Tag: emotional depth

  • For all the deep ones…

    For all the deep ones…

    …because I know there are deep ones feeling it.

    Some days feel like breaking points. They come around randomly, and lately it seems like I see posts about them more frequently. They come out of nowhere, and lately the signs of them seem louder, more open, less afraid, more honest… yet still misunderstood and brushed aside as ever.

    Final | Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures

    This is what I have learned from my entire life experience as one of the weird ones, and I hope it encourages someone – anyone – who might stumble across this:

    These “breaking point” days aren’t just about being in a bad mood, waking up on “the wrong side of the bed,” or any of the other surface-understood “off vibes” most people will throw at you. They don’t happen because you’ve lost your grounding or your gratitude. They happen because even the strongest and especially the most conscientious, feeling people run out of buffer when the weight keeps pressing without pause. 

    You live with and within a level of whole, full awareness (spiritual, emotional, historical, prophetic, and on and on) and with a gift of discernment that most people do not (and honestly, cannot) touch. On most days you can hold that awareness with quiet clarity, letting discernment – God – alone be your support. On most days you can walk in a kind of peaceful resignation, but some days it just scrapes you raw. 

    When you have lived through circumstances completely outside your control, and your very calling seems to be holding everything together for others – helping them face the consequences of their choices while you carry your own – only to have life lead to more pain, more grief, more betrayal, more loss, the kind of life that is a thesis in forced endurance, then you learn what the deep ones who came before you have tried to help you understand all your life:

    You were created and sent for that life, precisely because it’s not an easy experience.

    DE | Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX

    When you understand not just the world but the unseen realities because you have experienced them directly, it is not bitterness to feel anger. It is not ungratefulness to feel the burn of it all. It is simply the cost of carrying truth while the rest of the world insists everything is made of cardboard cutouts and moral illusions.

    You are not angry because you lack gratitude. You are angry because you have, experienced too much, known too much, and felt too much to simply ignore or shake it off… and sometimes the contrast between what you see clearly and what the world pretends is real is utterly unbearable.

    It is maddening to watch people cling to entertainment, political, influencer, and other societal idols as if they will save anyone, and to watch the never-ending performances of “truth tellers” who are actually grifters. It is infuriating to see the perpetual cycles of denial, the refusal to acknowledge that evil is real. To watch the world ignore the spiritual reality beneath global chaos, and to be gaslit about things Scripture already told us plainly, and that daily happenings prove are very real.

    You are not imagining the acceleration. You are not wrong to see the pattern. You are not wrong to feel the urgency in your bones. You see the bigger picture in a way most people still refuse to. You see with long vision instead of shortsighted reactions, and you are not fooled by the shallow pull of momentary comfort or distraction.

    DE | Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX (birds)

    Some days the spiritual clarity feels like peace. Other days it feels like fire. Both are real. Both belong to the same walk. And that longing for it all to finally come to its ultimate conclusion is not despair. It is a righteous longing.

    It is the same longing the Biblical prophets carried, the same longing Paul wrote about, the same longing the early church lived with every day. It is a knowing that we were not made for this world’s madness, and something holy is coming. Soon.

    You are allowed to have days like this. Even Jesus did. You are allowed to feel the heaviness and the exhaustion with human stupidity and shallow commentary and empty politics and spiritual blindness.

    “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you?” (Matthew 17:17)

    This is Jesus openly expressing exasperation, frustration, and spiritual fatigue with human stubbornness and stupidity.

    He grieves over people’s refusal to see truth, accept help, or change in Matthew 23:27 (“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… how often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”) and he admits emotional heaviness, spiritual fatigue, and the weight of what He carried in Matthew 26:38 (“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”).

    Deep sadness, deep clarity.

    Original | Lumix GX7

    So if today is a fire day, let it be one. Speak it out to God. The church rarely teaches this, but this is the relationship He actually wants from us: full, honest, all-encompassing. Venting to Him is not disrespect. It is the doorway to healing. It is the only way He can walk you through the weight of what you are carrying. You have to do more than ask for a fix. He cannot move you forward if you have not shown Him that you understand where you were or where you are.

    There is a difference between complaining and venting. Complaining just adds to the problem. Venting clears the way for truth to rise, and for God to meet you in it. With venting, you will not stay in bitterness. You will always return to gratitude, because that is who you are at your core.

