Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome

I think it all started with the googly eyes.

During the first Covid lockdown, where joy suddenly had to be found within walking distance, I found a new way to connect with our neighbourhood. It was springtime in Berlin, the trees and bushes were in bloom and I decided to get to know them better by… posting them on Instagram with animated googly eyes.

(You should be seeing GIFs here. If you’re not, arohamai! Try the Substack website or app).

I’d lived in our neighbourhood for five years at that point, but for the first time I noticed the three different shades of lilac trees outside the house with the olive green door. I discovered a favourite chestnut tree, its manky arms sweeping all the way down to face level.

We all saw the dolphins in Venice’s canals – or at least the pod of orcas in Pāuatahanui Inlet. Nature was healing. Or at least, it was healing me.

The googly eyes added a bit of silliness to my days, gave me a way to connect with far-flung friends, got me through that first pandemic year and then suddenly it was spring again and I knew when each of the trees on our block would bloom because, as it turned out, I had been paying attention to te taiao – our natural environment.

In a move that will surprise no woman above 35, I have found that as I head deeper into my 30s, I can think of nothing more life-giving than pottering about in my veggie garden. Earlier this year I sat with my sister-in-law on her deck, our hands deep in potting mix as we marvelled at how the same activity that would have been of zero interest to us just five years ago was now the best thing we could think of doing on a Saturday.

As Alice Walker writes in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, “I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible – except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have.”

What Walker describes as her mother acting as one with nature, giving herself over to it until she is rendered something near invisible, feels like the antithesis of that early-20s yearning to “make something” of oneself. The satisfaction and relief is immense.

But I do feel late to this party. A city girl since forever, I remember being about eight years old and meeting a friend I’d known since we were babies but not seen for a while. As our mothers chatted, I asked my friend who her favourite popstar was. She didn’t have an answer, but she did have a favourite native bird.

I hope that wherever that old friend of mine is now, she has delighted in seeing the tides turn. Because now, whenever I am back in Aotearoa, friends show me the native trees they’ve been planting to offer more habitat to our native birds, or offer fun facts about which berries get the kererū drunk. When I’m in Berlin, they send me videos of clicky tūī calls in their backyards. Caring for our native birds and trees seems to have become the new national sport. Or maybe it’s just that my friends, like me, are in their mid-thirties.

In this newsletter, I’ll be writing about cultivating an Indigenous relationship to nature as someone not currently living on their ancestral land, but in an inner-city apartment on the other side of the world. And as someone who was, until recently, more interested in pop stars than native birds. A Hine-come-lately, if you will.

I’ll be writing from te wheiao, the liminal space in our Māori creation story of not-yet-knowing, where there’s just the teensiest sliver of light. What I love about te wheiao is that there’s no shame in not knowing and just sitting there for a while. It takes as long as it takes.

Something I think about a lot is the atmospheric river in Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing, a vast channel of water vapour that stretches, like a river in the sky, from her ancestral Taiwan to her now-home in California, the environment echoing her family’s own migration. I would love an atmospheric river to come pick me up and take me home. For those of us not living on our whenua, or ancestral land, Talia Marshall says that our way of being at home is talking about it. So maybe this newsletter is me writing (or riding?) my own atmospheric river towards home.

Something I’ve loved about the advent of Newsletters 2.0 is getting to watch some of my favourite writers loosen up, share unfinished work, go on a rant and write outside the demands of the publishing world. Because writing is one job and publishing is another. Sometimes I just want to write for the sake of it, and I do that, but what I’ve been missing is the conversation.

Working in strategic communications, the idea of not having to write for a particular audience, publication or format has started to feel like a kind of fantasy, especially when AI is becoming an ever more accepted part of professional writing. Now, before you say ,“but it can help with ideas and research!!” – yeah, I know, but those are the parts I love the most.

So consider this newsletter my personal wish fulfilment. I’ll be learning more about living with nature, while noodling about in my writing, hopefully in conversation with you.

Things I’m into that will probably show up here: gardening, nature writing, indigeneity, migration, textile art, food sovereignty.

I’m calling my newsletter He Purapura, which is a seed, specifically of a root crop, like a potato or kūmara. That’s the New Zealand sweet potato which has much significance for Māori and I’ll almost definitely write more about it here.

My plan is to send my newsletters fortnightly. The idea of them landing directly in your inbox feels both triumphant in the face of social media algorithms and terrifying because your inbox seems like quite a sacred space?! Subscribe if you dare.

Until next time, here’s a bunch of zucchini and pumpkin flowers from our veggie garden, stuffed with cheese and ready for frying. We’re growing at least one giant zucchini per week right now, so please send recipes!

Vanessa x