In an unassuming corner of the yard, this yellow iris has unfurled like a quiet epiphany. What was once a tightly wound promise, rhizome buried deep through winter’s long hush, now opens fully to the light. Its ruffled petals now catch the sun with an almost reckless joy. The veins of deep gold trace a map of quiet persistence, while the orange heart glows like an inner fire that refused to go out.
Beside it, younger buds wait in patient green, still curled in their own contemplative silence. They teach their own lesson: not everything must bloom at once. Some wisdom arrives early; some lingers in the stalk, trusting the season will call when it is ready.
There is something profoundly philosophical in this annual resurrection. The iris does not bloom for applause or permanence. It blooms because that is its nature, with its brief, brilliant way of saying yes to existence, and it does so right here, against the ordinary creamy beige siding of daily life, proving that the sacred never waits for perfect conditions. It simply returns, year after year, not asking permission or requiring validation, reminding us that we too carry rhizomes of possibility beneath the surface of our ordinary days.
Seasons of dormancy give way to moments of vivid becoming, if only we pause long enough to witness it. Perhaps every ordinary moment holds the potential for a quiet epiphany. The question is whether we slow down enough to notice.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
Weeks into a health situation that has me on partial bed rest, still waiting on tests and surgical clearance, I find myself in this familiar nest of blankets and dim light, bookshelf full of words I love just across the room, window letting in what little of the world it can. It’s not where I planned to spend Holy Week. But maybe it’s exactly where I needed to be.
I’m watching The Passion of the Christ on this Holy Thursday, and something keeps settling over me, quiet and heavy and good, like those blankets: the reminder that my suffering, whatever form it has taken or will take, is not the end of the story, and that the One who authored the real end of the story already walked through something so far beyond anything I have faced or will face that it puts every hard season into a different kind of perspective.
I don’t say this from a dismissive perspective, or even the one that says “just be grateful, it could be worse.” More like… a grounding. A place to stand when the ground feels uncertain.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)
There was a time in my life when I would have resisted that. As recently as a decade ago, my heart was genuinely closed to it. Rebellious, angry, arrogant in the way that people sometimes are when they’ve been hurt and they’re protecting themselves from anything that asks them to be small or surrendered.
For two decades, from my late teens to my late thirties, I called myself spiritual. I deeply believed I was, with all my study and practice in various spiritual pursuits. I thought I was strong in that resistance. I thought I was wise, and had a comprehensive understanding of what a spiritual life was.
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. (Romans 8:18)
Life, caregiving and loss of almost all of my family and friends, many animals I loved dearly, from dogs and cats to horses and one amazing soul in a Cockatoo body, and years of watching what pride actually costs, have shown me how mistaken I was.
I didn’t learn with shame, but with honesty. The unnecessary struggle I created in that closed-off place was real. I don’t go back there anymore. I couldn’t have survived this last decade of so much struggle and stress I didn’t create but couldn’t avoid, if I had…
What moves me most on days like today, watching a mere artistic depiction (gruesome as even that is) of what He endured, is that it wasn’t abstract or metaphorical. It was not just physical pain, but humiliation and agony and the full weight of human cruelty, walked through willingly, for people who largely didn’t understand or care at the time. That kind of love is not easy to sit with. It asks something of you. It asked something of me.
Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:2)
I’m not here to tell anyone what to believe. But I do pray, genuinely, that any heart that’s still in that closed and armored place might find even a small opening, just enough to consider it. To consider what He suffered, and that He suffered what is, for most of us, truly unimaginable, and He did it so that even when we suffer and struggle on this side of life, we don’t have to carry it alone, and we don’t have to fear what comes next.
After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, “I thirst.” Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar, and they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to his mouth.
When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, “Tetelestai (It is finished),” and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. (John 19:28-30)
That’s a lot of grace for a Thursday in April from a pile of blankets… but here we are and I, for one, remain humbled.
God bless everyone who finds their way to this post today. I genuinely hope you find some peace in it.
Tucked into the quiet corners of my yard and spilling along the back fence — where wild grass gives way to the shadowed woods and, beyond them, the familiar silhouette of my mountain — the azaleas have erupted this spring in an almost audible riot of pink, purple, and white.
Two bushes a deeper rose at the edges, softening to a pink like the first blush of dawn on cotton-candy clouds; the purple one as deep as twilight shadows pooling in the underbrush, veined with richer amethyst; the handful of white ones pure and luminous, like scattered moonlight caught on petals. On several of them, the blooms crowd the branches so thickly that the dark green leaves vanish beneath waves of color, the bushes a generous bouquet bowed gently under its own abundance.
I stand at the fence line with my camera, breathing in the faint, sweet honey of their fragrance carried on the breeze, and it pulls me straight back to childhood. Growing up in the valley just across from my current, adult home, right at the base of that mountain, I’d watch for the wild azaleas and mountain laurel to appear along the wood’s edge, tiny beacons at the pasture’s far side. Each warming degree and every minute longer the day became — yes, I counted the minutes — felt like permission: one more day to explore before the snakes woke fully from their winter sleep.
