Tag: experiencing life

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • Lovely Death

    Lovely Death

    Dried leaves in repose,
    macro lens unveils their tale.
    Lovely death, frozen.

    (Lumix+Panasonica/Leica Macro DG Elmarit, VSCO, Mextures, Lightroom)

    In my mid-20s, I experienced an interesting exploration of death as a subject in my work, professionally and creatively. Delving into the intricate realms of death became an unexpected but necessary journey. Originating from my research and work in psychology, the fascination found a niche in the recesses of my mind, dancing at a newly discovered crossroad: psychology and spirituality.

    The illusion of immortality, a comforting notion in my youth, began to unravel, and a sobering awareness seeped in – a gentle reminder that time, despite our desires, marches on. This realization stirred occasional anxiety, yet it birthed within me an artistic sanctuary. While my “irl” associates and friends were rather put off by such a topic of discussion, it was given tangible validity within the “lovely dead stuff” community on Instagram.

    Back then, Instagram thrived on genuine connections, nearly two decades ago during its inception. Communities flourished, spanning from technical visual elements, like layering textures and tones, to profound philosophical discussions embedded in art. It was within the latter that the “lovely dead stuff” tag/community found its home. While the platform’s landscape may have evolved, I suspect its essence endures, adapting to the shifting tides of philosophy and the world’s unfolding events.

    The “lovely dead stuff” community, a haven for kindred spirits, provided a liberating space where my inquisitive mind and creative endeavors harmonized. In those formative years, it fostered an environment that not only embraced my curiosity but also guided me in the art of amalgamating thought and creativity. It became a conduit for transforming introspection into tangible expressions, a timeless journey that shaped both my understanding of mortality and my artistic identity.

    During that formative time in my spirituality, I realized that the connections between psychology and spirituality were becoming a pressing issue in my still immortal mind — I think I wanted to, like many, freeze time and never die and there was this underlying current of consciousness beginning to happen to me that screamed, “you’re not as immortal as you think you are, young ‘un!”

    It would sometimes create a lot of anxiety, those explorations, but I am so grateful that I found an outlet in the “lovely dead stuff” artistic community on Instagram. It was a liberating community that embraced all those levels of me (brain, heart, and soul) and helped me learn to employ them simultaneously for the first time in my life (I’d never been allowed that prior to that time in my life). I was able to create some tangible reality out of it all.

    I was not expecting to revisit those memories or that topic today, but I found myself considering it as I “walked the yard” (a Dorie thing that some of you may remember) this morning in search of moss to photograph for a mixed media project I was working on to commemorate my mother’s birthday. Amidst the quiet canvas of nature, the stark contrast between the lingering death of winter and the emerging promises of spring captured my attention. Winter’s remnants, laid bare and hanging in the air, echoed the transient beauty of life’s inevitable cycles. Meanwhile, the subtle signs of spring’s awakening breathed new life into the scene, embodying the enduring spirit of renewal and the continuous dance between life and its inevitable counterpart.

    It served as a poignant reminder that, like the seasons, our perspectives too undergo a perpetual transformation, each moment holding within it the delicate balance of both closure and new beginnings. Here’s to remembering and retrying forgotten editing skills, and to whatever comes next…

    Happy birthday, Mama. Thank you for the lessons, and the love. I miss you…