Monthly musings and updates from Stella Aster, an artist / social researcher / activist from Central Lancashire, UK. {{ posts }}...
After prolonged personal and family health difficulties, June has proven to be a productive and generative month. Following publication of my essay Reindigenising , we developed the Reindiginse! Pennines programme . Olu and I have been writing again and they've been asking great questions, some of which I still have to reply to, when I get time 😅 As part of the October Salon Collective's…
One of the first lies we are taught is that there exists something called "nature" or "wilderness". The reality is that there is just life, and we are all a part of all of that life, just like everything else. Instead, many people and many peoples live in ways that are fundamentally disconnected from non-human life. They maintain their relationships with "nature" through particular activities…
I was thinking about skipping this month's update. My family and I have been ill, and between caring for eachother and working on my PhD, I've not had much time for anything else except rest. Rest has been good. To be fair I have figured out some stuff this month which has been very important for myself, but it's personal and not something I want to talk about in a public forum. A wise friend once…
So, this month's update, March, is a few days late. It's characteristic of the mood of the month, really. Recently it's felt like my grip on life has been slipping a little. Deadlines are tighter, more of them are being missed than usual, and I've had to work harder and longer to make sure I'm covering all my responsibilities. At the same time, I feel like I'm falling out of some of my social…
I'm sat here trying to write my update for February. After pulling together my notes, my camera reel, and my calendar, I feel like I have a good overview of my last four weeks. And then I'm wondering, who am I writing this for? The process of taking stock of my activities is hugely beneficial for me, but I've done that now. And nobody I know is actually reading my updates, as far as I'm aware,…
For this month's update, I'll only be talking about things I photographed on my phone 😸 I spent some time at October Salon, working on our constitution and our 'doings'. October Salon is an artist collective that occupies temporary space in Preston. Find more on the @october_salon Instagram . I went to Blackpool with my partner Alwyn. It was cold but the seafront was so beautiful. I got some nice…
My friend Olu reached out to me the other day, so I thought for this month's newsletter, I'd write them a letter and publish that 😊 Hi Olu! Thanks for messaging me the other day, it's really nice to hear from you 😊 And thanks for letting me experiment with this writing-you-a-letter-that's-also-a-newsletter thing 😸 Before I start telling you about everything I've been doing, I wanted to spend…
Today is Monday 1st December 2025. It is 17 days since my 33rd birthday, when I published my Orbit Report 32 , reviewing and reflecting on the 32nd year of my life. It has also been one full month since I switched my note-taking application (Obsidian) from daily notes files to monthly notes files, in an attempt to sink my thinking into a deeper pace layer. Now as I step into the darkest month of…