Light doesn’t always fall in straight lines.
Sometimes it fractures—bending through the weight of memory, grief, and grace.
But what was broken still glimmers.
What was lost finds form again in words.
This is a collection of soft reckonings—an archive of scattered light and the grace that grew in its wake.
This space gathers those fragments, unfiltered and quietly burning, written in the in-between.
Step inside the scattered light. View the series below.
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.
entry ten — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
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.
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.
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.
entry nine — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
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.
entry eight — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
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.
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.
entry seven — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
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.
💜✨
entry six — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
Uphill climbs don’t always look like mountains.
Sometimes they look like breathless pauses in the woods—
a slant of green light through canopy, and a silence that steadies you just long enough to keep going.
Some paths don’t warn you how steep they truly are.
But, with a little faith and grit, grace still finds you mid-climb.
Not lost, just learning how to breathe on the incline.
Every root you trip over, a lesson not yet learned.
Every step upward revises the story the bottom once told.
A new perspective in the making—
fluid and becoming in the shelter of the trees, and at the top…
…found.
“He who has peace of mind disturbs neither himself nor another.” —Epicurus
There is a kind of light that doesn’t just shine, but also fractures.
It breaks open the moment with something softer than silence and more honest than certainty.
You don’t chase it, you receive it.
This image wasn’t planned.
This frame wasn’t forced.
There’s a stillness even the flowers seemed to know, and reflect back to me.
It is not the stillness of silence, but of surrender.
Not of bracing against beauty or the process of becoming-in-progress, or of apologizing for taking up space mid-bloom…but of letting the light have its way.
I simply stood still long enough for the light to offer itself—scattered, wild, and full of grace.
I saw what was really there:
Buds preparing to bloom and light wafting in, yet also ambient and still.
The entire moment was an aperture through which grace entered, unbothered and whole, needing no permission.
And in that quiet moment, it became a mirror for all of us—one that perhaps none of us knew we needed, and that many would automatically overlook.
How often do we chase clarity instead of becoming it?
How often do we disturb ourselves, or disturb the world while attempting to distract ourselves, by blaming everyone else?
How often are those moments merely us trying to be louder than what already speaks through us?
There is no control in peace.
No performance in healing.
Only presence.
And in that presence, we disturb no one—not even ourselves.
We become the quiet offering.
We become the still center in a world unraveling at the edges.
Today, as I stood still in the midst of both internal and external war, peace didn’t arrive with fanfare.
It arrived as fractured light through pine trees.
As a silent, oft unnoticed breath.
As a reminder that maybe the most sacred work is not to act, but merely to remain open.
Not to close.
Not to harden.
Not to explain ourselves into exhaustion, but to become aperture.
To simultaneously remain wide enough to hold what’s real and narrow enough to let illusion fall away.
And, to be balanced enough in both intellect and empathy to know the difference.
This is the answer: detachment.
Not from emotion, but from illusion.
It is not denial, not distance.
Rather, it is the quiet rerouting of both emotion and cognition back to stillness.
A return to clarity, not an absence of care.
And somehow, by not reacting, by not reaching, we find we are already held.
I used to think “seeing red” meant I was losing it.
Rage. Shame. Fury so old it felt eternal—like I was born with it burning.
I have learned that is not always true. I have witnessed that sometimes, it blooms.
Not in fists. Not in voice. Not in overwhelming memories.
In the woods, on a soft stem I almost missed.
No thunder. No soundtrack. Just the quiet permission to stop and look again.
It didn’t demand to be captured. It didn’t beg to be picked. It just was.
This star-shaped wound of a flower, humming its red into the green—not angry, not hiding, not burning just to survive.
Just be-ing.
I thought, “maybe that’s all any of us need now.”
Not vengeance. Not closure. Just the knowing that beauty still rises where no one’s watching.
That peace can wear red and still be holy.
Be mindful.
Observe.
