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Latorica Letters
It’s been some 42 moons since the last mail. That’s a while, so let’s take a moment to acknowledge the endings and beginnings we’ve lived since we last met here. These are not healthy times; I hope your spirit is well.
Latorica Letters has awoken on a new platform and the old mailing list has moved across. If I’ve mistakenly brought you here and you don’t want to receive these letters, this is the time to unsubscribe (click to unsubscribe). Bon voyage, I wish you good speed.
If you are travelling on, welcome, I have an urge to do some exploring with you
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Feb 2024
Dear Reader,
It’s a slow and quiet time for me and writing is afoot. The letters to follow, will share learnings from the past years of forest living. However this letter will be a reacquaintance of sorts.
If you’ve read my writings, you’ll know of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a medial woman to be sure! Her book, Women Who Run with the Wolves (WWRWW), has become a seminal guide for me since discovering it on Mum’s bookshelf amongst many strong women authors. Clarissa unravels story the way we need them.
In WWRW, the story La Llorona teaches the effects of clearing the river regularly. The ‘river’ is metaphor for one’s life, as well as literally referring to our rivers and waters. In modern times we instinctively ‘clear’ by way of ‘housekeeping’, but it’s a vague nod to a practice we used long ago. Cleaning uses different muscles to clearing, thus our waters remain stagnant. For now.
We clear to allow new life to bloom. And that’s what my writing is concerned with. So in good practice, let me clear the ‘river’ for the next chapter of letters to follow.
You and I meet a long way down a bloody history. We bare gifts to share, and pain to pass. Some cultures amongst us, embody knowledge well, as a collective-whole. Mine does not. Mine is fragmented into self-governing parts and is absent of a unifying truth – which I understand to be the land/waters which we inhabit.
I was born in colonial Canberra on Ngunnawal Country, Australia. My Mother immigrated from Germany when she was eight, post-WW2, a strong maternal line weaving through Eastern Europe and into the Steppes, horse-women. My Father’s lineage is fainter for me, Scottish South Australians, first settlers. I acknowledge the Aboriginal Cultures, all of them, who pre-invasion, lived here together in balance and respect, and a whole lotta life!
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As a child, I lived in a place where birds came to pray. Three giant gums stood about our home, a sentinel each for my mother, sister and I.
East of our tree-house was a gully full of snake whispers, coursing down to the railway line. Across those tracks lived a witch in a slab hut, with her companion, a white-haired gatekeeper who busied himself with metal tools.
When my courage was full-tide, I’d brave that snake passage to visit the witch. Her tongue was sharp, but I knew there was safety in her fold, from the birds’ nests toppling on her crown.
She had a strawberry patch that stretched from new moon to full. It was there she took me when I arrived, plonked me deep in the foliage of those red and green fruit-bearing plants, and propped herself against a rusted 44gallon drum from where she stirred our conversation.
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I slept upstairs in that tree-house, on an old tongue and groove wooden floor that had good ‘peep holes’ where the burls had fallen out. Life there was a dizzying mix of magic and violence. Bodies process trauma differently, but all bodies process it. Writing was a remedy for me.
The region where I grew up and have spent most my adult life, has 8 main river systems coursing through it, including the Clarence/Biirrinba which feels to be the spine of the lands I wander, an area 40,000 square kilometers in size (somewhere between the size of Switzerland and Bhutan). There’s a lot of biocultural systems to explore, and their interwoven relationships.
This is a recent photo. A shot of the land I’m writing on today, Gullibul Country. You are looking at my friends in those trees, we’ve spent seven years together, growing. This is rain country when the cycle is in flow, which is sporadic these days. The photo is also a shot of a third of my writings, another third is stored away, and the remaining volume I burnt.
As exposed across the pages of writings I burned, I’ve been wrestling unsuccessfully with some big ideas the last two decades. As you may know, I’m willing a paradigm shift. Not easy business.
Writing is still a remedy for me, but a loaded one. When you learn about the history of the written word you discover that writing contributed to the decimation of humanity. Writing corrupted the human world, capitalizing on inequality and generating propaganda. Tonight however, I’m reconsidering ‘writing’ in context of evolution - all species evolve through time – if writing is an extension of humanity’s evolution, then how can it be practiced for our wellness?
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes “How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?” I want to imagine those paths through my writing.
Whilst I write to decenter humans, I am sober to the reality of my privilege and luck. So, I write respectful of the many humans whose well-lives have been taken from them in unjust ways. My words scribe our relationship with the biological world, indirectly I hope they weave some healing.
The letters to follow will be shaped through the lens of Settler narrative and mythology. The Settler needs to decolonise, quickly. Fresh ways are called for.
Until the next letter, I leave you with what I know of Story magic thus far, bring these gifts next time we meet;
- Language connects us to land and waters, as a bird is connected to flight.
- Mythology, the old old stories, keep knowledge for a well future.
Much Kindness,
Ilka Blue
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