Hello gentle-people,
Today is my last day at my current job. Looking for a new job is exhausting.
I know I call A Gentle Landing “a poetic playground for restless dreamers,” but I do try my best to keep the restlessness away from this page. But to be honest, these days I feel like I am racing:
Racing to catch up with loved ones. Racing to figure out my neurodivergence. Racing to find new sources of income. Racing to survive fascism.
I am trying to overcome the latest bout of burnout, wrap up my current job, look for work, and read book after book in a quest for solutions to the problem of myself.
Has anyone been there?
After waking up at three or four am several nights in a row, I remembered this poem that meets my restlessness:
night vision by Lucille Clifton
the girl fits her body in
to the space between the bed
and the wall. she is a stalk,
exhausted. she will do some
thing with this. she will
surround these bones with flesh,
she will cultivate night vision.
she will train her tongue
to lie still in her mouth and listen.
the girl slips into sleep.
her dream is red and raging.
she will remember
to build something human with it.
train her tongue
What stands out to me today in Clifton’s poem are the lines “she will train her tongue/to lie still in her mouth and listen.”
This year began with surgery and as I end it, I still feel like I am stitching together the threads I need to care for my body well. This line reminds me that underlining my frustrations is a deeply dysregulated body, a body in need of rest.
Thanks to the support I have gathered from my subscribers here, I could afford to sign up for a course that will take me through The Embodiment Institute to help me ground myself somatically.
Softness is still the foundation of my approach to the work of A Gentle Landing before I get to this:
first studio.lab project preview
I had a lot of thoughts about how to share about the work I want to do. You can click here to see my last newsletter where I spelled out a lot of different dreams I’ve been holding.
Here is a free preview on Patreon of one of the projects I want to produce through the studio.lab. You can access the same preview through the Substack dedicated to the Woven podcast if you would prefer to listen follow the journey outside of Patreon.1
This is the description:
Woven is a podcast about attention. Rose explores how to respond to the pull of digital life with more softness, intention, and imagination. Each episode asks what it means to stay human and stay present while so much of our world happens online.
This podcast weaves together reflections on creativity, vocation, and digital culture, helping listeners notice how online spaces shape us and how we might begin to move through them with more tenderness. You’ll hear grounding practices, meditations, and gentle invitations to return to yourself drawn from the ethos of A Gentle Landing, a studio lab for rest, healing, and play through creative formation.
Woven is for those who feel stretched thin by the internet and find themselves hungry for slower ways of thinking. It is for those curious about how to live truthfully in a world designed to scatter our attention. It’s a companion for anyone seeking a life that is more spacious, more rooted, and more whole—online and off.
It will be available wherever you listen to podcasts. Support from Patreons will help fund the work and rest necessary to produce it. This includes being able to pay guests!
a new AGL ecosystem
I used to have a process. I would (over)think and (over)think and (over)think. I would have conversations that help me “detangle” my wiry thoughts and make sense of the overwhelm. I would practice archival devotion, coming back to words I’ve written or read from others and in that process, I find my way back to precious, hard-won truths. Then finally, I’d chart that journey here in posts that help bring together ideas I find interesting with practices I find grounding.
It is all experiential and dependent on a lot of vulnerability.
In these last few months, I have taken away the part where I chart that journey here, in part because some of what I am learning and unlearning feels too fresh to make public.2 I want to honor what this space has been while acknowledging the need for a new ecosystem to emerge, one where I can slow down even more and produce quality content that reflects my best creative and spiritual work.
I read a quote that said “Being an entrepreneur is like going to a casino with your reputation.” I had to put that in calligraphy. It feels so true—I am sticking my neck out here, trying my best to build a foundation I can build my dreams on.
It’s still vulnerability but it looks and feels different.
help me get there gently
So all that being said, will you help me? One holiday we should all celebrate this month is my birthday month and all I have is one wish: to be grounded in the work my soul must have.
My friend Bethany Nicole and I have had many conversations about what a gentle landing is together. I have shared many ideas I did not have the bandwidth to produce over these last few months, as I dreamed up possibilities for spaces I want to create and works of creativity I want to produce. Her affirmations keep my dreams warm:
“Your natural state saves Black women all the time.”
“I want everything good to come for you twice.”
“I truly believe in the depths of my soul that you are THAT GIRL TM.”
I am sending this post so close to the holidays, in the event that you would want to join me on Patron, where no matter the tier, members will have access to all posts.
I will be resting, reading and leaning into my relationships over the holidays. I will be offline, but happy to respond to questions and comments when I return in January. For now, I celebrate the support I have already felt from you friends like Bethany Nicole and you all, as I have crossed into 1.7k subscribers here. We’ve arrived gently here together. May we continue to grow in more beautiful and gentle ways in the new year.
this is my last landing track of the year
What lessons of gentle landing will you carry from this year into next year?
But if you want more than one place to encounter the podcast, then by all means, subscribe to both!
I have also been reflecting on concept like the “visibility trap” and “the right to opacity” which I reflected on in an early iteration of the “woven” work, through a series I wrote here reflecting on my time on the internet.
Thank you for your work this year! This page has been a life line for me as I’ve been on my own journey of creative exploration and rest from several burnout. You helped this black woman- and I know you continue to help so many more!
Last landing track of the year is so right on time. Can’t tell you how excited I am to get into studio lab. But you know I plan to try. And least 3 more times.