Tag: creativity

  • The Freeze

    The Freeze

    Every so often, I experience what I call the freeze.

    Artists will know exactly what I mean. It is that moment right before you begin a new piece, canvas blank and supplies ready, when something inside you locks up. You want to move, but you don’t. You know what to do, but suddenly you can’t do it.

    It’s not laziness and it’s not a lack of ideas. It’s more like a quiet paralysis, the sense that whatever you do first will somehow be wrong, wasteful, or irreversible.

    I experienced that tonight, and it surprised me. I haven’t frozen like that in a long time.

    Maybe it is holiday stress. Maybe it is the cumulative weight of life, reality, and empathy for a world that feels perpetually on edge. Maybe it is something smaller, or something that would sound completely absurd to anyone watching from the outside. But absurd does not mean invalid.

    Any time we experience something like this, there is a reason… and I am the kind of person who looks for it. I look inward and outward, I sit with the discomfort instead of trying to bulldoze through it, and I pay attention to what is actually happening in my body and mind.

    I find that process purposeful, and sometimes even enjoyable, not because it’s comfortable but because it gives me agency. When I understand what is happening and why, anxiety loses its grip. I can experience it and coexist with it at the same time. More often than not, that approach resolves the issue in a deeper and longer-lasting way than simply forcing myself forward.

    So this is the internal conversation I had tonight, and how I talked myself through it once I reached a clearer understanding of what was really going on. This is where my professional training in psychology meets my self-taught training in art, I suppose.

    If you have similar experiences to what I’ve described above, I hope some part of this is useful to you.

    Step 1. Pause for a moment. Not to analyze or fix anything, just to name what is happening. Once something is named, it tends to lose a surprising amount of its power.

    What you’re feeling when you experience “the freeze” as soon as you pick up a brush or a palette knife, or face whatever in life it is that makes you freeze in a similar way, is not a personal flaw. For artists and creatives, it’s not proof that you are bad at being creative.

    It’s a very specific nervous-system response, and it shows up most often in people who actually care about what they are making. In psychology, this response is often described in a few overlapping ways.

    It can be understood as a conditioned approach and avoidance conflict within you, where the part of you that wants to create is simultaneously held back by fear of loss or failure.

    Funny story: I wrote an entire 23-page research paper on this in my junior year of undergrad. In my opinion, it was incredibly boring, personally insulting, and the worst three months of my life at the age of 21, but somehow I shockingly got an A.

    I digress.

    It can also appear as performance anxiety, though not in the social sense, more as an internal pressure to do it right. For me, it is absolutely perfectionism as a defensive strategy, a way of protecting myself from imagined mistakes or wasted effort (thanks, Mom, may you rest in peace). In many cases, it can even be the brain or your physiology responding to dorsal vagal activation, which includes fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, but we will not go that deep here.

    To put it in easy, normal language, this reaction almost always appears right before commitment. Any commitment, but especially one that means “if it goes wrong it’ll really cost me.”

    In the art scenario, up until this point, the work has existed only in imagination. In that space it is infinite, perfect, and safe. The moment you are about to touch the canvas, it becomes finite and real. Something is chosen. Other possibilities fall away. Your (my) system hears that as loss, and it tries to protect you by freezing you in place.

    That feeling that it has to be a certain way to be right is not creativity. It is internalized surveillance. Somewhere early on, many of us learned that mistakes mean waste, mess means failure, and a wrong choice causes permanent damage. Even when those rules no longer apply, the body remembers them. So when you are free, your body does not quite believe it.

    That is not weakness, or incompetence. It is conditioning that has simply outlived its usefulness.

    At the center of this response is a quiet lie: “If this turns out bad, the supplies are ruined.”

    That is just not true. Acrylic can be scraped, painted over, sanded, cut up, or turned into texture. A canvas can become a foundation rather than a final statement. Materials are meant to be used. That is their purpose. Paint that sits untouched out of fear is already wasted.

    Canvas is not sacred. You are. Please remind yourself of that immediately, and lock it in.

    Another lie slips in just as easily: “It has to be a certain way to be right.”

    Right for whom? There is no audience in the room, no rubric, no grade. There is only motion, pressure, color, and the physical relief of making contact with the surface. Art does not exist to behave! Remember?