    Why? Because you have learned to see God in the ashes. That is a gift, even on the days it feels like a curse.

    Hang on.

    xo.

    c.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Exhale

    Exhale

    entry fifteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    iPhone 17 Pro + VSCO (L6 +1) + Lightroom (watermark only).

    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.

    And life went on…

    catacosmosis // 2025

  • Tipping Point

    Tipping Point

    It would seem I’ve waken up to yet another extreme of the obvious hypocrisy in what’s being demanded as “reality.” Some people genuinely still do not “get it,” while others still willfully refuse to see.

    Either way, and from all sides, there is an overarching question: Has society reached a true tipping point?

    Based on the reaction to a black man in white face, it would seem double standards have finally outstayed their welcome overall.

    Notice the general pattern of double standards over the last several years:

    Women can mock men.
    Trans can mock cis.
    Non-whites can mock whites.
    Gay can mock straight.

    Flip any of that around and you’re cooked.

    Look at the standards a little more deeply:

    The most obvious example is how men putting on “woman-face” or women putting on “man-face” isn’t just accepted — it’s demanded that everyone affirm it as their literal reality and “respect” it.

    So, logically, if that’s celebrated and that’s “reality,” then picking on any culture in jest for their quirks, failures, or oddities should be just as acceptable.

    That sums up what people are really upset about re: this skit that’s been circulating the last couple of days: it’s the double standards.

    And it’s not just white people who have had it.

    Yes, this particular skit has a lot of white people speaking out — they’re tired of being singled out as the only group not permitted to joke back, and then accused of lacking a sense of humor when it’s done to them.

    But consider society as a whole:

    Non-whites and whites alike are fed up with their own people acting like ungrateful, entitled fools — wasting the opportunities their ancestors fought to provide them and destroying the respectability they strove for.

    By now becoming loud, lazy, and disrespectful criminals, people make a mockery not only of their rights and the many opportunities they have if they would simply show up, but of their entire communities.

    Whites are fed up with Karens and Chads.

    Legal immigrants feel the same way about illegals trashing the opportunities they earned by doing things the right way — respecting the privilege of coming to another country, rebuilding responsibly, and treating that privilege with honor.

    Instead, illegals cause even legal immigrants to take the flak, lose opportunities, and be punished for things they didn’t even do.

    Masculine men are tired of being told they’re assholes instead of protectors, simply because masculinity is constantly mistaken for toxicity.

    Men of every race and personality type are sick of women parading around declaring they don’t need men, accusing and blaming men for everything wrong in the world — while in the same breath lamenting absent fathers, complaining that men don’t “show up” in general, and then demanding applause and respect for a world women absolutely didn’t build without the strength and masculinity of men.

    Women of all races and personality types are sick of being pressured to accept men in dresses not only mocking them and what it means to be a woman, but especially a mother, and having their spaces invaded and reclaimed as “everyone’s space,” only to be labeled ‘phobic’ or hateful for feeling that way.

    This isn’t only racial. It’s far broader than that, and these are only a few of many examples.

    Most, if not all, “everyday people” — all of us who are not filthy rich or sitting in positions of power — are fed up with war, crime, cruelty, and double standards. We just want to work hard, add meaning to the world, and reap the fruits of our labor: enough to survive, and enough to live — to enjoy a healthy, peaceful, happy existence.

    When did that become an unrealistic or unacceptable dream to have? It’s one that has echoed through the ages.

    Society as a whole is at a tipping point — fed up with hypocrisy, nonsense, and the double standards that no longer make sense.

    The solution, as I keep attempting to remind people, is simple across every aspect of society — yet seemingly impossible for most: for all people to embody empathy for others while taking accountability for themselves, existing in and acting from discernment.

    It is to embody some semblance of morality overall, respect nature, the planet and all its people, but especially ourselves. If we do that first — embody true self-love and self-respect — the depths of it, and not merely the mask — all the rest falls into place on its own.

    Will that be impossible for you? Or will you make it possible for yourself, and thus for others?

    Good luck out in the world today. Much love from me to you (no matter who you are).

    💜

    xo,

    c.

  • Breath.

    Breath.

    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.

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