entry eighteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + Mextures + VSCO
There’s a softness to this kind of morning light… the kind that slips in without ceremony and still manages to uncover what the heart has tried to tuck away. The silhouettes stand like witnesses, thin and unassuming, yet somehow they hold the whole ache of the season.
And maybe this the truest gift of December: that almost nothing blooms, yet everything speaks.
The sky daily turns itself into a quiet oracle, whispering that even in the stripped-back places, even in the stark-cold bare and in-between, there is still beauty gathering itself at the edges, waiting to rise every morning with the sun.
The sky did that thing again, burning from the inside out and setting the whole horizon to humming like a memory you can’t quite place.
The trees are bare now, all ribs and silhouettes, but somehow that makes the color strike even harder; more vividly, more beautifully… an invitation to remember my long held belief that winter always exposes what summer works so hard to hide.
I stood there for a long while, suspended in the holiness of whatever that moment was. It felt like foreshadowing, like catching a scene from a story I’ve lived before but also haven’t finished writing. Hard to explain, harder to forget, and yet some part of me feels almost commanded to try.
Two things are certain: I’ll never stop preaching that more often than many realize, the proverbial backyard is the only cathedral you need; and no scene will ever beat sunrises/sunsets and their silhouettes to wholly captivate my spirit.
As most of you know, I have a strong familiarity with death and its unfolding, especially in humans, and a fondness for and kinship with death and dead things, all in the most holy, positive and beautiful sense… in the way one honors the combined soul and humanity of a teacher they have come to not only respect but to understand to such a depth that they recognize in them a truly kindred spirit.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX
Endings speak a language I have learned well: honest, unpretentious, and oddly comforting once you understand and accept that there is no escaping them. In fall and winter, I find that endings, at least in nature, also make for the most interesting and oddly beautiful subjects. Therefore, prepare to be lovingly spammed with my perspectives and perceptions. 😌
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX
Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
The sunset this evening caught my eye as I glanced up from the command prompt to rest my eyes.
“cmd —> DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth” be damned, I forgot the problematic machine.
I gravitated outside as though an unseen force beckoned me… and instead of me capturing a backyard moment, the moment froze me in place and then swallowed me whole.
It happened quietly, the way revelation always does: when the day was no longer sure of itself.
The horizon drew one long, trembling breath, and the sky exhaled light like a confession, soft and burning all at once.
For a few heartbeats, the forest became a cathedral. Oaks turned to stained glass, every vein of every leaf catching the final ember of the sun’s breath.
The air itself seemed to glow with a kind of surrender, as though heaven was remembering how to let go and reminding me all over again.
I stood beneath it, small but aware, suspended in that thin seam between the living, the leaving, and the memory of the already gone.
The colors didn’t ask to stay; they simply poured through the cracks of the canopy and into me, as if to say, “grace doesn’t vanish when the light fades. It only changes hue.”
When the sky went gray again, it felt less like an ending and more like an exhale finished.
Have you ever been sitting in the woods, in the quiet and minding your own business , just breathing it all in, when out of nowhere the birds seem to spring into motion?
One moment, they’re scattered through the trees, singing softly into the hush; the next, they take flight as one, their calls vanishing into a deathly silence. All that remains is the trembling of wings and the echo of something unspoken moving through the air.
It’s strange how quickly stillness can shift, how a single gust or unseen presence can ripple through an entire forest. You can feel it, even if you can’t name it. The temperature drops, the light changes, and the ordinary world folds itself back like a curtain.
And then you’re left sitting there, swallowed by wonder. Not fear, not exactly, but that beautiful, unnerving awareness that something else is here. Something wild and watching.
For days afterward, it stays with you, that soundless moment when the forest seemed to remember itself. It makes you question what else is living in the margins, what other forms of life or spirit move just beyond the limits of our hearing.
I think that’s when I understood that silence is not absence. It’s presence, waiting to be known.
The forest wasn’t empty. It was full of attention.
What you create… does not require an explanation of itself. It doesn’t need to convince, convert, or justify. It just needs to exist. Quietly, softly— like fog curling through trees or dust dancing across old floorboards.
Like light through ancient glass, sacred, but unflinching; gentle, but resolute. A whisper with weight, in that space exists everything— beyond the reach of articulation.
Silence is a presence, as much as an absence. Holy. Haunting. Both leave their imprint.
You are free to feel without having to be felt back. Free to present instead of perform. Free to sit beside your own silence, and know that it understands.
Because your creation… exists.
entry one — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
catacosmosis 