    This kind of freeze does not happen to people who do not care. People who are shallow about creativity do not spiral like this. It tends to happen to people with depth and sensitivity, to people who were corrected more often than they were encouraged, and to people who learned how to perform before they learned how to play.

    The nervous system is not sabotaging anything. It’s trying to protect something precious: the ability to feel and express. It’s simply using outdated rules.

    Step 2. A small reframe helps here. You are not making a painting right now. You are making the first layer of a surface. Nothing more. Not meaning, not outcome, not art with a capital A. Just noticing what happens when color moves downward. That layer is allowed to be ugly. It is allowed to be scraped away. It is allowed to disappear entirely under the next thing. You are allowed to stop at any time.

    There is one gentle but important rule I follow that can helps me quiet the pressure. Say out loud that nothing you do in the next fifteen minutes counts. Set a timer. When it ends, you can walk away with no obligation to continue, fix, or judge. This is not about pushing through fear. It is about making fear irrelevant.

    And finally, this matters. The experience, the art, and your simply being. But also, the fact that you sometimes freeze. It’s not invalid. You do not need to get over it already. That voice was built over years. It softens through safe repetition, not self-attack. Every time you begin anyway, tentatively and imperfectly, you rewrite it.

    You are not broken. You are unwinding.

    I hope this helps someone…

    xo.

    c.

  • December Sunrise

    December Sunrise

    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.

  • Entropy

    Entropy

    entry seventeen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    Lumix GX8 + Leica DG Macro‑Elmarit +
    Hipstamatic (Salvador 84 + Miles TMax)

    Twenty twenty-five bleeds into me like a half-lit nightmare,

    Stephen King and Tim Burton laughing in the corners.

    AI hums in the air, a static pulse I cannot unhear.

    I want to scream and break the sky…

    …but the real and the familiar fragments of me rein temperance in, in quiet revolt.

    Twenty twenty-six waits like a shadowed carnival, and I am here,

    trembling with light in a society fractured by entropy…

    …still standing.

    When I started exploring textures and analog styles using mobile camera and editing apps like Mextures and DistressedFX a decade ago and Hipstamatic closer to two decades ago, I remember the beef among photographers about how it was cheating.

    Even when shooting DSLR or scanning 35mm negatives and importing to iPhone to manually edit creations, on deviantART it was utter blasphemy to call that work photography… which is the majority of the reason I left that site (alongside the unnecessary drama, petty competition and childishness of it all).

    I remember the same attitudes when the DSLR was introduced as a more convenient option for shooting (as compared to film) back in the nineties, and even more strongly opposed by what I like to call the “haughty and holier than thou professional” photographers (many of whom had never been published, mind you).

    It was all just a whole lot of projection… yet here we are in 2025’s much broader version of those things, getting ready to wake up to a 2026 that looks like a Stephen King and Tim Burton co-conspired reality, and I now find myself itching to raise the same ruckus about AI. I fight the daily urge to scream at the top of my lungs that I hate AI, and that it will absolutely be the death of raw human creativity, not a help or a tool for it.

    Mark my words, and I say this not just from the creative part of myself but from the psychology and computer science educated and experienced parts, from the professor in me, and from the emotionally and spiritually evolved pieces of myself, from my entire being and from the depths of my soul:

    AI is a mistake of biblical proportions, and not just for creatives.

    I have watched what it does to attention, to imagination, to the inner world, to the very scaffolding of how a human becomes themselves. I have already watched it practically eat my child alive, and I banned it from our sphere entirely. I will die on this hill if necessary.

    AI may not be evil incarnate, though I have my suspicions that it is, but it will certainly cause more evil than we can stand or cope with to manifest in this already imploding world.

    The ASMR, the funny animal and parody videos, and the art may be cute today, but tomorrow it will look like proverbial mushroom clouds around the globe.

    With AI more prominently in the mix, the end of true freedom is nearer than you might think… and it is all by design.

    💣😘

    xo

  • Things Unseen

    Things Unseen

    entry fourteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    Lumix GX7 + VSCO (A9Pro) + DistressedFX + Lightroom (watermark only).

    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.

    💜🐦‍⬛🪽

    catacosmosis // 2025

  • I died, and it… was okay. | Notes from the Other Side

    I died, and it… was okay. | Notes from the Other Side

    The First Illusion

    How can an illusion free an illusion?

    It can’t.

    Impossible.

    And yet, freedom itself is not impossible.

