There comes a point in every soul’s story where you’re asked to lay down what you thought was love—or risk letting it break you.
That’s the thing about burdens: we don’t always know when they stop being sacred and start becoming self-destruction. But eventually, if we’re honest, we feel it.
That’s the core of this message.
You can carry the burden until your knees give out, insisting it’s strength. Or, you can listen to the whisper that says, “Lay it down,” because true strength isn’t brute force. It’s not in how long you hold on. It’s in knowing when to release—when to grieve, and when to grow.
Brute strength—the kind that resists surrender—is fear in a steel mask. But surrender? That’s wisdom. That’s love maturing into understanding.
This isn’t a love story between me and someone else. It’s a love story between who I was and who I’ve become. It’s the story of two souls—two versions of my own soul—and how only one of them eventually realized that the weight of love, when carried alone, becomes grief.
That grief, if left unprocessed, becomes blame. Becomes resentment. Becomes bitterness. Becomes the ghost of a life I never got to live.
The version of me that held on so tightly was trying to preserve love by never letting go—even of the dead. Even of ghosts. But the version of me that learned to let go understands now:
It’s not about letting go of the ones we’ve lost. It’s about letting go of what keeps us from healing. Letting go of the pain we wrapped ourselves in like armor. Letting go of the misunderstandings. Letting go of the old wounds that kept us from breathing fully.
I couldn’t shrink myself any longer to fit into the versions of love that others offered. And they couldn’t stretch themselves to meet me in mine. That wasn’t failure. That was fact. Then, in the case of my mother, she died.
Maybe—just maybe—there’s a higher realm where we meet again, whole and healed. Where all the versions of us come home to each other. Where they are not in conflict, but in communion.
Until then…I carry them forward. I no longer miss them the way I used to—because they’re not gone. They’re right here, quietly guiding me home.
Sometimes, even when life isn’t spiraling out of control, it feels like it is. Maybe there’s no reason. And when it happens, there’s almost certainly no rhyme.
So what do we do—especially as artists of any kind—when the world around us reeks of chaos and seems to have lost all its marbles?
Abstract.
No matter what kind of artist you are, no matter your medium or your muse, no matter your level of inspiration (or lack thereof), abstract can be a perfect middle ground to ground your spirit, or wake it up.
The Scenario
Of course you (ok, I) woke up at 12:01 AM for no “apparent” reason—the absolute cosmic middle finger of liminal time, where nothing makes sense and yet everything feels oddly sacred.
Maybe, like me, you didn’t have any looming crises to fret over, or feel any real emotion about waking up at an inconvenient time (or being distracted, if it’s not the middle of the night for you). Spoiler alert: that “no emotion” is still an emotion.
I think—for a lot of us deep feelers, thinkers, philosophers and creatives right now—that numb, unanchored state has a lot to do with the collective dissonance we’re living through. There’s a major divide between those trying to evolve and live with intention, and those still operating from fear, ego, and unchecked reactivity.
Even if we try to stay grounded, we still feel the chaos buzzing around us. We still feel the friction of a world flailing through an identity crisis. And while we may not want to name it all or get swept up in it, we still end up absorbing the noise—because that’s what happens when you’re tuned in to—and transmuting—what others refuse to confront.
Another spoiler alert: things could be fine…if more people paused before projecting, reacted less and reflected more, took accountability for their realities—and how/what they contributed to their creation—and stopped mistaking emotional immaturity for a personality trait.
Alas, for me, that energy—and that emptiness, void of any clear direction, yet full of invisible limits (like everyone else being asleep, so I have to be quiet, for example)—is exactly the kind of blank page that’s just waiting to be painted on.
Literally and metaphorically.
Me? I felt the pull toward abstract watercolor. After a chaotic day juggling real life—and feeling deeply grateful that I don’t have to bend a knee to the public school system or navigate the mess so many parents of school-aged kids are facing—this makes complete sense. Abstract is, after all, what we turn to when logic is exhausted and emotion has no specific name.
