today I release

a letter to you all

Today’s post is a letter to you all on the current state of my work and well-being, as all AGL letter sections are generally focused. Usually, I find ways to weave ideas together and offer landing tracks for self-reflection. Not lately. Lately words aren’t coming to me as easily for AGL. So I am breaking from my usual format in order to loosen my tongue.

Hello gentle-people!

I just finished my first week in a new job. In this space, I typically don’t talk about my day job. The details of what I do for work might be on LinkedIn, but here we focus on how vocation shows up beyond the hustle. But I must admit one thing:

I am kind of excited for this role. It brings together aspects of some of my favorite past roles. I will also get to work part-time. This will serve me in my desire to rest more and explore different kinds of creative freelance opportunities.

I must admit I haven’t been writing much lately because there have been quite a few concerns occupying my mind. I am internally preoccupied quite often, but these days it is more so. I am having trouble doing things I usually enjoy, like writing and playing guitar. Luckily, I am finding reading comes easily right now.

I am thinking about how I cultivate this public work as someone who cannot promise consistency in this season. The meaning making part of experiencing life is what makes up this newsletter typically. But I must admit, these last few months of battling depression and anxiety have made me want to let go of some additional burdens I’ve placed on myself. So I won’t promise to publish every Wednesday from now on. And I release the pressure to make sense to myself and others, and with it, the motivation to be easily digestible.

Photo by Liana S on Unsplash

I also had to admit to myself that I took on too much trying to launch a studio lab and look for a job at the same time. I am pausing on that idea, putting my attention into building the woven newsletter and podcast slowly. I want to continue to create and hope people will support my work as I do…but I remembered why I left Patreon the first time: to craft a communal space around my writing more intentionally through Substack.

I am looking back and what four years of writing on here has cultivated. A Gentle Landing has given me a sustained space of self-reflection, shaped by my readings. It has given me a new language for prayer, shaped by the convictions that grew here. It has called me into deeper commitments to gentleness, with myself and others.

It would be nice if it kept doing that…but now I am asking myself if it is meant to do something entirely different. I want to give myself the space to find out.

Some part of writing these posts over the last four years has been rooted in the belief that another world is possible. I want to write my way through whatever new place I am meant to land gently next.

But my writing might look a little different moving forward. I want to remain open to learning new ways of expressing myself and my neurospicy brain has already gotten tired of my old writing routine.

Thanks to this newsletter, I make a little money every month I can use for self-care, wellness, and self-improvement. Anything that contributes to the vocation of softness I am cultivating for myself. I want to thank those of you who help tend to this space by contributing to that fund. It has gone to things like massages (a necessity for my embodiment), books and a poetry class.

but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.

—Isaiah 40:31, NRSV

I read this verse as someone struggling with her faith. Someone fighting to believe in God while being actively disillusioned by the church and the state of the world. I read it as a cynic, who has run away and chosen isolation over community care many times.

I think I am trying to understand how to talk about repentance from this place. Can repentance mean that I ask for forgiveness, as I return to the people, places and practices that best sustain my softness? If that is so, then I repent. I see now that I had lost my way but I am finding it again.

Come bear witness.