With each passing day I’d step more carefully, heart racing with equal parts thrill and caution — head on a swivel, eyes scanning for copperheads or rattlers coiled just out of sight. The early days of spring were my favorite. They were the most relaxed. But the flowers made even the hot summer days worth the risk, with the promise of wild bursts of color rivaling my grandmother’s carefully tended, cultivated bushes next door, proof that beauty could thrive untamed.
Funny the things we fear and the things we don’t. Bobcats and mountain lions hunted those slopes, yet I never once worried about them — until the story my father told years later. At three years old, toddling the forty yard path to Grandmother’s a couple of hours after nightfall, my father watching and guarding intently — something I’d, we’d, done dozens of times before without consequence — a mountain lion perched on the cellar roof five feet above me, eyes fixed, body still. Daddy watched it watch me, praying silently, knowing any sudden move or cry might trigger instinct. It never pounced. I reached the house safe, unaware. When I was safely inside my grandmother’s screened-in back porch, he scared it off with a shotgun blast into the air, and we never saw one that close again.
I’ve thought about that story more often since losing him. He’s been gone eleven years now, and there are many things I never thought to ask, or wish I hadn’t been afraid to ask, while I still could… but this one he told me himself, more than once. I think it meant something to him that I should know it.
What I understand now, standing on this side of parenthood, is the cost of that stillness. The discipline of it. To watch a predator watch your child and not move, not cry out, not run — to trust that motion or sound might break whatever fragile restraint was holding that animal in place, and be so steady and rooted in your faith that you pray. Just… confidently pray. Whatever else he did or didn’t get right in his life, in that moment my father was made entirely of love and terror and faith, and none of it showed on the outside. That kind of stillness cost him everything. It was paid for in utter surrender, and he surrendered to fate, and to faith, beautifully.
📷 iPhone 17 Pro ⚒️ Hipstamatic X (Salvador 64 Lens + Uchitel 20 Film + Spiro Pop Flash
I think about that when I think about my own son. Sixteen, navigating a world that doesn’t always make room for the way his mind works, walking through invisible dangers I can’t always name or intercept. And I understand something about the helplessness of parenthood now that I couldn’t have grasped as that oblivious three-year-old toddling through grace.
You can’t always throw yourself between your child and what’s coming. Sometimes the most faithful thing is to stand still, breathe, and trust the hand that’s bigger than yours.
These azaleas have had quieter seasons. A few years back they were sparse, almost reluctant, with a handful of blooms where there should have been abundance. I watched them without much comment, the way you watch things when your own life has gone quiet in ways that don’t invite easy conversation.
Loss has a way of muting everything: the yard, the mornings, the impulse to pick up a camera at all. Grief and illness and the particular exhaustion that comes from giving what you have left to people you love… all of it settles like a kind of winter that has nothing to do with temperature. I’ve had a few of those winters. Longer than I’d like to admit.
So this spring, when every single bush along the fence erupted like they were making up for lost time, I stood there and felt something catch in my chest. That’s part of why I photograph at all — not just to capture beauty, but to bear witness to it. To say, with the deliberate act of framing a shot, I see this. This is real. This happened. The camera makes me slow down enough to actually look, and looking is a form of gratitude I can access even when words fail me.
As a child, maybe I sensed some invisible shield, or maybe I was just young enough to believe in magic. As an adult, looking at these cultivated echoes of those wild blooms now thriving in my own yard, I know the truth: protection was there all along. Not arrogance, but grace.
God’s hand has turned aside far greater dangers than I ever knew were there. The mountain lion I never saw, the losses I somehow survived, the moments where the math shouldn’t have worked out in my favor and it did anyway. These azaleas, blooming so fully this year after quieter seasons, feel like a quiet reminder of that mercy, a gift unfolding right where the tame meets the wild, the past meets the present, under the watchful gaze of my mountain.
I don’t take that lightly. I don’t take it for granted. I take photographs of it, and I tell the stories that go with them, because that’s how I know to say thank you.
Mere backyard glory doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s memory, wonder, and gratitude all tangled in petals.
I wrote that on January 8 when I shared this edit of an iPhone shot I captured in my back yard to Vero and VSCO, and then just… moved right past sharing the image or the words here. I’ve been becoming.
I’ve been lost in introspection, peeling back layers, observing, feeling it out, integrating it – all of this over and over in this time non-adjacent, beautiful cycle of infinity, that I kind of forgot… most everything lately. I used to think it was just the caregiving and/or the surgical menopause. I thought for a short time, when I surrendered the last earthly thing I had left that had for so long been the treasure of my heart, that I’d finally just overloaded and lost my mind.
In reality, ultimate surrender to God, truly following where He leads, had removed and continues to remove me from everything, and evolved me into this extremely quiet girl who just stands under the sky and lets it undo her. Not just in posting, but at every level, including who I remember myself to be.
Coming to Christ – not just saying the words but the evolution itself – hasn’t just been “I believe.” I have believed since I was a child. It hasn’t just been, “I accept, I surrender, I heal, God changes my heart and I change my habits.” It’s been this slow, surgical unmaking down in the deepest parts, and I’ve been metamorphosing through it since the night Ralph died.
