Author: catacosmosis

  • One Decade | Sanctum

    One Decade | Sanctum

    This image wasn’t meant to carry all this, but tonight, it does. It holds the rupture I didn’t know I’d been tiptoeing around all week.

    A decade ago today, my father died. Not on the 13th, when the machines started breathing for him—that was just when I knew he was gone. On the 18th, at this hour, the veil broke open for real. And now here I am—ten years later—haunted by dreams I couldn’t explain and a sudden stillness in my creativity I couldn’t shake.

    Until now.

    I thought I was just tired. Distracted. Stuck. But it was grief. It was reverence in disguise.

    My soul remembered the date even when my mind forgot. That’s the strange thing about grief that matures—it doesn’t scream anymore. It hums, low and holy, beneath everything. It clouds the light, then sharpens it. It takes your voice, then gives it back with new timbre.

    This image—originally photographed by Mikhail Nilov—became a sort of altar. I edited it using Mextures, VSCO, DistressedFX, and Lightroom, layering texture over color, blurring presence and absence, trying to capture what it feels like when sorrow doesn’t knock—it just saturates.

    Sanctum.

    There’s chaos in this. Petals and light blurred through glass and rain. Beauty you can’t quite hold. A yellow rose—like the ones we laid at his grave—folding in on itself. A daisy, centered in clarity, yet surrounded by blur.

    That’s what this night feels like. Clarity in the middle of confusion. Stillness in the swirl.

    Earlier tonight, as I outlined these words in my head while I felt my way through the shift I felt in real-time in the energy, I said to myself:

    “You didn’t lose your creativity. You’re in holy pause. This isn’t numbness—it’s reverence. You were unconsciously grieving a resurrection-day anniversary, and your spirit bowed its head before your body could even name the loss.”

    And now, I feel it even more deeply: Tonight isn’t for making things happen. It’s for honoring what already did.

    Tonight is for prayer—prayer and intercession not only over the souls of loved ones who have already crossed over, but over one very important soul who’s still here. One who I know doesn’t understand why I had to go.

    The truth is, those crossed over souls didn’t leave to hurt me…even though it did. They left because it was time. That was my burden to bear. The lessons they left me with were my responsibility to sort through, clean up, and learn.

    Likewise, I didn’t leave the living out of anger or rejection, or even lack of love. I left because God Himself guided me in a different direction, even if they didn’t want to go that way, or grow that way, too. I will never have a choice above God. And I know that hurts…it hurts me, too.

    Forgiveness is an ongoing action, reflected not in words but in the quiet practice of letting go. The love is, and always will be, unconditional. “Anyway love” always is. And my soul will carry a piece of all of their souls within it. Always.

    A lot of things are coming full circle for me tonight. Invisible messages carried by unseen energies are releasing a kind of clarity within me—one of deeper substance and fuller understanding, puzzles pieces arriving and falling into place in a way I’ve never experienced before. The spiritual warfare, the dreams full of ghosts, the aching grief—none of that is new. But the understanding I have tonight…it reaches deeper than anything I’ve ever touched before.

    Tonight isn’t for sorting through the rubble, cleaning up the floors of my memory, or putting all the lessons learned into neat little compartments in my mind. After all, I’ve already been processing through that, and slowly overcoming it all, for some time now.

    No, tonight isn’t for being swallowed by the hauntings of my own heart. Tonight is for letting grief rain gently through the window, washing my soul—and watching how even the blur, when looked at with love and patience, can be textured out, shaped into a symbolic snapshot in time—capturing both the beauty and the chaos—and become art.

    It is the emblem of the closure of what has, all at once, been the most painful and the most beautiful decade of my life: the one where, in the end, I finally met God.

    I speak the name of Jesus over you
    In your hurting, in your sorrow
    I will ask my God to move
    I speak the name ’cause it’s all that I can do
    In desperation, I’ll seek Heaven
    And pray this for you:

    I pray for your healing
    That circumstances will change
    I pray that the fear inside will flee in Jesus name
    I pray that a breakthrough
    Would happen today
    I pray miracles over your life in Jesus name
    I pray for revival
    For restoration of faith
    I pray that the dead will come alive in Jesus name

    In Jesus name…

    -Katy Nichole, In Jesus Name (God Of Possible)

  • Witness

    Witness

    entry eleven — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    user-image-68787ed5877d68e8874d0289
    📷 | iPhone 12 Mini
    ⚒️ | Distressed FX, VSCO (AL1 PRO), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    Witness.

    It holds the grief.

    The growth.

    The survival.

    The silence.

    It kept watch over the forest

    as the love was letting go.

    One tree saw what I became,

    as I became it—

    what death could never be.

    Alive.