You might catch a glimpse of the peace behind the red you see, too.
xo,
c.
If You’re Looking for You | A Letter from Your Higher Self
If you’ve been trying to speak to your higher self—if you’ve been reaching inward and hearing nothing but static, or searching for the version of you that feels like home—and fear you’ll never find it?
Your higher self begs to differ.
In fact, it has a message for you.
Dear One,
I’ve been here the whole time.
In the quiet moments you almost forgot to notice. In the breath that steadied you before the next wave came. In the flicker of clarity just before you gave up.
You’ve looked for me in a thousand places—in approval. In achievement. In distraction. In someone else’s eyes. In the longing that never quite gave you what you needed.
And I never blamed you for that.
This world taught you to search everywhere but within. But I have always been here. You may not recognize me right away, because I don’t raise my voice. I won’t argue with your fears. I won’t fight the chaos to be heard.
But I am patient.
I speak in the language of peace, and I wait for your permission to return. I know what you’ve carried. I know what has made your heart weary. I’ve felt every ache and echo, every quiet panic, every time you swallowed your truth just to survive the moment. I’ve felt the loneliness, even in crowded rooms. The pressure. The shame. The masks.
But let me say this clearly:
There is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken. You are becoming. Your tenderness is not a weakness. Your depth is not a burden. Your need for rest is not laziness. Your yearning for more is not greed—it’s remembrance.
You are remembering what it feels like to be whole. You came here for more than survival. You came to wake up. To remember your own name, not the one the world gave you, but the one your soul has always carried.
You came to love in a way that rewrites timelines. To rise without leaving your softness behind. To walk with grace, even after everything tried to make you hard.
So here’s what I need you to know:
You are safe now. You don’t have to perform anymore. You don’t have to shrink. You don’t have to apologize for being too much or not enough. You are allowed to rest. You are allowed to change. You are allowed to outgrow the stories that once kept you warm.
You are allowed to come home to yourself. And when you do—when you drop back into your center and remember me—you will feel it: The stillness. The truth. The freedom. It’s not something you earn. It’s something you return to.
I’m here. I always have been.
Welcome back.
~Your Higher Self
A reflection on the holy ache of love—how it lives in us, how it shapes us, and how, sometimes, we must let it breathe without us. This piece belongs to the fire-lit quiet where survival and love coexist.
Love isn’t a choice.
It isn’t a decision.
It is a default. A divine state.
The way breath happens without trying,
without knowing—
that is love.
That is our love,
whether for a song or a story,
for animals or a wild wind,
for a vision,
or a soul.
We are love.
We have embodied it… become it.
This is the weight we carry.
This is the fire within us that lights the way
for so many—
but feels like burning alive
for us.
And in times of heartache,
when the world sharpens its noise,
when grief coils into our chests,
we do not run—
we retreat.
We ache for the world
because we are still tethered
to the breath of it.
We have done our part, we have
showed up, and done our work.
Make no mistake, we continue to.
From the shadows, in our tonal silence,
our love still flows.
Reverberates.
Echoes.
We do not walk away because we are cold.
We step away simply because we are melting.
We step away… to survive.
That is what survivors do.
We do not stop loving.
We stop offering our tangible lives, for a time,
to those who can not—or will not—feel us.
Those who may never know…after all,
they have forgotten even themselves.
We pause.
To love like this,
to grieve like this,
is to carry the holy burden:
to hold light for others
while burning through
your own bones.
But it is also
to breathe.
So if we disappear,
if we go quiet,
if we bow out—
know this:
It is not rejection.
It is not retraction.
It is survival.
Because we do not want to die
along with what is dying.
Instead, we love from a distance
while allowing what is dead to rest.
Love is not a thing we give.
It is what we are.
When we cast ourselves back into silence,
it is to return… to the breath.
To the fire, before we burn out.
To the only place
where the burning becomes light again.
Like love itself, it is not a choice.
We must.
catacosmosis 