    But what we often mistake for freedom is only substitution. We trade one mask for another, one prison for another, one dream for another.

    Replacing one illusion with another does not set us free. It does not bring liberation. It simply shifts us deeper into what I sometimes call non-happening happening — the endless cycle of movement that looks like change but never truly is.

    So where, then, is freedom?

    Maybe it’s in understanding that simple truth.

    Maybe it’s in seeing clearly that nothing we have called “freedom” has ever been real freedom at all.

    Maybe that was the point, all along.

    Is that awakening?

    Awakening as Death

    Awakening is the death of the familiar.

    Because what is “familiar” to us — what we call “our life,” “our personality,” “our world” — is illusion.

    Nothing we are familiar with is actually real. None of it is actually us.

    We are not real. We are not what we think — what we are told — we are. And yet, here we are.

    So when awakening comes, it feels like death. Because it is death — the falling away of everything we thought was “me.”

    And without that death, there is no birth of what was real all along.

    Meaning Before and After

    Before awakening, there is no meaning of our own.

    The only meaning available to us is what others have told us is meaningful. Parents, teachers, religions, governments, lovers, friends, enemies, cultures, systems — all of them have fed us their meanings.

    And we absorbed them as if they were truth.

    We were conditioned to believe meaning is handed down, not discovered.

    We were punished for expressing anything antithetical.

    Yes, that is a word. I did not make it up. I checked, as always, when I returned from the other side.

    I digress.

    Even when we think we are thinking for ourselves — are we? Have we ever? Do we even know how?

    This is the prison of the familiar.

    But those of us who have never been able to simply swallow it — those of us who have spent our lives being told we are crazy, too deep, over-analytical, antithetical — maybe we’ve always been a little closer to freedom.

    Because we have always been with ourselves. We have always lived in the company of our own questioning. Our own introspection.

    And that has saved us.

    Moving Through Darkness into Light

    My entire life has been this movement — through darkness into light.

    And then again. And again.

    I never stayed still in a 3D thought long enough to let ideology calcify around me. Never settled enough into the world’s definitions of reality to say: “Yes, this is it. This is reality. This is me. This is final.”

    No.

    I couldn’t.

    Always, incessantly, I questioned. I sought. I chased myself. I chased I am.

    Because each time I reached for that exactness, that rigidity, something in me would die. And something deeper would awaken.

    So instead, I’ve kept moving. Through darkness, into light.

    Through lies, into truth.

    Through death, into life.

    Over and over again.

    And each time, what I found was not more of “me,” but less.

    Until I began to understand that the “me” I thought was the center of the story was never the point at all.

    And then, I actually… died.

    And then, I came back!

    What?

    I know. That’s what I said, too.

    And that is when the fullness of both illusion and irrelevance were clear to me, and the illusion and irrelevance… both shattered.

    Freedom.

    The Irrelevance of “Me”

    “Me” is irrelevant.

    Yet somehow, everything has always been about me.

    That’s the paradox.

    The small “me” — the conditioned self, the mask, the name, the history — means nothing. It is dust. Illusion. A temporary construction.

    But the deeper “I” — the one who moves through the dying and the awakening, the one who is aware of even that dust falling away — that “I” has always been the ground of everything.

    So in a sense, “me” does not exist.

    And in another sense, “me” is all that has ever existed.

    It was always… the I Am.

    The Misunderstanding

    This will be misunderstood.

    Mostly by anyone and everyone who reads it.

    If they even make it past the first few lines.

    Because illusion defends itself. It doesn’t like being called what it is.

    But misunderstanding doesn’t matter.

    Life takes care of itself.

    Life Happens

    Even when you are not there to see it, life still happens.

    Everything still unfolds — rivers flow, winds move, earth shifts.

    Even if you choose inaction — even if you refuse to eat, drink, or sleep — things still happen. The body dies, yes, but death itself is a happening.

    Because everything is always happening. Always in motion.

    Even in stillness, there is happening.

    And everything that happens has a result. Even nothingness produces consequence.

    Life is self-correcting. Even ungrounded, it finds its own balance.

    Sometimes that balance looks toxic. Sometimes it looks destructive. But it is always balance. Always motion. Always happening.

    Death Must Occur

    Death, then, is necessary.

    Not the physical death we fear — not suicide, not the cutting short of the body’s days.

    Though that death is really not all that bad, in my experience.