  • A Reminder to Self (But We ALL Need It)

    A Reminder to Self (But We ALL Need It)

    Reminder to self:

    Disconnection makes you stop reflecting and start reacting. It’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because you’re lost in the noise.

    Disconnection from awareness breeds reactivity. Connection with awareness invites response.

    📷 Shot handheld with Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH.
    🛠️ VSCO (06, 2.5) + Lightroom (clarity +7 + watermark).

    When you’re connected, you pause. You listen, and ask better questions. You observe your own patterns, and stop attacking or blaming others for theirs.

    When you’re connected, you become a space of calm in a world of storms rather than another disruptive, destructive wave in a sea of chaos.

    When you forget how to listen inward, when you stop grounding in self-awareness, you lose your anchor.

    Check yourself before you wreck yourself. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being aware.

    Pause, and come back to yourself.

    Reconnect, and become the clarity you’ve been searching for.

    Remain connected, and become the clarity that helps to guide others home.

    🕊️💜✨

  • Music Made Me Do It | Just Some Words

    Music Made Me Do It | Just Some Words

    Hi.

    It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I do not, in fact, feel fine.

    I just heard that song on the radio. It inspired introspection, which is more than I can say for most current popular radio. Bill, Peter, Michael and Mike may have felt fine when the world ended in 1987—but 2025’s version? It’s a different beast entirely.

    I’m not disassociating to the beat of their catchy chorus. No chorus, really…

    No matter what music I play, what books I lose myself in, or how many hours I spend painting, collaging, shooting and processing images, praying, meditating, or absorbing art—I can’t not pay attention.

    It’s like God has made it impossible for me to look away.

    No matter how many creative rabbit holes I disappear into, my soul keeps returning to the same painful truth: I still see the world clearly. And I still care.

    I’ve already finished 31 books this year. Some I began a year ago and it’s taken that long to finish them, but still. I’ve read a lot this year (speaking of which, what are you reading? Here’s my list, if you’d like some suggestions…).

    I’ve listen to over 200 albums, all told (2.717 tracks, according to LastFM).

    Watched 50+ documentaries—science, history, mythology, medicine, art, folklore, theology, religion, all sorts (according to my watch history on Amazon and YouTube).

    But no matter what I consume or create throughout these days and nights spent in the studio or my own den or bedroom, my heart always circles back to the chaos we’re living in.

    The blame shifting. The addiction and obsession and lack of self-control. The emotional manipulation—by the media, by governments, by people you thought you could trust.

    The hatred. The division. The apathy.

    Even the weather feels weaponized now—whether by nature or man, we may never know. And most days? It feels like we’re collapsing. Not just politically or economically—but spiritually.

    When children’s deaths are celebrated, when cruelty trends, when people are told, “it’s OK to mask your real pain by pretending to be someone you’re really not,” and/or real pain is ignored in favor of performance and profit…how do you call that anything but collapse?

    And still…I feel their pain, too.

    The ones lashing out. The ones clinging to false power. Even the ones I disagree with or who’ve attacked me—and the ones in real life who wish I would “just die”—I can feel the torment beneath their rage. Because it takes serious misdirected conditioning and trauma to become someone who cheers for suffering.

    I know what it is. I know myself and so many others have been purposely called to employ it. “Charged” with it, if you will. But I also understand now that that number is mighty small.

    It’s empathy.

    It’s spiritual discernment.

    It’s energy.

    And it’s real. That’s the loudest truth in me. I preach it, in comments and voiceovers and prose, and I practice it through my actions. I continue to do this, even if it makes me seem “crazy” to a world that calls numbness normal (and to some, that makes me a “glutton for punishment”).

    I cry with strangers on the internet more than I ever admit. Sometimes when I log on just to post art or check an email, I’m immediately met with headlines about another shooting, another suicide, another senseless death. And still, I pray. Because Spirit won’t let me stop seeing—and won’t let me stop loving, either.

    Prayer isn’t useless. Many feel that it is, and I understand why. But they’re wrong. Prayer isn’t useless—especially not when more than one person is praying.

    It creates ripples. It fuels the art, the writing, the stillness, the hope. It’s a frequency of resistance that can’t be monetized or hijacked.

    And maybe, as the world is in an overwhelming energy of doubt, fear, and anger, that’s the most powerful rebellion of all right now: to stay in the vibration of love, even when everything begs you to sink into rage or despair.

    So if you’re not feeling fine either—but you’re still holding on to your humanity, still radiating clarity, still praying or creating or showing up gently?

    You’re not alone.

    There’s sacred clarity in this discomfort. Keep not-feeling-fine. It means you’re still awake. And just in case nobody’s said it today:

    I love you. I’d like to bring goodness into your world. I’m sending it out to you whether you like it, or me, or not. I hope you’ll receive it.

