I have been obsessed since I discovered Friday Afternoon Tea. Friday has an amazing selection of both single origin teas and some really well crafted blends, and so I’ve been slowly ordering out the entire store to try everything.

 

This is a beautiful white tea from Nepal. The scent is delicate and floral, the taste is sweet and subtle, the leaves are silver gray and brew to silver green, and the tea is organically produced by a community collective that lives in the Himalayas. I found it to be very forgiving of brewing time and temperatures.

 

White teas also tend to have higher theanine content: the combination of theanine and caffeine tends to impart a feeling of energized calmness, as compared to the jittery feeling that some people claim to get from sources of strict caffeine. This is no exception: an afternoon session with this tea helped quiet my mind and make me feel ready to do things.

 

We are in a time when calm energy seems more valuable than ever. We’re a month out (eek) from the US presidential election; the VP debate was last night, and it turns out that people spouting slick, bold-faced lies is a particular blood pressure trigger for me. It has been a week of disaster (and for me, travel and multiple minor car irritations).

 

Tea—particularly white tea—is one of the most effective calming methods I have in my arsenal, and this one delivers in spades. It felt so necessary in the moment that after I finished about six separate brews, I immediately dumped a bunch in the cold brewer because I knew I’d need it for later.

You can get Nepali White Prakash from Friday Afternoon Tea.

I think all of us probably find the aftermath of Hurricane Helene heartbreaking. The devastation is not just at the coast where land falls, but up into Appalachia, deep into the country. I’ve seen stories about the rapid rise of flood waters that eventually swept away entire towns. I can only imagine the terror that they felt, and the fear they face now with infrastructure destroyed and people still cut off.

 

One of the things I have been thinking about is how little we know about what climate disaster will actually look like. Nobody expected a hurricane to devastate Asheville, North Carolina: it was actually dubbed a climate haven because it had temperate weather, ready access to water, nearby agriculture, was high enough not to worry about sea level rise and was far enough from the coast that hurricanes were (supposedly) unlikely to do serious damage.

 

People were moving to Asheville for climate reasons, enough that people were using the words “climate gentrification” to describe the growing population.

 

I say this not to imply that anyone did anything wrong. We’re going to see a lot more migration for climate reasons in the next few decades, and none of us have a crystal ball. The fact that people fled unsafe coastal regions after being battered by hurricanes to a place they believed to be relatively safe, only to suffer this disaster is an absolute tragedy.

 

But I do think there has been a sense among certain economically comfortable individuals that the money they have will enable them to live in the places where climate change touches lightly, that climate will be a crisis for other people but an annoyance for them. I hope this is a wake-up call for everyone: some places may stop being livable, but there is no “right” place to live. 

 

I wonder if this point will get through to the ultra-rich. There are a large number of very wealthy people who have built lavishly appointed, secret, isolated spaces, in places that they believe to be safe, because they have convinced themselves in times of disaster, other people are the enemy, and hoarding resources (a thing they have done all their lives: that is why they are ultra-rich) is the key to survival.

 

This seems to be the opposite of what we are seeing. People in disaster-struck regions are not staying isolated; they are helping each other. Bookstores are hosting community spaces to talk about community needs; people are programming drones to drop deliveries of life-sustaining medication to people whose roads have been washed out. They are setting out with chainsaws and teams of mules to deliver food and water. The bunker is the opposite of safety: community is what saves us.

 

So I have been thinking about how I will show up for my community in the event of a disaster. One of the things my husband and I have decided to do is to slowly build up medical supplies. Since he’s an ER doctor, there’s a lot he can do to help people if things go wrong here.

 

We plan to start small—sutures and slings, a store of antibiotics and basic over the counter medications, burn treatments, N-95s, oxygen to treat smoke inhalation (fire is one of the biggest dangers here), narcan. We’ll save up for wish-list items: an AED, a portable ultrasound that can run off a phone, a solar-powered battery to keep things running. And I’m going to take a first aid, CPR, and AED course so that I know enough basics to help out.

 

There is no safe place. There are no guarantees. But people showing up for each other is the closest we come to a climate haven. Planning for the worst means planning to be the best you can for the people around you.

If you’d like to help out with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief and Day One Relief are already on the ground in the affected areas; these organizations were suggested to me by people who either are local to the disaster or have deep knowledge of the impacted areas.

So this weekend, while all this was going down, I flew out to New York to take part in an awards ceremony, because Romancing the Vote, the online auction that I founded with Bree and Donna from Kit Rocha in late 2020, was recognized as “Democracy Heroes” by “I am a Voter” and the Rockefeller Foundation.

 

There was an awards dinner, which was a little too fancy for me, but the best part was meeting the other “heroes”—ordinary people who had just decided to step up and help out, and who are actively making the world a better place.

 

I know many people who get this newsletter have participated in the auction—by volunteering, spreading the word, and donating or bidding on items—so I want to spread the word: you’re a hero!

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