    The dying part itself is no fun.

    The death?

    Too many words — words are funny for this one; there is not a word, other than death.

    It is nothing, and everything.

    Alpha, omega.

    I am.

    Here? What must die is the illusory self.

    The self we defend, cling to, and worship without even knowing it. The self we call “me.”

    That death is the doorway.

    The Last Illusion

    And yet, even here, there is a final paradox:

    If the self is illusion, then death is illusion too.

    Which means — death cannot free us either.

    Because an illusion cannot free an illusion.

    I do not fear.

    Why is none of this terrifying to me?

    Maybe because fear only exists where there is something to lose. And what I am losing was never real in the first place.

    Maybe because I have already died a thousand small deaths, the fear has already been burnt out of me.

    Maybe because I saw it:

    That what I am cannot die.

    And maybe that — quiet, simple, unshaken — is what freedom has always been.

    ✨

    xo,

    c.

  • A Message for So-Called “Artists”

    A Message for So-Called “Artists”

    “So you think you’re an artist, but you haven’t been to art school?”

    Well, then yes. You are.

    That’s exactly the right mindset — especially if you’re building skill and intuition at the same time.

    I say this both as a person with a Master’s in Arts (which I mention only to say, “I’ve been through your system, I know how it works, and I still reject the gatekeeping!”), and as an absolutely NON-PROFESSIONAL, non-conforming artist who also rarely shares any of their actual work:

    You’re not just “playing artist,” and being recognized as one is not the point. Those people trying to convince you of anything otherwise are wrong.

    Whatever you’re creating is absolutely valid.

    Don’t let anyone — especially those offering discouraging, destructive feedback rather than genuine critique — convince you otherwise. Just because some believe the creative or applied arts diploma they hold in one hand somehow validates the brush or pencil they hold in their other, along with the harsh judgments and negative opinions they’re vomiting all over you, doesn’t make it the truth.

    Regardless of who you are or where and how you learn, when you approach art as both a learning experience and an emotionally expressive therapy, you’re doing it right — not failing. You’re not just slopping paint on paper, scribbling in a sketchbook, or gluing down collage scraps at random.

    The difference is night and day — especially with watercolor (the medium I see people abandon most) — when you’re doing things like:

    • Consciously learning the muscle memory for how each brush moves.

    • Recognizing how the spring, belly, and tip affect water control.

    • Having fewer “happy accidents” and more intentional effects

    Painting is not just the act of moving pigment across a surface. It is the deliberate conversation between your hand, your tools, and your vision. It’s problem-solving in real time, learning how water, pigment, and paper (or canvas) respond to each other, and adjusting with both skill and instinct.

    It’s as much about restraint as it is about expression, and as much about observation as creation. When you understand that, every stroke becomes intentional, even in your loosest, most playful work.

    Watercolor especially rewards this kind of discipline because it’s less forgiving than acrylic or oil. You can’t just pile on more paint to hide a mistake — in a way, you have to work in reverse.

    No medium, but especially watercolor, is as easy as “the professionals” make it look. But if you keep going, keep learning, and keep focusing on technique and purpose — no matter what the art-school elite try to tell you — the control you gain over water, pigment, and paper will make even your loose, expressive or abstract work stronger. It will be loose or abstract by choice, not necessity.

    That deep dive into technique is probably why so many of you express so often how your art process is helping you mentally and emotionally, and why many artists pick up a pen, pencil, or brush in the first place. It’s meditative — but also empowering — to know exactly what your tools can do.

    So keep learning. Keep practicing. Keep playing! Keep a balance between the fun and the serious aspects. Sure, we all appreciate skill and technique. But what is the point if it’s just a job and not a fun expressive process with purpose?

    Nobody owns art as a process — and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they’re not talking about art. It’s still a free world, regardless of how it may seem on the surface and no matter what the uppity, judgmental types try to say.

    Keep making art. Because your kind of art — the kind that comes from soul combined with technique rather than straight line, hard rules — is what art should still be all about.

    xo,

    c.

    💜🦋

  • Maintenance as a Creative | Not Broken, Just Built Differently

    Maintenance as a Creative | Not Broken, Just Built Differently

    There’s this list — never written down in one place, but always hanging over me like the hum of an old fluorescent light. It’s made of things that should be straightforward:

    • Back up the photos.
    • Untangle the art supplies.
    • Organize the sketchbooks.
    • Move the ideas from my head to a place they can breathe.
    • Put the words onto the pages.
    • Clean the brushes.
    • Organize the books.
    • Organize the ideas.