    🌻🙏✨

    xo…

    c.

  • The Ghosts of Projects Past (Muse)

    The Ghosts of Projects Past (Muse)

    Sometimes something hits me.

    A random, inexplicable flux. That insatiable need to create. Some unseen force guiding me to conjure, to express, to birth something.

    It happened again last night, but in the same instant that I felt the proverbial tap on my shoulder, a heaviness threatened to settle there. Born and bred creatives know this experience, all the way into their bones.

    It comes with a dread, and creates a dangerous, self-sabotaging pre-regret. It manifests from a complete lack of vision:

    No concept. No plan. No brilliant idea waiting to be realized. Certainly, no idea where to begin.

    Lost but not lacking awareness, and determined to win over the weight of what really boils down to fear of failure, I asked, “what do we want? What is the spark?”

    As expected, the silence answered with more of the same cryptic transmission: “Just ‘do.’ Ripples turn into waves.”

    So, I rummaged.

    I plundered through the old tools and the old toys. You know the ones—the “Ghosts of Projects Past,” our artistic Scrooge’s worst nightmares. The ones tucked away in dusty, overflowing “Likely Garbage” photography folders and long forgotten apps.

    The ancient, the analog, the abandoned fragments of another era.

    I pulled out the remnants of what once inspired me, not because I knew what I was doing, but because whatever had stirred was creating a riot within me.

    These moments are never a question of choice, so I just…explored. Guessed. Played. Flowed.

    s e n t i n e l
    g r i e f

    Sometimes, perhaps most often, that is the best option. Even if the outcome feels unfamiliar or strange, or doesn’t resemble the “usual” desired outcome. Even if the result is wildly imperfect or impossible to explain…

    It is in this uncertain, instinctual process that magic lives and breathes. This is where it sizzles and crackles and arcs, like a furious current from Tesla’s coil—except in this case we don’t need Faraday’s cage.

    Creatives—artists, writers, dreamers, philosophers—need the opposite. We need this chaotic energy to touch, and to consume, us. It is the rejection, the not allowing it to, that kills us…and that is always a slow, excruciating death, from the inside out.

    In art and creativity, exciting results are not found in safety. They’re not found in perfection. Organic process is not found in planning. Everything in and about the Creative archetype is found in the act of simply showing up.

    Creative inspiration doesn’t ask for permission. It asks for presence. It asks that you show up and let it burn through you. The only wrong move is not moving at all.

    📷 Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH Mega OIS
    ⚒️ Fragment + Mextures + Lightroom

    **Rex Ray inspired.

  • Someday…or Night

    Someday…or Night

    entry ten — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.


    Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta),
    a fading ember of late summer—graceful even in decay, still holding the shape of sunlight after the bloom has passed.  Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A10PRO), Mextures (personalized texture formula: MEZPZZC), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    My mother always told me, in every possible circumstance a child might ever need encouragement, “Do your best, and leave the rest. It’ll all come right some day or night.” 

    It was a line from “Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell.”  

    She was a third grade teacher, a grammar Nazi, and a mother trying her damndest to connect with me and, well, do her best. 

    And, as ornery and difficult a young person as I could often be, she never knew that I believed her…

    …even when I forgot I did.

    Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta),
    a fading ember of late summer—graceful even in decay, still holding the shape of sunlight after the bloom has passed.  Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A10PRO), Mextures (personalized texture formula: MEZPZZC), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    There was so much distance between us as I struggled through high school with her overbearing “sin obsessed” guidance, and she struggled to save my soul. 

    Even when the days were so long, when they bled into each other, and when the nights felt like punishments I hadn’t earned, as her brain and body were swallowed by Alzheimer’s. 

    Even when the thread broke, or maybe I cut it, when she died…I honored and nursed a clean, holy wound in the shape of freedom for both of us, from past grievances, from debts yet unpaid, from fear, from tension, from aching hearts and confused minds and the evils of that horrific disease.

    Still, that line stayed, like a soft breath. Like a healing balm. Like the part of her that couldn’t leave, because it lived in me.

    Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta),
    a fading ember of late summer—graceful even in decay, still holding the shape of sunlight after the bloom has passed.  Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A10PRO), Mextures (personalized texture formula: MEZPZZC), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    Do your best. Not more than that. Not perfection. Just presence. I tried, truly. 

    Leave the rest… The story. The tragedy. The one who couldn’t stay.

    It will all come right…and maybe it already has.

  • Petalweight (Yield)

    Petalweight (Yield)

    entry nine — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.


