Tag: DistressedFX

  • 2025

    2025

    2025 has been… peaceful.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Overlay)

    Not because it was an easy year. Personally, it has been a year of intermittent, great difficulty. The most challenging thing has been the unexpected diagnosis for my son – this, alongside compound grief that included more than death, and varying massive changes to daily life.

    It was a year of seemingly ceaselessly reorganizing, reframing, recalibrating, and managing circumstances and emotions for all of us, at different levels – while continuing to show up every day whether forward progress was visible or not.

    For me and my family, it has been a year of awesome trial and challenge. At times, a battle with doubt. Always, a falling back into and onto faith. And so, regardless, peace.

    It has obviously not been a year of peace in the way the word is usually used. Not peace because the world was quiet or gentle or healed. The world, broadly speaking, has been at war in myriad ways. Loudly. Relentlessly. At times, blatantly resisting.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Multiply)

    The world suffers only because it engages. Because it resists reality, which is that the only truth is love. And the world does not understand love, or much else, as it truly exists or is meant to behave or work.

    The world struggles only because it consents to the noise, the fear, the constant pull toward reaction, and because it values personal comfort and ego over soul.

    2025 was, cosmically, a 9 year. A year of endings. Of completion. Of letting things finish instead of dragging them forward out of habit, guilt, or fear. A year of cleaning up.

    A year of letting go. A year of allowing what was already done to actually be done. There is a strange, almost holy peace that comes with that kind of self-honesty.

    2026 rolls into a 10, or a 1 year. A reset. New beginnings. A slate wiped well and fully clean, whether we are ready for it or not. Our inner secrets and shadows brought into the light. Truths revealed that can no longer be denied, avoided, reframed, or buried.

    It is going to be a hell of a year, personally and collectively. Not because it is cruel, but because it is clarifying.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Hard Light)

    Every time I share what I see, thus expect to see going forward, simply by paying attention and quietly experiencing (as I have above), people tend to squash it. Dismiss it. Explain it away. Excuse it away. Laugh it away. That is fine. Squash this too, if you must or need to.

    But I speak only what needs to be heard, not what is comfortable:

    Do not fight it, whatever the “it” is at any given moment for you. Do not engage with the distractions. Do not take the bait.

    Do not allow society, media, or collective panic to manipulate you into believing that this manufactured “reality” is solid, fixed, or inevitable. Most of it is noise. Most of it only has power because we keep feeding it our attention and our fear.

    Peace lives on the other side of that misconception.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Screen)

    Not passive peace. Not numbness. Not spiritual bypassing or pretending everything is fine. Real peace. The kind that comes from clarity. From discernment. From choosing where your energy actually belongs.

    Choosing these readily available alternatives, through mindfulness and conscious being, through choosing God/Soul over self and ego, is the only reason such an exceedingly difficult year was not merely laced with peace, but filled with it for me.

    I hope and pray that you find and live in peace in 2026. Your own peace, first and foremost. Because that has to come first. That is what matters before it can ever combine, ripple outward, and become something shared. Collective peace is built from individual truth, not the other way around.

    Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
    Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
    Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
    Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.
    Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
    Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
    Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
    Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

    (Matthew 5:3–10)

    One important note, since this is so often misunderstood:

    “Peacemakers” does not mean peacekeepers.

    It does not mean avoiding conflict. It does not mean keeping things comfortable, quiet, or polite. It means actively making peace. Often at cost. Often through truth. Often through disruption, reconciliation, and righteousness. 

    Peace is not the absence of tension. It is the presence of integrity.

    May you find all of it in 2026.

    xo.
    c.

    Original image, iPhone 17 Pro
  • Unhidden

    Unhidden

    entry nineteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    I’ve been thinking about how easily we overlook what does not bloom on command. How quickly we decide something is less valuable when its rhythms are quiet or unusual or slow to reveal themselves. How we are conditioned by convenience to turn away from what requires a different or more tender kind of attention, unless we are its mother.

    As mothers, the expectations begin to pile up, even as the help quietly disappears… if it ever shows up to begin with. It showed up for me recently, with my son’s diagnosis of autism, and then the weight shifted again. The label alone added a layer of juggling and balancing that feels impossible, even in ways that his father may never fully know…

    …but these small remnants of #lovelydeadcrap in my backyard have been teaching me how to package it all and express what’s inside.

    Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    In their faded textures and fragile lines, I find a gentler truth. Beauty is not always loud, nor peace immediate. Sometimes neither are easily interpreted. Sometimes they appear in the very things the world has already dismissed as unremarkable because they do not fit the desire or expectation.