Maybe, like me, you’re not uninspired—you’re just not anchored in this moment. Maybe, like me, it feels like you’re floating a little. Untethered. Not because you don’t care or don’t want to create, but because everything around you feels too slippery to hold onto. Too uncertain to frame.
I have come to understand that when that happens, my soul isn’t asking for structure. It’s asking for space. It’s asking for breath. It’s asking for some way—any way—to come home to the present moment without having to name it, define it, or pin it down.
That’s where abstract steps in. Not as a replacement for direction, but as a safe space to reconnect before you try to direct anything at all. In these moments, I’ve found that what’s waiting to be uncovered isn’t something planned or polished, but something feeling-based and rule-free—a piece born from presence, not pressure.
Try this, if you’re in a space like that. ⤵️
A Gentle Framework for Midnight Abstracts
Color Prompt:
Close your eyes and take three deep breaths. Think of the word: “release.” Without judgment, what three colors float into your mind? Even if they’re weird together—especially if they are—let them lead.
Composition Prompt:
Whatever your medium, start simple and let the process unfold.
If you’re shooting photography, don’t force the subject or the composition. Wander your space, and just shoot. Let your eye catch on whatever it catches on—light, shadow, texture, reflections. Let it all—even the clutter—guide you. Try new angles. Blur the focus. Let it be weird. Let it breathe.
Fun photography hack for this kind of energy:
Don’t be afraid to create outrageous effects with tools like Lightroom, Photoshop, or even apps on your phone. These tools aren’t just for polish—they’re wonderful (and especially useful) playgrounds for unlimited texture, distortion, and mood. Perfect for transforming ordinary shots into abstract, emotionally charged pieces.
Lean into the surreal. Add grain. Blow out the exposure. Warp the tones. You might just end up with a visual journal entry that says far more than any perfectly posed image ever could.
If you’re working with mixed media, paints, inks, clay, sketching/drawing, writing, or even scrapbooking or junk journaling—don’t force shape or form. Let your hands (or your heart) lead before your mind starts trying to make sense of it.
I’m drawn to watercolor as I write this post, so when I finish this post and start painting, I’ll start with a layered wash using just one color. Let the water move it. Drop in my second and third colors without intention—just observing how they bloom, resist, or swirl. I’ll add detail only if my hand naturally reaches for the brush again.
Examples of abstract watercolor, following exercises in Kate Leach’s “Creative Abstract Watercolor” book. I have the Kindle edition and would recommend the book 77/10 for inspiration and information, but I’d 1000/10 recommend the PRINT EDITION over Kindle if you’d like to add it to your library.
Let the chaos speak.
Sometimes that’s all it takes—one odd hour, a small canvas (whatever that looks like for you), and a handful of scattered supplies. Water, glue, tape, scrap paper, stickers, markers, pens, brushes…even a few oddly placed objects to capture in still photos on a clear or cluttered surfaces. It doesn’t have to be planned or polished.
All it really takes is a little setting of soul-driven intention, then a little courage to move that intention into action, to make something unexpectedly beautiful from what doesn’t make any logical sense.
No rules or expectations required. Just presence. Just honesty. Just the courage to let what’s inside you move—without needing to explain it first.
That’s the beauty of abstract. It doesn’t ask you to be understood. It just asks—and allows—you to be real; and that’s the truest art there is.
HipstaCat stands for Hipstamatic + Catacosmosis. I’ve decided to make myself play with Hipsta again. Per usual, I’ve lost my creative drive due to stress and caregiving anxiety (that’s on my brain’s inability not to worry and fear, not on anyone being a burden, to clarify) so thank heavens for tools like Hipsta and Mextures that allow me to create without doing so from scratch (if that makes sense). I got this, right? LOL
Hipstamatic, Frederick + Combo2X
This is a crystal statue in a hall at St. Vincent’s hospital. I dig it, so I hipsta’d it.
