...to the studio lab!

building a space for rest, healing and play online

This post has been edited since its publication to update subscribers on the direction of my project. 

For those who have read the original post, I will not be using Patreon or Discord anymore for the studio lab. We are still holding on to the dream and charting a different pathway.

Hello gentle-people,

Tomorrow is my birthday! This week, I did not do my regular Wednesday post because I was not feeling well and I was deeply overwhelmed in the days that followed. It made me thankful for the culture I’ve created here, where I can rest at anytime and return to the work.

What I will share today, I hope captures the spirit of what is possible when that kind of approach to rest is central to the work I want to do.

Here is a glimpse of what I am building!

what it is

I wrote the following explanation for the website:

A Gentle Landing (AGL) Studio Lab is a space for rest, healing, and play that strengthens the spiritual and creative lives of its participants. It offers a supportive environment where people can step away from algorithm-driven pressures and enter a slower rhythm of reflection, imagination, and embodied grounding.

The Studio Lab hosts gatherings, workshops, and companioning spaces that help individuals build capacity for creative work, deepen their spiritual practices, develop gentler relationships with their craft, and nurture their vocational clarity. It is designed as a trauma-sensitive environment where rest and formation unfold together, and where participants learn to cultivate lives rooted in flourishing rather than productivity.

In this space, creative practice is treated as spiritual practice. Participants are invited to explore their own becoming, tend the body, cultivate aliveness, and practice what Lucille Clifton calls “build[ing] something human.”

grounding frameworks

Also from the website:

A Gentle Landing Studio Lab is grounded in an integrated set of frameworks that shape the pedagogy, ethos, and practices of the space:

• Black Feminist Poetics

  Centering imagination, lineage, breath, aliveness, and the everyday as sites of knowing.

• Womanist Theology

  Attending to liberation, embodied wisdom, dignity, survival, and joy within community.

• Digital Media Literacy

  Naming the formational pressures of digital life and offering practices that support agency, discernment, and humane connection.

• Contemplative Practice

  Cultivating slowness, presence, healing, and the rhythms of becoming that attend to body, breath, and spirit.

These lenses guide how we gather, create, teach, rest, and build capacity together. They allow the Studio Lab to function as both sanctuary and training ground. This is a place where people learn to be softer with themselves while strengthening the skills required for a life of creative and spiritual integrity.

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the birth of an idea

I have always imagined that “A Gentle Landing” would be a community of folks who can come together around a vision or a dream…even if that dream is simply to rest. The framework of “a gentle landing” is inspired by midwifery. It is what you call the moment of birth, where the midwife’s hands catch the baby. But as we know, the journey of supporting the birth of a child begins before this moment. Supporting the pregnant person through labor is just one aspect. I could go in about the importance of midwives, but for me, they are an important part of my approach to spiritual care, spiritual formation and creative expression. It is why I refer to myself and wish to be known as a “midwife of divinity,” not a master.

What I hope to create is a pathway to do the work I am already doing with more support and to expand its reach so that it might serve others. This is the ministry I have wanted, what I would do anyways without support because it brings me so much joy.

The lenses above shouldn’t come as a surprise to those of you who have been reading this newsletter for awhile now. You all have been a significant part of bearing witness to the vision as it has unfolded over the last four years. For that, I am deeply grateful. I know I will have to continually explore how to share my approach with others, but I feel grounded knowing there have been a bunch of folks who have been picking up what I have been putting down now for years.

This journey is about doing the work of creating a gentle landing for others while being grounded in my own gentle landing.

from a photoshoot with my brother Ro. some books that have inspired my work!

studio. lab.

Once I knew I wanted to be grounded in the metaphor of midwifery, I searched and searched and searched for the words to define the container for my work. I landed on the creation of a digital “studio lab,” after a vocational epiphany: I am a producer.

While I think of it as yet another way to say midwife, I borrow from music production in my understanding here. Producers are known for having their own projects and contributing to the projects of others.

I have helped create or cohost four podcasts and consulted on many more. I have helped people find their way to helpful books and language that supports their work and their thriving beyond work. I have been in many roles where I’ve experienced coming alive most in the moments where I am dreaming with others and imagining the creation of new communities of belonging.¹

In this space, which I imagine as both incubator and retreat, I want to build a sustainable practice of using my gifts and passions to continue to produce—on my own projects and the ones I am invited to. So often, what aids in the production of beautiful creations that help change the world is a space to rest, heal and play.