    When my son was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism, the world tried to hand me a script of loss and limitation. But the more I sit with the reality of who he is and what I know he has experienced in his life, the more I understand that nothing essential has been diminished.

    Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    Not unlike #lovelydeadcrap, the reality of his story simply asks to be read with a different kind of seeing. The light lands from another direction. The beauty moves at its own pace. That is what this winter season is teaching me:

    To honor what does not conform. To stay open to the quiet forms of life and value that do not perform for anyone’s comfort. To recognize that some truths require presence rather than projection.

    Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    My son is not less. He is not broken. He is not something to mourn. He is fully himself, unfiltered and unhidden, and there is a sacred beauty in that.

    May we all learn to truly see what stands before us, not merely what we were taught to expect.

  • 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.

  • Sunsets and Silhouettes

    Sunsets and Silhouettes

    Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + VSCO

    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.

  • Revelation

    Revelation

    entry seventeen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + VSCO

    The full moon always finds me in that thin place between ache and awakening. The heart softens, the past stirs, and the light insists on touching what I thought I’d hidden.

    It doesn’t shout. It simply rises. And in rising, it reveals.

    This full moon of these last few days felt like a mirror tilted by something wiser than me: clear, unguarded, almost tender in the way it offers back the truth of who I am becoming.

    Every full moon asks for release, but this one asked for understanding. It offered an opportunity for a quiet recognition of what’s been shed, what’s been carried, and what still longs to be held with gentler hands.

    Under its glow, my fractures stopped pretending to be wounds. Instead, they shined… faint, but deliberate. And grace slipped in when I wasn’t looking.

  • Lovely Dead Crap

    Lovely Dead Crap

    It’s that time again – #lovelydeadcrap season.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX

    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)

    xo…

  • Coldness

    Coldness

    Coldness has arrived and with it the pull to go inward, to rest in the quiet places that rarely see the sun. Winter has always been the hardest season for me. It settles deep and stirs up everything I have tried to set down, everything that has followed me long after the caregiving ended. Two years have passed and I am still carrying the weight of those long nights, the vigilance, the grief that lives in the body long after the moment of loss.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + VSCO

    Yet even now there are small reminders of life that keeps reaching for the light. These plants on my windowsill keep growing with a kind of quiet courage. The morning sun touches them and they respond without hesitation, without guilt, without a single thought about the expectations of others. They lean toward whatever warmth they can find and allow that to be enough.

    I am trying to learn from them. I am trying to believe that rest is not weakness. It is restoration. It is the slow and necessary work of returning to myself after years of tending to everyone else. Winter makes that lesson feel sharper, but it also makes it feel truer.

    Some days I am tired in a way that feels ancient, but I keep growing in small ways. I keep reaching for light in whatever form it finds me. If these green and fragile things can thrive in the coldest season, maybe I can too.

    xo…

  • Winnow

    Winnow

    entry sixteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    iPhone 17 Pro + VSCO + DistressedFX + Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    Evening gathers in a bluish-purple hush, and the crunch of dirt and rock seems to echo around me. Steadily and with intention, I put one foot in front of the other.

    The birds fall silent, and the wind begins its quiet work. Loosening what I’ve held too tightly. Lifting the thin, trembling pieces of me that never settled into place.

    They rise like seeds learning the shape of their own release, drifting out of me in a soft unspooling. The silhouette remains. Stem, leaf, the stark line of what endures. Everything lighter unthreads itself into motion.

    What once felt like a tangle becomes a brief choreography, a small mercy in the dimming light. Loss, I’m learning, is sometimes only a shifting of weight.

    The wind carries the rest. The jumbled thoughts. The old ache. The unspoken sentences that kept circling my ribs. Let them scatter. Let them drift beyond reach.

    What stays is quieter, but honest. A rooted shape against the fading sky, held together not by certainty, but by the simple grace of letting go.

  • 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

  • Lifted

    Lifted

    entry twelve — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. VSCO (A6 PRO) + DistressedFX + Lightroom (watermark only).

    There is a moment, early in a few blessed summer evenings, when the heat—the oppression—sighs and lets go.

    Not in protest, but in quiet surrender—the sun lingers, the sky softens, and a hush moves in with the rain.

    Steam rises like incense from the bones of the earth.

    You’ve felt that coveted shift.

    It’s not loud. Not showy. Just the heaviness loosening its grip on your ribs as breath returns without warning.

    This is how some battles end—

    Not with victory, but with survival.

    Not with a roar, but with a breeze.

    No fanfare—just rain through fractured light, and the ache leaving your body before you even know it’s gone.

    What remains?

    A field of yellow flowers—bent but blooming.

    Tired, but free.

    And air that smells like something holy—finally lifted.

    catacosmosis // 2025