Sometimes it feels like you just want to jump from a great height and be gone. But why?
We all make mistakes. We all do things, fail to do things, or find ourselves in situations we can’t control. For example, sometimes people lie about you and you lose someone you love because of it. But if that person cared about you and not just themselves? Instead of erasing you from their life and losing something that could have been good (erasing you except for holding a grudge/hating you) they’d choose differently.
THEY don’t realize that they broke your heart AND their own. YOU don’t realize that the truth is, it was probably for the best. Rejection is spiritual protection, my friends. And nothing beats your spirit team…
I love fall flowers…I love how they feel like summer’s last hoorah, or perhaps Mother Nature’s final gift before the long, cold winter…
When the season of death is upon us, both literally and figuratively, in nature and in life, I think we are often give this gift but tend to take it for granted.
I suppose that’s why I shoot so many details, and so many natural things…I wish to bring them back to the consciousness of those who live a sadder life because they’re forgotten them…or just become too complacent to see the gifts and the beaut that is always right before them.
Enjoy these flowers, and have a blessed and beautiful day.
You don’t know what someone is dealing with…what they’re going through. Sometimes a person can be confident and also anxious, look healthy but be sick, look happy and be miserable, look good but feel ugly, act hopeful but feel hopeless, smile and be broken, or never smile at all and be happy… You don’t know. So unless you ask, don’t judge. Don’t assume. Sometimes a person you see every single day or think you know very well can be fighting battles you know nothing about.
Flowers!?? Of course, flowers! How could I not start this whole top five/top ten thing with anything else when that is what I shoot the most?? OK – it’s probably a tie with droplets, but even those are technically flower shots. ((blows raspberry)
Specifically, as you’ll remember me mentioning Nicole if you read my last post, flowers are what she first asked me to choose as a top five list. I’m going to have to go with ten, though, because I share almost exclusively flowers. It was too difficult for me to choose just five. In fact, it was extremely difficult for me to put these in any sort of order as far as my own “top” choices. The rest of these will likely be “five” lists. This one was definitely the hardest.
10. Blue
I love this one because it combines different visual elements but still keeps the flower as the focal point. Another reason this one is special is because I shot it to complete a calendar I was doing for my Mom. This flower was one from one of the sprays given in memory of my father at his wake, and it also reminds me of the blue and white ceramics that she collects. Things so often tie together like that, in my perception and creativity.
**Sony Alpha (a37), Tamron macro 90mm f2.8, manual focus on full, tripod, external flash. Unedited, aside from crop.
09. Calla
I love this flower edit, done with DistressedFX on the fly. I shot this Calla lily at the oil change place with my phone. It was February, and I was attempting to leave for New Orleans for the third time in two weeks. I was so desperate to get there and find something. This flower, before I even embarked on my journey, was the first thing I “found.” What I was looking for in New Orleans exactly, I’m still not sure, but, all told, I found a lot more than I bargained for.
My plan to stay once I arrived there was foiled by understanding and learning in a very tangible way that you can’t always escape reality, and that when you love someone you’ll always return to them. My dad fell ill and that’s why I ended up coming home in the end – which I wasn’t planning to do at all…and from there my life began to unfold a chain of events that would forever change it – but not all for the bad.
**iPhone 5
08. Finding It
This cute little flower was hanging out on my cousin Gail’s porch at the farm. I shot this during a time when I felt so…overwhelmingly lost. It was a day when I simply didn’t know how to breathe without my father’s presence in my life, and was struggling to find meaning in ever leaving my room again, and when I saw this flower and spent thirty minutes photographing it and even longer playing with the DistressedFX/Mextures edit, I found a ray of meaning to get out of bed the next day: a desire to find more flowers to shoot. It was a very meaningful day because of this tiny little flower.
I found these daisies on clearance at Home Depot around mid-spring this year. This experience was something on many levels that I can’t even put into words…but this shot is visually one of my favorites because of the angle, focus and colors.
