Tag: existence

  • Unhidden

    Unhidden

    entry twenty — 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 nineteen — 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 eighteen — 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…

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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

  • Vesper

    Vesper

    📷 iPhone 7 Plus.
    ⚒️ VSCO (06, +3) + Lightroom (watermark only).
    entry thirteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.

    There is a moment every single day when golden hour gives way to blue hour. In that moment, the world pauses between heartbeats.

    The warmth of the sun hasn’t fully left, but it’s fading, slipping behind the horizon while the cool hues of twilight begin to take hold. For a few fleeting minutes, everything softens. The light is neither day nor night; it’s an in-between realm where time seems to hold its breath.

    Shadows stretch. The air shifts. The gold turns to amber, then to lavender, then to blue, a slow dissolving of one truth into another. It’s the day’s last whisper and the night’s first sigh, a moment that belongs to no one and everyone at once.

    Most people miss it. But for those who are still and detached from the noise of the world enough to notice, it feels like standing at the seam of two worlds – the visible and the unseen – the known and the infinite, as light gently hands the sky over to darkness.

    If I were still as attached to the idea of controlled outcomes as I used to be, I’d still not know it exists… much less recognize it and be aware enough to take it’s photo as it occurs.

    This is the product – nay, the gift – of mindfulness. 🧘

    Detachment is not that you own nothing.
    Detachment is that nothing owns you.
    —Bhagavad Gita 2.47

    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.