april - a digital scrapbook

friendship vs (and as a part of) community, finding identity through relationships

Spring is in full bloom and with it has come a flush of fresh life - wisteria dye the city streets in vertical streaks of lavender, bare branches adorn themselves with budding flowers, and the cherry blossom outside my window drips in pink pigmentation.

April begged for me to spend more time in its warming air, and I answered its calls. I began many mornings this month on my roof, waking and orienting my body to the day, and claiming some precious moments of quiet breathing before the kinetic streets would reliably sweep me into them. Living in a city so overflowing in options and opportunity makes each day feel like a practice in focus and intention so as not to become swallowed in its excess.

A theme I’ve been ruminating on this month has been momentum, and the amount of time and effort it takes to change direction when you’ve been full throttle ahead in another. Imagine a car driving 80mph down an open road when the driver suddenly chooses to take a 90 degree turn. The car first has to slow down, then stop, then turn direction before even getting the chance to speed back up and drive the way it now intends to. I’ve been trying to recreate some habits in the recent months, and sometimes it feels like while I’ve changed direction, my wheels haven’t yet gripped the ground and gained enough traction to create speed.

One way I’ve been feeling this is in community building. As a long-time social floater, the venn diagram that holds friendships and community hasn’t often left much space in the middle. Where I think the overlap of the two can be vast, as groups of friends can double as community, my friendships tend to be more one-off than in groups, creating more of a disjointed relationship between friends and community.

I think everyone needs at least a little bit of both to thrive, whether they overlap or not. Thinking about what each of these titles mean to me right now, I think friendship is more about individual connection, and the sharing of mutual interests and/or symbiotic personalities, while community denotes a greater sense of place in the world, belonging, and purpose. Community offers a diversity of knowledge and wisdom that individual friendships cannot achieve simply due to them being…individual.

I believe it’s the book, The Defining Decade, all about making the most of your 20s, that talks about the influence the people around you make on your development, character, your self. It’s no secret that friendships have a massive impact on identity. When a new core relationship enters my life, I actually feel a part of myself being born, coming alive for the first time, ways of thinking and being that I’d never before known. The same goes for relationships ending, and fragments of identity and being dying with them.

I spent a Sunday afternoon at a community garden this month, and at one point everyone there went around and shared what brought them there, and what their dream community garden would look like. One person’s (among many) response centered on community, and she shared that the few hours she’d spent at the garden that day were the deepest sense of community she’d felt in over a year living in NYC. The garden that day was host to everyone from infants to elderly, and everyone showed up in devotion to maintaining this precious little patch of green space in an at times oppressively concrete landscape.

It’s interesting to note that community can be realized so quickly, and what makes a space feel like community rather than just a random gathering? I think when people gather out of shared values rather than compatible personalities, there is a deeper sense of community. The two often come hand-in-hand anyway, and there are usually at least a few people in every group that feel like more individual connections, which can turn into deeper friendships.

I still think often about the women’s retreat I went to at the beginning of this year and how quickly and deeply I felt apart of that newly born community, one that was realized over the span of 3 days and that I continue to feel seen and supported by, by people who live across the country and who I barely even speak with.

April 23rd was a full pink moon (shoutout to Nick Drake). To celebrate it I invited a few friends to my rooftop. Now that it’s nice enough to spend evenings outside, I am very excited to do more of that, in community!

In an act of sheer serendipity, a friend I met in Mexico in late 2022 now lives a few stops down the J train from me, and I happened to reach out to reconnect with him the week he was hosting a Passover seder in his Williamsburg apartment. 15 people (all but him previous strangers to me) cozily crammed into a small apartment. Before we started the seder he asked everyone to take a few breaths together to fully enter the space in a present headspace, and to leave all the city rush and chaos at the door. We then went around the room and each shared something we were grateful for at that moment. I shared that I am grateful to be rooting down in NYC, and that the more I seem to search for community, the more I seem to find it — as I was in that very moment.

Some other April happenings included: two BBQs/potlucks with neighbors, tabling an earth day event and spending the day outside talking with people about regenerative, sustainable food systems (one of my now-favorite topics), visiting the Brooklyn botanical gardens and recording a podcast for

What's That Plant?!

(which I will share when it’s out) surrounded by the rows of cherry blossoms, a few trips to Anima Mundi a fav herbal drink spot in Greenpoint, going on a mission to “mingle” with with friends and having a night of silly conversations and times with strangers and new friends, visiting the museum of natural history and seeing some of the coolest rocks of my life, cooking dinner with a friend from Ohio State and starting to create a totally new version of our friendship after living in different cities for a few years and now aligning in ways we hadn’t before, getting invited to a brunch with Natures Fynd, a value-aligned brand that where I was able to meet many likeminded people in…dare I say..community, spending the day at the NY public library which truly feels like a museum, sitting on park benches with friends, making ceramic naked body candleholders, participating in a neighborhood cleanup event, playing guitar with my roommate, going to a crafting event for strangers, spending time with family for Passover, writing this Substack now in one of my favorite spots!

Thank you for being here - I would love to know some of the places you’ve found community (wherever you are), and/or what types of community you most deeply cherish.

‘Til next time

-Miranda <3