Some form of wild sage, I think. I shot these while walking in the woods somewhere in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I love these little purple flowers, and I didn’t have any super special experience for or equipment with this shot. I just love the textured edit I did with it using Mextures.
**iPhone 5. Mextures Formula Code – TWTIYIE
05. Lightroom
With this shot, I was playing with Lightroom – which, at the time, I hadn’t done for a very long time. I’d been using mobile apps and devices and hadn’t touched my computer for months (ok, truth be told, years). Here I was trying some different styles with some shots from earlier in the year, and I was especially addicted to some Lightroom presets I’d gotten from Creative Market. Mixing presets and filters with Mextures formulas and effects from other apps, like DistressedFX and Stackables, is fun and you get some pretty cool results.
I chose to include this image because I love the gradient of the colors in the edit, but when I looked back at the original post I remembered very clearly how I felt on that day and why I called it “Soul Dance.” It was all down to music – a song called “Crystallize,” by Lindsey Sterling – as my moods often are. Internally, I was having such a hard time. I remember how light and how empowered that music made me feel, and as I was editing this image whilst listening to it and was trying to imagine my spirit flying like these dandelion seeds soon would be, I titled it after the song.
Continuing with my dandelion obsession this year, this shot is one of my all time favorites. I shot this while walking a trail at Norris Dam State Park, located on the Clinch River in Campbell County, Tennessee. I was sitting down, talking on the phone with my Dad (one of the last times I ever spoke with him before his illness and death), and he was telling me he was still not feeling well. It was at that point that he was going back in to the doctors to request more blood work and I was very scared and concerned and asked if I needed to come home. He said no, he’d be ok.
I remember telling him that the sun was going down and I saw this shot I wanted to try to get while I’d been sitting on the path talking with him (this shot), and I had to go, but I’d call him later that evening when I was back at the place where I was camping. That return phone call was when I told him about my art show in Knoxville, and he was so excited about it and didn’t say a whole lot about his health the rest of the time I was on that trip. It was just a couple weeks after I returned home that he went into a diabetic coma.
Sigh. It’s sometimes very emotional for me to see how things fit together when I look back on them. I’m so grateful that I got a good shot of this. It’s funny to me now that half the dandelion is missing – half of me is missing now, too…
**Lumix GF3, Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f2.8, manual focus on full, handheld. Unedited, aside from crop.
02. Invisible
A very recent edit and a new favorite, I shot this the same day that I shot the blue flower at number 10. I was still experimenting with the external flash, and decided to play with this paper white bloom that had fallen to the floor when I’d moved things around for the blue flower shoot. I love the way the shot turned out, and edited it to further blend into the lighting with Mextures and the Stackables app. One of my all time favorites of my edited shots.
My number one favorite flower image is this macro image of a rose that was in one of the many gorgeous vases that were delivered to my house the day after my Dad passed away. I suppose we all know that flowers are my favorite, they are my friends, and I photograph them more than anything else. I just absolutely love flowers and have a fascination with them at many levels. This is something, interestingly enough, that I shared in common with my Dad. I kept my sanity during the weekend before we were to plan his funeral by shooting these flowers, somewhere in my heart hoping that he was there with me, invisibly enjoying them, too.
As I was shooting this particular flower, I had one of my first spiritual experiences with my dead father, as well as my first completely overwhelming, breathtaking, soul wrenching moment of grief. I remember falling to the floor and just completely breaking down for the first time that afternoon. I began to talk to my Dad, out loud, and I remember having this revelation that got me through that night and the next morning (the funeral home, picking out the casket and all that happiness).
As I shared on the original post:
I used to think that nothing lasts forever. Now I know…the love of a father does. I feel it all around me, especially when I close my eyes, and especially when I cry…even though he is gone. What a beautiful thing.
Now stir the fire, and close the shudders fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn; Throws up a steamy column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in. -William Cowper
catacosmosis 