a place to crash (out)

mapping dreams of a gentle landing beyond words

Hello gentle-people,

My creatively gifted friend Melanie continually reminds me that I have an archive of words I can return to to mine for wisdom. Here are some I am reflecting on today. (I borrowed the preface from a previous resharing):

Today¹ I am reflecting on this little piece of prose I wrote when I was in Atlanta in May 2022 for the Forum for Theological Exploration’s Christian Leadership Forum, where I met so many lovely and imaginative people. I am reflecting precisely because I am in a place of feeling physical, mentally, and emotionally burnt out. When I am this way, I feel like my longings increase and my sense of imagining and hoping for a world otherwise are intensified.

At the time I wrote this, I was in a happy place. I share it now to remember:

Where my hope lies currently:

The things that break my heart may not always get the last word. There is liberation, rest, and renewed imagination on the other side of deep pain. 

I may have been misled, but God can reorient my path toward deeply caring community that celebrates my full humanity. 

My body may be tired, but my mind is racing with ideas and dreams again. 

I can grieve what I have lost (continually) and make space for the emergence of something new. I do not need to have all the words yet to describe what that newness is, but I can lean into its growing pains. 

God is good enough to place people in my life who can support my flourishing. God is faithful enough to keep me through the uncertainty, even when that uncertainty lives in me more than in the world I encounter. Even when that uncertainty lives in the world more than it lives in me. 

There is an abundance on the other side of imperialistic models of education that suppress imagination. There is abundance on the other side of capitalistic models of work that oppress the exhausted body. 

We can and will dream worlds where we are rested enough to imagine anew. 

Survival mode is not our inheritance.

Photo by Pavel Danilov on Unsplash

These words are one of the main guiding affirmations I’ve written for my life’s work, which is to embrace a gentle landing and help others find it for themselves. When I wrote these words, I was just finished graduating from my Master of Divinity program. I had enough self-confidence to boldly refer to myself as a “midwife of divinity” and a womanist theopoet. I was finally getting the kind of rest that helps you dream.

Since then, I have moved through many vocational shifts, including starting a second master’s program, focused on a desire to do accompaniment work predominantly with Black women, femmes and nonbinary people. My motivation went down the toilet towards the end of my last semester in that program when I was hospitalized for my mental health after a traumatic event. This was April/May 2023. That event broke my life into before and after, teaching me what a gentle landing was as I literally ended up needing a place to crash.

There is liberation, rest, and renewed imagination on the other side of deep pain.

a place to crash

I call a gentle landing a poetic playground for restless dreamers because this restless dreamer (me) is constantly playing with words and living inside them. Let’s play with “a place to crash.”

The summer of 2023 was rough. I was the most depressed I have ever been. The bout of depression I am navigating now pales in comparison. I was a shadow of my former self, my negative self-talk was intense and terrifying. I didn’t have the mental energy to work on my entire course load of incompletes. I was without a job and losing money quickly. I numbed myself with cannabis to make it through the day, conscious consumption was not even a thing. Since this was months after the initial crisis point, fewer and fewer people checked in. And I struggled to keep in touch with people since it was hard to show up for others during that time.

This was the state I was in when a friend and I met up and he asked me genuinely how I was doing. Even though I had incompletes, I was no longer taking classes so I had to move out of student housing. He gently offered that I meet the folks he lives with and consider making the available bedroom my next place to land. The invitation was to stay for however long I needed, renting month to month. There was a transient nature that allowed me to consider what I needed and gave me room to decide if I would make the place my home for much longer than a little while.

When I first arrived, I was still in the state I described, making myself scarce in the house so I could be a alone with my sadness as much as possible. Over the course of months, I started to feel better as I found a part-time job and leaned into the warmth that radiated through the home.

I haven’t written much about my home life here because I like having some boundaries but also because it is really hard to describe how this place and these people has helped me rest, heal and play.

