vincent and The Grenadines, Barbados, and St Lucia have had serious landfalls, homes and businesses destroyed, livestock lost and there have also been some deaths. My heart aches as I witness what the first hurricane of the season has done. I’ve had to reach out to family and friends in Jamaica to ensure they are safe; they want to know if Belize is going to be OK. We hold ease and sadness in the same conversation. In today’s essay I’m writing about this ease and its benefits, as I often do.
Your ease may remind or inspire someone into bravery or creation. We need to not be ashamed of ease if it is something we have capacity for. Ease is an opportunity for remedy.
The effects of ease exist as a tool in activism, in maturation, in the intelligence of the body. When we are stressed our bodies experience fight-or-flight mode. Ideally, this isn’t an ongoing state because the body must eventually be eased back to normality. In sickness, our bodies' response to attack, is attack. Remaining in this inflamed state for too long initiates chronic stress in the body, which invites chronic pain, which invites chronic disease, which renders your efforts less useful than intended. Ease is woven into the design of our repair, and so a very useful tool worth encouraging.
Abundance too. Being abundant is an opportunity to give from a fuller, less depleted space. It means that we can be of service entirely. Abundance exists to flow where there is deficit. Of course, there will be times when we have to rise and act without enough sleep, hungry, devastated, unprepared, grieving. Those who can do that, must. I suppose (and am still learning) that we will have to use wisdom to navigate these scenarios, but choosing ease and cultivating abundance in the face of chaos is an act of rebellion that can’t be belittled.
I’m inspired by the ones who have revolutionised ease as an act of ancestral recovery1. As a woman of Caribbean descent, I cannot tell you how foreign ease was to me. To be born into a bloodline where your rest has been negotiable, where your body has been afraid to be caught, where your survival has been pitted against ease generationally, where you have not seen any evidence that the world values you when you are not working for it, means you may now be seeking a safe place to unload your ease. It has never been ease and abundance for the sake of it, it is always intentionally restorative of what was taken. I am stubbornly at ease in honour and in memory of my ancestors who rebelled for it.
The beauty of our collectiveness is this too. We may not all experience privilege on the same terms and may not all crave ease with the same desire. Ease may not fuel you into action the way it does for me. You may solely need rage, if that is so, allow it to be so. Your ease may take the shape of rest, or it may take the shape of listening, and either way, it is your attempt at being here fully.
Even within our cycles as women, there are seasons when ease is less warranted and seasons when the body demands it. None is better than the other. We are many things. We exist in many ways for many causes. Our offering of ease, of abundance, is a deeply advantageous gift to the world we are creating, if we allow it to be.
And there is so much work to be done. The work is layered, it is made so by your governments that want to sow scarcity and death into every colonised land. They profit from your physical and energetic dis-ease. They have angered and killed us. There are many ways to resist this. We need some to be there to soothe and others to be there to keep the fire going. There is inner work for the individual to tend to; social, radical, collective work to be done together. I have found it most useful to honour all gifts and their ability to be placed where that work is needed.
On that note, I hope you name your gifts and use them entirely. Today, as rain begins to fall, I am thinking of the many ways to bring care into whatever comes after. If you are able, please donate support to the Caribbean islands affected by this disaster. Please send love and prayers as an offering too. Please keep going for everyone, everywhere.
Love,
Amara Amaryah
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
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.
Audre Lorde and Tricia Hersey are two writers who have been teachers in this.
A soothing read this new moon morning, I hope you stay safe during all the storms, mental and physical, and have access to resources that are abundant and nourishing. You do a good job holding the both/and in life and expressing it in your writing as well 🫶🏾
Wishing you safety and ease in Belize <3. I'll see you soon!