    But they are never straightforward. Not for me. Not for anyone whose mind has a thousand open windows and refuses to shut them just because the world prefers tidy blinds.

    Society has found a name for this: ADD. ADHD. Neurodivergence. The diagnosis may be true for some, but here’s what I believe — it’s not a flaw. It’s the original wiring of the artist, the philosopher, the restless creative soul. It’s the part of the mind that won’t collapse into the assembly-line cadence of “normal life.” And that refusal has always been a threat to the people who rely on compliance.

    This is why so many people who are miserable in the 9–5 grind feel like they’re constantly drowning. They fight from one day to the next just to keep their priorities in order, forgetting things, feeling scattered, wondering why life feels like a treadmill they can’t get off. It’s not because they’re lazy or incapable — it’s because they’ve been convinced, by family, by school, by the whole machinery of society, that their purpose is something other than what their soul already knows it to be.

    They’re creatives, not conformers. But they’ve spent their entire lives pouring all their energy into staying afloat in a stormy, chaotic sea they were never meant to swim in. And not only has the world’s rules kept them from living their purpose, they don’t even remember what that purpose is… and they certainly haven’t been taught how to manage or maintain reality as a creative.

    The problem is, the tools that work for type A people don’t work for type B people — and vice versa. But the world, the powers that be? They don’t want any creatives to thrive. Why? Because thriving creatives don’t line their pockets, and they can’t control what they can’t contain.

    By the late ’90s and early 2000s, the strategy had shifted. They started medicating us into focus, pressing Adderall into palms while preaching “Say no to drugs” in the same breath. It wasn’t just hypocrisy; it was the perfect kind of doublethink. They couldn’t get my generation — Gen X, especially — to trade curiosity for clock-punching, so they tried to sedate the wonder right out of us.

    It had started long before my generation. From the ’60s onward, every decade had its rebellion, but something about our era cracked the pattern wide open. We remembered how to slip back into our creative current, to say — without apology — that the system wasn’t built for us, and we weren’t going to rewire ourselves to suit it.

    The boomer generation fell for it enough to punch the clock and hold the grind in both hands. But my generation? The ones who were school-aged in the ’80s and especially high school/college aged in the ’90s, raised as latchkey kids, left to our own devices? We had just enough space to keep our own ideas and double down on our self-expression. We rejected the rhetoric outright, but we still had the foundational work ethic, the grit, the stubborn drive to show up.

    Unfortunately, that refusal was met with more control, more noise. By 2012, the hum had become a low, constant pressure. By 2016, the unexpected and unorthodox split the air like lightning, and nothing went back to sleep after that. By 2020 — and certainly by 2022 — largely thanks to Covid (which I will forever believe was a purposeful attempt to tighten the reins of control), the result wasn’t the obedience they hoped for. It was the opposite. People were waking up in numbers that mattered.

    And here we are.
    And here I am.

    Sitting with a computer that holds hundreds of gigabytes of uncataloged photographs, each one a memory or a moment, all of them waiting for me to find them a home, if not on someone’s wall then in beautiful posts they can enjoy on their computer screens. Art supplies scattered in a way that makes them impossible to ignore and yet impossible to start sorting. Projects that live half in the physical world and half in my head, where they multiply faster than any app or planner could contain.

    Digital tools have not tamed the chaos — they’ve only given it better hiding places. They’ve bred a new kind of loathing, a quieter form of procrastination and lethargy, one that makes the struggles of pre-technology life feel almost romantic in hindsight — like a fairy tale we didn’t know we were living, a beautiful dream we only learned to miss once it was gone.

    This morning, I pulled a book from my shelf. It’s been there since Ralph died:

    How to Be an Explorer of the World — Portable Art Life Museum.

    I haven’t opened it yet. The title alone feels like someone has tossed me a rope, and I’m still deciding whether to pull. Even without turning a page, I intuitively, automatically know — as every creative does — what waits for me inside. The “Art” in the title has been struck through and replaced with “Life” for a reason: because that’s what it truly is. A reminder that we’re not here to live as curators of someone else’s museum, dusting off exhibits we never chose. We’re here to explore — to step into new rooms, to rearrange them until they make sense to us, to claim the space as our own.