It’s been soaking in depths even I never imagined. And that’s saying something. It’s been being truly alone, except for His presence, and the Holy Spirit’s, and it’s been… excruciatingly, exquisitely beautiful.
It’s not trauma, it’s not grief. It’s not even grief-induced – not wholly. That’s all nonsense, at least in the way the Western world and Western medicine and psychology and new age and new thought belief systems tell it. It’s more real, more spiritual, more invisibly tangible, than all of that ever thought about being. It was just… time.
It’s been about the things I thought I understood, the places where I thought I had to earn worth, the parts of me that were performing the gifts of the spirit – the discernment, the temperance, the hard-earned wisdom, the surrender – that I was so desperate to truly embody. It’s been no longer sharing or trying to grow and evolve that with anyone else. It’s been walking into the desert, embracing solitude instead of simply being in it by circumstance, and just… belonging to Him.
Somewhere in that process, I lost track of a lot of things. A lot of people. Somewhere in the slow, surgical unmaking of solitude, I lost track of almost everything I used to believe was real. I’ve been letting Jesus have the layers, not just the words. Letting Him name me again, in the dark, where nobody’s clapping, where it’s just me and the sky and the God who knows my real name, and actually treasures, doesn’t just hold, my heart.
I’m not sure what this post really is. I’m returning this scrap of sky to this quiet place, in part because I hope it helps someone else, as always… but also because I don’t want the girl who stares up and ultimately surrenders to the peace of solitude and to the Creator Himself to be a footnote in her own story. I don’t want the becoming to swallow the one who simply is. This is me remembering me, and thanking God for the long, slow unmaking that made room for the becoming in the first place.
Even if it meant losing almost everyone I ever loved, I’ve found a love within myself I never could have imagined, and it all comes from and returns to Him.
Catastrophe in osmosis. That’s where catacosmosis began. And the name won’t change, though the person has, because that’s the entire point of that journey.
Tetelestai (ܬܫܠܡ). John 19:30
And yet, for me, it feels like it’s only just begun.
Haze blurs his profile. I grip the thin stem of hope. Current keeps moving.
I came across this photo from a camping/hiking weekend in December 2018 this morning, and it opened something in me… or awakened it.
In the photo, the woods are one giant lens flare: the late-fall sun punches clean holes in the canopy, throws every leaf into over-saturated neon, while the creek becomes a mirror so sharp you feel you could step through it into another forest.
That’s what this last year with my son has been doing to the dial inside me. Faith cranked so high it hums, reality just as loud, and me caught in the bright slash between. I used to soften one side or the other: pray the hard parts dimmer, work until the wonder felt manageable. But the creek refuses to choose between glare and reflection; it holds both, lets them ricochet until you can’t tell which side of the surface is real.
I can see now that I am – or prefer to be – the creek. I practice that same double exposure of my roles, but it has all blurred and blinded me in recent days. In reality, all it adds up to is the fierce mother part of me – scheduling therapies, ordering visual timers, and trying to learn an entirely new language that has no words – and the gentler, whole me. The part of me that still leaves room for hope and comfort in the impossible color of his laugh when a dragonfly lands on his sleeve.
Balance isn’t compromise; it’s letting the light stay blinding and the shadows stay knife-edged, trusting the picture only makes sense when neither is edited out.
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 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.
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.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + LR (watermark only)
Always look up. Especially when you’re already shaken, don’t ever look down. That’s when you lose what steadiness you do have, and crash.
This week hit hard. J was told he’s going on unpaid shutdown leave from Dec 15 until the second week of January. No vacation time, no cushion. At least not yet…maybe they’ll change their mind about that.
It always makes me heartsick when companies do this to families in December, right before Christmas. Now, here we are, and I’m not sick about it. Just determined.
This, after receiving the full evaluation for our boy yesterday, which finally gives us clarity… but also informs us that we have to get “further testing,” as if what he’s already been through and what we’ve already done couldn’t possibly be enough (money for them) for any referrals or disability help.
I genuinely don’t know how we’re supposed to afford it with everything happening at once, but we will. If I don’t laugh in the face of it all (especially the system) believing God’s already got it handled, I’ll collapse under the weight of that situation alone.
Christmas this year is going to be bare… at least materially. Some part of me feels immediate comfort, though, because I so intimately recognize this feeling… the gritty “underdog in a Christmas movie” version of life I’ve always known. Always the underdog…
But the thing about underdogs? Most especially when they’re faithful and balanced in determination, heart and spirit, they always come out on top. Always.
God is in this story. God is in the details. He always has been, and when I’ve followed His guidance and employed discernment, He has never turned away or left us. I’m holding onto that. That is my foundation.
I have to do my part, though… so for that, besides us trying to pick up a seasonal job until this shutdown is over, I’ve created an Amazon wishlist for my boy. If the universe wants to make sure he gets a Christmas beyond my homemade treats, it will. And if not, he already knows he’s loved, supported, and my whole world.
I’ve already got my Christmas miracle. That boy, and his precious heart.
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.
catacosmosis 