entry twenty one — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Final Edit)
Sometimes it feels like there is a different, almost literal space between seconds. A pause the world does not announce.
There is intimacy in those spaces. Love. Beauty. A kind of quiet permission.
There is me, and the moon, and what I remember without remembering. Something about home. Something about spirit. Something about soul.
In those spaces, which turn into a place, then into awareness, then into something conscious without warning, I find myself again. Not arriving. Not searching. Just remembering how to be.
It feels like standing in a doorway I have crossed a thousand times but cannot name. Familiar without history. Known without proof.
And always, even when I wish it were not so, there she is too.
There are all of them. The pieces of my life that have already returned to Source, leaving me here to feel them but never hold them, to love without helping, to remember without any hope of their human realities returning.
Home, not as a location, but as a frequency. And for a moment, I am inside it.
catacosmosis // 2026
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Final Edit)iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Textures Only)iPhone 17 Pro (Original, shot with ProCamera)
Not the sanitized, monetized version. Not the hollow “good vibes” lie designed to keep everyone comfortable and nothing honest.
I mean the kind of light that exists because the world has become grungy, nasty, ridiculous, and addicted to consuming whatever still has a pulse.
Truth should be efficient. In a sane world, it is. But this isn’t a sane world.
Here, efficiency belongs to distortion. To slogans instead of substance. To repetition instead of verification. To emotional leverage instead of reality.
Truth requires something costly: attention, humility, memory, accountability. It forces people to stop, reassess, sometimes admit they were wrong, sometimes change. And that makes it inefficient in a culture built to move fast, feel loudly, and never look inward.
So truth is treated as an obstacle. As “problematic.” As dangerous. As something to be managed, softened, buried, or rebranded until it no longer threatens the illusion.
Hold the light anyway.
Even when it makes you a silhouette instead of a spectacle. Even when it costs you comfort, applause, or belonging. Especially when it exposes what others are desperate to keep hidden.
Light doesn’t scream. It doesn’t beg. It doesn’t perform.
It reveals.
And that, more than anything, is why it’s feared.
So keep carrying it through the cracks and decay. Not to save the world. Not to convince the masses. But because surrendering it would mean becoming what’s poisoning everything.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
A while ago, God asked me to step away from the noise. The purpose was not just to “rest,” but to enter true solitude. It wasn’t the kind of solitude that simply quiets the mind; it was the kind that strips away the need to convince, the compulsion to rescue, and the reflex to correct every error you see in the world.
When you live in that stillness long enough, especially when you begin to examine how deeply and how long you have been misunderstood in your own life, you finally grasp why no one was truly listening. You begin to understand:
The time for saving people by warning them and trying to teach them by telling them, begging them, or reasoning with them has passed. Just like with a child, there comes a time when you have to let them just keep screwing up until they learn. Experience is the only teacher that can accomplish anything fruitful.
At some point, you realize your job is and always has been to just be the example and let them hate you or blame you if they wish. The time now, and the purpose, is to show up anchored in truth, walking forward for the sake of those who are searching.
It is time to lead without any guarantee of who will follow, even if the path takes you to meet God alone. In the end, it all comes down to free will — and on the day you stand before Him, the only life and soul you will ultimately give account for is your own.
There is no bureaucracy at the Pearly Gates, no worldly process to pass through. Character witnesses don’t exist there. Your actions, your choices, and the truth of your heart and relationship with Source will speak for themselves to the one and only true Judge, whose authority is absolute and divine.
After months of this solitude, returning to public spaces feels different. The peace you find in solitude makes the digital clamor almost unbearable. You realize most people are not listening, not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to. They’ve been taught to fear the very silence that would heal them.
Still, there are always a few — maybe only two or three in a sea of millions — who are listening for a different kind of voice. And for them, we show up.
As I dipped a toe back into social media in recent weeks, I saw exactly why Source had been directing me as it had. Then, this morning, I saw a post on Instagram that reminded me exactly why I hesitate to return.
It was a meme “conversation” between two cats:
Cat 1: I don’t know who I am anymore.
Cat 2: That’s okay, everybody feels that way sometimes — the universe doesn’t have a support line or customer service to tell you how to fix the problem.
It’s clever on the surface, but the truth is: this is false.
Yes, everyone struggles with knowing who they are from time to time — that’s life. But somewhere along the way, society began labeling that struggle as illness, defining solitude as unhealthy withdrawal (thereby denying people access to the solution), and filtering human experience through a narrow definition of “normal” set by a handful of powerful voices.