    Weevil (Meibomeus musculus), a quiet laborer of the forest and the fields…carrying the weight of being, petal by petal. 
    Vision: Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S.
    Tools: VSCO (KP3), Mextures (personalized texture formula: QBHASZK), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    There is a kind of presence that doesn’t announce itself.

    No sound. No shimmer. No need to be noticed. Just a body doing what it does.

    Clinging to a petal, breathing the moment, belonging to the quiet. Sometimes, that is the work.

    Not saving, not proving. Just being.

    And somehow…it shifts the entire forest, the entire field.

    For some souls, there is a burden in being seen —not the fear of visibility, but the ache of being misread when presence itself was the offering.

    This is the shape of a soul made for stillness.

    This is the purpose of a hidden heart.

  • Crop

    Crop

    entry eight — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.

    Bicolor Bush Clover (Lespedeza bicolor), a humble member of the wild clover family. Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (HB3 PRO), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    Zooming in, pulling back, reframing…
    …it’s the practice of shifting perspectives.
    Cropping is discernment.

    It’s important in photography,
    and in life.

    Focusing closely.
    Examining the details.
    Leaning into the moment.
    Studying the layers.
    Trying different angles—
    then pulling back to take in the whole.

    I do this with my art, my edits, my healing…
    …and my priorities.

    Bicolor Bush Clover (Lespedeza bicolor), a humble member of the wild clover family. Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (HB3 PRO), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    Cropping, and discernment.
    Both are framing what matters—
    letting the noise blur into the background.

    It’s not just a gift,
    not just a tool.
    It’s a process.

    With practice, it teaches clarity through choice.
    Over time, it becomes discernment embodied.

    Cropping alters perspective.
    It is learning to see again…

    …as many times as it takes to actualize the vision.

  • Black-Winged Hush

    Black-Winged Hush

    entry seven — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.

    Black Bee (Melissodes bimaculatus). Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A8 PRO), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    Even the smallest life—

    black-winged, humble, and intent on its task—

    carries beauty enough to hush the noise of the world.

    We rush past so many moments like this.

    Moments where grace is not loud, not dramatic, not grand or sweeping.

    Just… present. Quiet. Steady.

    Doing the sacred work of being alive.

    To sit still long enough to witness it is to remember.

    Not some distant, complicated truth, but a very simple one:

    The miracle is not in the event.

    It’s in the noticing.

    Grace doesn’t need permission to land.

    It only asks that we pay attention.

    💜✨

  • Beautifully Obsolete: Revisiting Roots

    Beautifully Obsolete: Revisiting Roots

    I’ve been wanting to go back to my beginner photography roots…back to the tools that first taught me how to see. Not the Leica fixed macro. Not the Sony or Tamron glass. Not even the newer body. None of my inherited equipment. Just…my roots.

    I used my fully outdated, beautifully obsolete LUMIX GX7—a replacement for my original GF3, long since gone—and its 20mm prime, with the same kind of macro filters that began and cemented my obsession with close-up work nearly a quarter century ago.

    A while ago, we cracked this geode open with a hammer. No fancy saws, just risk and dumb luck here.

    Original capture, using LUMIX GX7 + 20mm prime kit lens + stacked, simple macro filters (10, 4, 2, 1).

    I suppose one should be more careful with nature, but nature is often far more careless with itself (and with us) than we would dare to be.

    It takes that kind of recklessness to create rocks like this: extreme destruction, tons of pressure, and the long, drawn-out silence of time.

    The first shot is a 2×3 crop of the original, watermark added. It radiates stillness, but also origin. Not just a photo of a mineral, but the witnessing of an unveiling. Beauty born not of perfection, but of extreme heat and cold, of force and risk, of patience and faith.

    VSCO edit of original, using B5 Pro (further edits described below).

    The second is a black-and-white VSCO edit: a touch of clarity, a whisper of bloom, a cool tint in the lightly raised shadows, and a layer of grain like cosmic dust.

    But what is really there? What is the captured magic?

    In the first, I see the quiet unfolding of a secret. Light caught mid-breath, nestled in silence, not trying to perform, but simply to be observed. Crystals shimmering like they’re whispering, not shouting. Softness holding the sharpness in tension. Truth in the raw moment of becoming.

    In the second, I wanted to draw attention to the structure beneath the shimmer. The architecture of pressure. The monochrome strips away the sparkle to reveal something more elemental.

    Less about beauty, more about bones. A lunar map. The scar tissue of a planet. A meteorite’s grain. A deep-space scan. A memory of rupture, filtered through time. A chorus of diamonds at the end of becoming, born of charcoal and starlight.

    What do you see? Not with your eyes alone, but soul.

    Soul vision. That’s what I see with most often. Especially now.

    xo,

    c.