08/04/2026
Sometime last year, someone asked me:
what is your relationship with nature?
At the time, a wave of emotion came to me.
Part of my childhood in Cameroon was spent in the village with my grandmother: barefoot on red earth, surrounded by the smell of wet soil after rain, nights lit by oil lamps, with the sharp snaps of cocoa pods cracking open and the steady, rhythmic thump of the pestle beating against cassava leaves in the wooden mortar.
My grandmother, whose name I carry, was always at ease in the middle of the bush, and that ease became mine.
Nature was never something separate from me.
It was part of how I understood the world and, in many ways, how I understood myself.
It felt like an extension of my being.
Now, whenever I feel drained, uninspired, or in need of space, I find myself returning to it.
Not as an escape, but as a recalibration.
Standing on my family’s agroforestry estate, in the middle of so much green, hands on a cacao pod, I feel the same thing I felt as a child: a limitless abundance.
1️⃣ 🍫 Me holding a cacao fruit pod on our estate
2️⃣ 👩🏾🌾 On a stroll on the farm
3️⃣ 🥜 Standing on some peanut canopy right before nature reminded me it also has fire ants, boars and snakes