    And yet, here’s the truth I keep circling: maintenance is the perpetual loop where I always seem to get stuck.

    Not the dreaming, not the making, but the keeping. The tending. The part where you have to hold the door open for what you’ve already made so it doesn’t fall apart while you’re off chasing the next thing. Somewhere in the tug-of-war between vision and upkeep, I drop threads. And when enough threads fall, the rest of my life starts tangling with them — homeschooling, daily meals, the way the pantry and the jumble of household chores scribbled on random scraps of paper looks like a metaphor for my brain.

    This is the quiet battle no one talks about: how to keep creating without losing the things you’ve already created. How to tend your work without caging your mind. How to make room for the next idea without letting the last one turn to dust.

    For people like us, maintenance is never just maintenance. It’s a negotiation between the world’s idea of order and the wild way our minds are built to move. And maybe the truth is that we aren’t the ones in need of repair.

    Maybe the wiring was never the problem.
    Maybe it’s the world that’s broken.

    And what does all of this lead to? Yet another idea tossed onto the pile: maybe I should explore it in an in-depth series of articles here.

    Ha.

    For now, though, here’s a brief gallery of shots of my favorite tree — the oldest in my state, and one I’ve found myself referencing often lately. A couple are completely blown out. One feels especially dull to me. But while they may seem ordinary, even boring, to the casual observer, my passion for this incredible 400+ year-old short-leaf pine runs deeper than any skill or lens could ever capture.

    And that’s exactly the point — this tree is the living embodiment of what I’ve been trying to say above. The uncreative soul may never understand the pull, the quiet reverence, or the way beauty lives in the details that can’t be measured or monetized. But to those who do understand, no explanation is needed.

    I hope you enjoy these images as much as I enjoyed the process of shooting and processing them.

    xo.

    c.

  • 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.

  • Fragrance, Memory, and the Air Between

    Fragrance, Memory, and the Air Between

    The Quiet Power of Things That Don’t Stay

    Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin). Lumix GX7, Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., Lightroom Mobile (watermark), VSCO.

    Not everything soft is weak.

    Not everything brief is forgotten.

    The mimosa blooms like a passing thought—pink, feathery, fragrant, gone before you’re ready. But even in its short season, it rewrites the air.

    And maybe that’s the point:

    To offer sweetness without needing permanence. To make magic in the margins.

    💚🌿✨

    Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin). Lumix GX7, Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., Lightroom Mobile (watermark), VSCO.

    The Mimosa tree (Albizia julibrissin) is commonly known as the silk tree or Persian silk tree. Albizia julibrissin isn’t actually a true mimosa—though it’s been lovingly misnamed for generations. Native to Asia, this delicate tree has made its way into southern landscapes with grace and stubbornness alike.

    Its blooms are light as breath—powdery tufts that attract butterflies, bees, and human daydreamers. They bloom at dusk, shimmer in the wind, and drop silently—often leaving a petal-scattered sidewalk like a love note no one signed.

    Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin). Lumix GX7, Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., Lightroom Mobile (watermark), VSCO.

    Though it’s sometimes called invasive, there’s no denying its presence feels like a portal: part nostalgia, part perfume, part dream.

    Its scientific name, julibrissin, comes from the Persian gul-i abrisham—“silk flower.” A name that suits it perfectly.

    Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin). Lumix GX7, Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., Lightroom Mobile (watermark), VSCO.

    In folk medicine—especially within Traditional Chinese Medicine—the mimosa tree is known as the “Tree of Happiness.” Its fragrant pink blossoms and bark have long been used to lift the spirit, ease grief, calm the heart, and quiet a restless mind.

    The flowers are brewed into gentle teas, while the bark is sometimes tinctured for deeper emotional support. Often given to those moving through sorrow or heartbreak, the mimosa is considered a natural ally for joy, resilience, and emotional rebirth.

    #Nature // #Mimosa // #TreeOfHappiness

  • Seeing Red.

    Seeing Red.

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

    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.

    Recipe below. Watermarked in Lightroom.

    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.

    Recipe below. Watermarked in Lightroom.

    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.

    Recipe below. Watermarked in Lightroom.

    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.


    “Seeing Red” Recipe (same for each photo in this series)

    Be mindful.

    Observe.

    You might catch a glimpse of the peace behind the red you see, too.

    xo,

    c.