When I started attending a church that had a mission for creating an intentional community, I got excited because this somehow unintentional intentional community I was in was such a blessing to me. I joined the small group that stewarded the dreaming and building process and even considered moving into the place myself. It felt like the perfect continuation of my vision for my life and the work I was called to do. Especially since there were other Black women in discernment, I felt such a pull.

But then I had another fall into scary brain times.

A lot got lost in translation as I tried to dream from a place where my mind wasn’t at its best.

A lot was fractured in this time and I am still trying to piece things back together.

I affectionately call September/October 2025 “Ragnorak.”

The pain of the losses I am still navigating hurt so much.

Among those losses, the dream of moving to this new place to spiritually accompany other Black women in the more subtle everyday ways that are so precious to me.

Or so I thought—

I may not be moving into that house, but there are still ways I can live the dream, accompanying other Black women, femmes and nonbinary people through the ordinary every day that is living and loving one another. That is pursuing our passions and dreams. That is awakening the work our souls must have and the rest we so deeply deserve.

a place to crash (out)

I don’t use a lot of slang because it doesn’t always fit my mouth, if that makes sense. But a friend of mine taught me the term “crash out,” and I find it suitable to describe the various states I find myself in. Merriam-Webster says “to crash out is to become suddenly, uncontrollably angry or distressed.”

Lately I have been working on healing my relationship with my thoughts, feelings and stresses. I am reading my way through Lama Rod Owen’s book Love and Anger: The Path of Liberation through Anger.² I am meditating every day. I am remembering how much damage these crash outs can create and walking the path of restoration where I can.

It is hard to share what I am dreaming up exactly because I am open to surprises. I am open to the possibility that that intentional community—or one like it—is for me after all. I am open to the idea of having some kind of residency somewhere to experiment with this poetic approach to spiritual formation in community with other Black women.

I don’t know where I will land, but my exploration of Buddishm in this season is helping me ground myself in reality: I am coming off a crash (out) and I already have a place to land. I am using the resources at my disposal to help me be well. I am also already in relationship with other Black women, femmes and nonbinary folks( and others who are okay not being centered here) who are doing the same.

We are leaning on each other. Sometimes it is true:

We all we got.³

I am resting from formalizing my dreams into action plans because for these next few months, I want to settle into me some more. But this is how I am living the dream right where I am.

a open hand

As a Haitian-American woman, I have heard many people struggle to imagine a world where Haiti helps. But Haitians are among some of the most helpful people I know. I have lived in unintentional intentional community before growing up as my family hosted many who were moving from Haiti or New York (but also from Haiti) in our home growing up. My dad works as a pastor for the church and doesn’t take a salary. I have watched the generosity he’s poured into the Haitian community come back and bless him several times over. We are a giving and receiving people, even as we navigate our own crises.

Which is why even though I believe best practice looks like giving from the overflow, I know crisis changes the rules. I will aim for best practice, which for me is to offer from an open hand when I can. But I won’t deny that we are living through a polycrisis—the rules keep shifting on what best practice looks like.

So I have decided rather than keeping track, I would focus on buiding a life where I am as well as I can be given the socio-political state. I have decided, as an act of archival devotion,⁴ to return to my notes like this vision from May 2022 and keep the dream alive in my daily habits.

It feels good to grow a dream of what I want for the future and to realize I am living some form of it already:

I want a place where people can crash. A home for rest, healing and play. I’ve already been writing this story with my life. I have good reason to believe I will continue to.

landing track

Today I invite you to sit with the breath of simply being. Let your focus draw to the sensation of your breath moving in and out of your nostrils. After a minute or so, read the affirmation “Survival Mode is Not Our Inheritance.” If you need someone to bear witness to what came up for you, I will be present in the comments.

1. I have reshared this many times in the last few years, so I don’t remember which “today” I am referring to.

2. It is also part of my learning about Black Buddhism, which began with the book bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision that I shared last newsletter.

3. It doesn’t fit my mouth to say it but it fits to write it.

4. Archival devotion is my term for a practice of returning to previous writings for my own spiritual formation. They can be things I’ve written or things I’ve read somewhere else. You can read about where this term came from here.