And the part about the universe not having a “support line”? That’s the deepest untruth of all.
The universe — God’s creation, and the divine voice within it — is always speaking. The language is there for anyone willing to learn it. The signs are constant. I know this because I have been hated for decades for striving to be a translator.
The problem is not absence; it is illiteracy. Most people are not listening, or even looking, because they’ve been conditioned to tune in to the wrong frequency.
Depression is not always depression, but many times (and this was my experience) the immediate response to anything that feels unpleasant is to label it as depression and drug people to Timbuktu and back again. Honestly? That is the reason many people can’t hear and don’t care to try. Not all — but so many.
Lost is not always lost. Not every ache in the soul is a disorder to be medicated or pathologized. Sometimes it is simply disconnection from self and Source. The remedy is stillness, quiet, and the willingness to listen, and to then face and accept the truth — the very things people are told are “unhealthy” or “unproductive.”
Society has been trained to fear solitude and invisibility, to measure our worth in noise and visibility. And then, when society meets those who have rejected that conditioning — who have done the work through blood, sweat, and tears — it labels them as “too deep,” “too intense,” or “problematic.” Society dismisses them because the truth they carry is rarely the easy answer the world wanted to hear.
It’s willful ignorance, fed and nurtured by systems that benefit from a distracted, disconnected people.
Those same systems encourage shallow comforts and praise the very mechanisms keeping us miserable. And when you break free, find balance, and refuse to play the game, you’re labeled extreme or hateful — when in reality, you are simply walking in the narrow space between reality and insanity.
This was on my mind when I saw another post, one about the pressure of social media as an artist versus as a human being.
My response was simple:
I used to approach social media in the same way — letting the noise, the opinions, and the unspoken “rules” decide how and when I would show up. I carried the weight of strangers’ expectations until it felt heavy enough to crush my own reasons for creating.
And then I realized: the ones who made me feel small were not here for the same reasons I was. They were chasing validation, purpose, or attention they didn’t already have. I already had those things. I was meeting my own goals, my own standards. When I stopped caring if they “got it,” the pressure disappeared.
It is the same in life beyond the screen. Too many people are chasing money, status, and recognition, and too few are working from genuine passion or purpose. The work done from love will feed you. The work done to please others will drain you.
That’s why these two posts — one about “not knowing who you are” and one about the pressure of showing up as an artist — are really about the same thing.
The sickness of our time is not that we feel lost or uncertain; it’s that we’ve lost the ability, and in some cases the willingness, to listen to the truth that’s already speaking.
If you can hear it, you don’t need a “support line” from the universe — you’re already, and infinitely, connected to it. If you can’t hear it, no human voice will convince you until you quiet the noise long enough to try.
So for me? I keep showing up as I feel led to, as I hear God guiding me to. I keep sharing my experiences, through my photography, my art, and my voice, softly and quietly in shared expressions meant to be examples, not to convince the unwilling, but for the few who are listening and searching for a different kind of voice.
Yesterday, I went shooting. I collected over 1,500 photographs in a single morning.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been that focused, that immersed in the creative energy that sustains me. It felt good to be so deeply aligned with The Flow—Nature’s and God’s flow, not mine, not anyone else’s.
For hours upon hours, I alternated exploration and randomly sitting still with nature, and with my favorite tree—the oldest documented in my state—for a long time. I quietly observed every detail, inner and outer, letting my mind wander and my spirit settle.
So long, in fact, the chiggers are still feasting on me. A worthy price, though, for what was finally made clear to me—the missing puzzle piece that’s been keeping me from being able to help others fully grasp my perspective when I talk about grounding and meditation:
It’s not about escaping the body, 3D reality, or floating above your life. It’s not about leaving. Healthy, true meditation is the opposite of escape.
Meditation is about stillness, observation, and rooting in. It’s about grounding into the physical body, and the earth itself, consciously connecting with both.
It’s about sinking into the body—not running from it. Anything rooted in “escape” isn’t meditation. At any spiritual or energetic level, escapism is a cop-out. Worse, it’s a lie.
Meditation is about bringing the physical, mental, and emotional into balance so that rising energetically, emotionally, and intellectually becomes not only natural… but possible in the first place.
This shift in understanding can (and will) change everything for anyone who is willing to open their minds and hearts enough embrace it.
catacosmosis 