Heat Is My Home: Notes from the Delta, Charleston, and the Caribbean
I really love the heat. I welcome it every summer here in Charleston, South Carolina — the way it settles over the city like something with weight and intention. Part of it is the setting: beaches you can actually get to, parks canvassed in mossy oaks and botanicals so large and boisterous they look like they're on crack. Charleston in July doesn't do anything halfway.
But mostly, I love to move in the heat. Because I believe if you can sustain discomfort for at least an hour a day — really sit in it, not fight it — you can do anything.
Where It Started
I grew up in the Mississippi Delta, which I'm convinced can be the hottest place on earth come August. It's a river town with little or no breeze, the kind of heat that doesn't move because there's nothing to push it along. Summer drives down two-lane highways are accented — and honestly, made memorable — by mosquitoes hitting the windshield and sounding like rain. The highway ahead shimmers with what looks like water, a mirage that isn't water at all, just humidity trapped on the asphalt, refusing to let you forget where you are.
But in junior high and high school, we learned to move through it. We learned to endure it.
Our high school gym wasn't air conditioned yet. All we had were industrial fans that sounded like combines threshing wheat, pushing hot air around instead of cooling anything. We practiced cheer for at least an hour, then basketball after that. Water bottles and Gatorade bottles peppered the bleachers like casualties. Meanwhile, the football players had two-a-day practices, enduring that same heat outdoors while we sweated it out inside. Nobody thought to complain. It was just what summer asked of you.
Still Chasing It
Even now, decades later, I crave a hot yoga or fitness studio the way some people crave coffee. There's an addiction to it I don't fully understand and don't try to talk myself out of.
Drenched in sweat, ponytail so wet it looks like I just stepped out of the shower, I love moving beat by beat, breath by breath — letting my body build strength and endurance while it detoxifies everything it doesn't need anymore. I sweat between my toes. I sweat from my ears. Places I didn't know a body could sweat. If there are sixty people packed into a room, my heart rate sitting at 130, and the thermostat has broken 110 degrees, I am, without exaggeration, in a spiritual place.
When I travel, it's Caribbean heat I love most — long runs or walks that take me through historic streets and out onto the border walks where the town meets the water. Breath by breath, I make my way to the end of the earth, covered in sweat, somehow breaking down who I am with each step, each movement. There's something about heat that strips you down to the version of yourself that isn't performing for anyone.
What the Heat Actually Teaches You
I think all of it is applicable to life, too.
Can we take the heat? Not just the literal kind, but the kind that shows up as criticism, as being canceled out or overlooked, as the tough moments and the ever-changing terms of a life that rarely asks permission before it shifts?
Can we sit in the pain long enough to actually learn something from it — in the moment, and afterward, once the dust settles? Can we make peace with what it means when things don't go according to plan, or accept, fully, exactly where we are instead of where we thought we'd be?
Can we quiet the monkeys in our brain long enough to arrive somewhere good?
When I was a child, my mother used to wrap me in an electric blanket in the middle of summer — heat piled onto heat — to subdue my anxiety and temper my perfectionism. It sounds counterintuitive. It wasn't. There was something about that contained, inescapable warmth that forced my nervous system to stop negotiating and just settle.
I think of yoga studios now. I think of Caribbean heat and Charleston summer walks. I think they're doing the same thing my mother's electric blanket did all those years ago — asking me to stop resisting, stay in it, and trust that I'll come out the other side.
Heat doesn't ask if you're ready. It just asks if you can stay.