Sometimes a break from work is the work.

Through the studio lab, we will embrace principles shaped by years of writing, public scholarship and my experiences with spiritual accompaniment. We will release urgency, cultivate media literacy, sharpen our imaginations and rest from algorithmic demands.

who this is for

The easy answer? Anyone who is on the journey of trying softer.

But to be clear, this will be a womanist space, welcoming to Black women/femmes and all who agree that when Black women/femmes are free, others get free. Additionally, we will work to ensure the burden of translation does not fall on those whose experiences are marginalized in our society.²

We welcome creatives,³ caregivers and contemplative leaders, any one who wants to deepen their creative/spiritual practice. Especially those trying to figure out how to create a gentle landing in ways that support their vocation of softness.⁴

We welcome those who long for a space that feels like church but freer. A space that invite ritual and reflection while cultivating shared imagination without the pressure to perform or believe a certain way.

what we offer

Yes, “we.” I keep saying “we,” because this work would not be possible if I didn’t already have a gentle landing community that supports me. I look forward to working with collaborators to create spaces of companioning, workshopping, retreating, healing, etc.

Here are some ideas of what offerings could be housed under the Studio Lab. In bold, are the ones I am preparing to launch in January.

• Discord Community

• Gatherings for Black women/femmes

• Digital retreat experiences

• Capacity building spaces

• Spiritual direction

• Drop-in companioning hours

• Consulting & advising

• Learning spaces and classes

Along with these offerings, I hope to generate support for my creative projects and research. Here is a little bit about what I am producing, creating and researching in this era:

• Writing projects;

  • belonging, babel and beyond: A Theopoetics of Creolization (poems and essays) - done, just needs editing and publishing!

• Podcasts

  • Woven: a podcast at the intersection of womanism, contemplation, poetics, digital media literacy and spiritual care to share stories and meditations - the concept is clear

• Music

  • music for contemplative activism

• Sermons

  • I am reentering the itinerant preaching circuit in the new year. My preaching style is poetic, drawing from (eco)womanist & Black theological biblical studies.

  • I am adaptable and will travel but I love preaching online and would enjoy building that skill in the new year.

• Ongoing Research

  • My study of Lucille Clifton’s poetry, of course.

  • I am always reading up on spiritual formation/care, digital ministry & digital media, Womanist theology & ethics, and (Black feminist) poetics.

  • I have newly added books to my collection to explore digital homiletics, creative pedagogy, ecological justice, freelancing, creative research methods, queer theology, entrepreneurship, neurodivergence, culture making, etc.

  • I would like to share this research within the Patreon and in my consulting sessions and as needed for the meta construction of spiritual companioning/direction.

will you help support this dream?

As I share all of this, I want to name where I am right now.

As I create this, I want to do it slowly, to garner support, and to make sure people truly understand the vision before they commit to becoming patrons. I also want to take a real break from urgency and grind for myself.

As my witnesses, you have seen how I have been on a long journey trying to find work that allows me to lean into my creative gifts and passions. My writing here has always been about vocational discernment. And in this year of grounding myself more deeply in my neurodivergent and queer identity, I can see now that the space I belong in is the one I build.

I don’t expect this to be built overnight. I expect it to take years. I expect it will take time before I am operating at a capacity where this becomes my main source of income. Because of that, I will continue the search for work that sustains me for a season, while also recognizing that I am building something else alongside it, something I am deeply excited about.

I am tired of this work living on the margins of my life. Truly and deeply. It’s time for it to be front and center.

As always, I am committed to the pace of flourishing. And I know this might sound like a lot, but I also know that the only way I can rest from doing the most all the time is by inviting other people to help hold this dream with me. That is what I am doing in this post.

Stay tuned for the launch of the Patreon and the Discord community. Stay tuned for offerings as they take shape. And if anything I’ve shared here or written throughout this newsletter sounds like something you might be able to guide me toward in terms of interim work, I would be really happy to hear from you.

Thank you for being a part of my gentle landing.

-rose june

1. I plan to share more about the devocations that came with these experiences, moments where I felt called away from my humanity, or denied the space to expand into myself fully. But for now I lean into the joys.

2. There is a through-line here from my writing on Black aliveness and de-centering whiteness, which has been my commitment for years that continues to be refined.

3. A reminder here that we are all creative, it is just a matter of mediums.

4. This is a concept I have created to reorient conversations that center work to highlight how rest and work are two sides of the same coin. Both need to be approached with more softness.