Some of the most important conversations of my adult life have happened while walking through a park identifying edible weeds.
Somewhere between spotting wild berries at The Wilds, discussing medicinal plants, laughing over travel stories and sharing nutrient-dense meals soundtracked by good (healing) music, I realised that community is less about sameness and more about recognition.
The older I get, the harder I seem to become to place, and perhaps, therefore, to fully know.
Friendship felt simpler when I was younger. My high school and varsity friends knew a more singular version of me. Before motherhood. Before marriage. Before homeschooling. Before corporate life and strategy meetings and deadlines.
Before my growing obsession with ecological consciousness, food systems and the dream of building something more rooted and regenerative.
Those friendships remain precious because they hold the blueprint of who I was before life required so many characters of me.
They remind me of myself before performance, responsibility and survival layered themselves onto identity.
Somewhere along the way, time becomes fragmented. Intimacy becomes scheduled. We carry entire ecosystems within us: children, partners, work, caregiving, ambition, exhaustion, purpose.
Friendship, for a while, becomes a voice note sent between school drop-off and the first meeting of the day.
I have often found it difficult to explain my corporate self to my artistic and creative friends, just as I have struggled to articulate the more untamed, imaginative parts of myself within corporate spaces.
Eventually, you stop trying to translate yourself completely.
And yet, there are people who somehow understand the language of your becoming without needing every part explained.
For me, two of those people are Mokgadi and Brittany.
Chef Mokgadi Itsweng is a plant-based chef, author, music lover, mother and one of my favourite travel companions, the kind of person I can take anywhere.
Dr Brittany Kesselman is a food systems researcher, foodie, author and adventurer who can identify edible weeds on a walk and somehow make you rethink the entire way the world eats.
Together, we dream often. Sometimes jokingly, sometimes seriously, about travelling the world documenting indigenous food systems, meeting growers and storytellers, learning from communities deeply connected to land and culture.
In our minds, it always ends the same way: with a sprawling gathering around food, beautiful, indigenous, nourishing food, bringing together some of the most interesting producers, growers and transformers we have encountered along the way.
In reality, we are simply navigating life and trying to make a living. But we remain connected by something deeper: a shared longing for a world that is more equitable, more conscious, more rooted and more alive.
Life is busy. Time is limited. But I always have time for these sisters of mine.
Maybe that is the quiet truth about community: it is not the people who have known you longest.
It is the people who can hold the many selves you become, without asking you to simplify any of them.