Tag: grace

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • Coldness

    Coldness

    Coldness has arrived and with it the pull to go inward, to rest in the quiet places that rarely see the sun. Winter has always been the hardest season for me. It settles deep and stirs up everything I have tried to set down, everything that has followed me long after the caregiving ended. Two years have passed and I am still carrying the weight of those long nights, the vigilance, the grief that lives in the body long after the moment of loss.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + VSCO

    Yet even now there are small reminders of life that keeps reaching for the light. These plants on my windowsill keep growing with a kind of quiet courage. The morning sun touches them and they respond without hesitation, without guilt, without a single thought about the expectations of others. They lean toward whatever warmth they can find and allow that to be enough.

    I am trying to learn from them. I am trying to believe that rest is not weakness. It is restoration. It is the slow and necessary work of returning to myself after years of tending to everyone else. Winter makes that lesson feel sharper, but it also makes it feel truer.

    Some days I am tired in a way that feels ancient, but I keep growing in small ways. I keep reaching for light in whatever form it finds me. If these green and fragile things can thrive in the coldest season, maybe I can too.

    xo…

  • 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

  • Presence.

    Presence.

    What you create…
    does not require an explanation of itself.
    It doesn’t need to convince, convert, or justify.
    It just needs to exist. Quietly, softly—
    like fog curling through trees
    or dust dancing across old floorboards.

    Like light through ancient glass,
    sacred, but unflinching; gentle, but resolute.
    A whisper with weight,
    in that space exists everything—
    beyond the reach of articulation.

    Silence is a presence, as much as an absence.
    Holy.
    Haunting.
    Both leave their imprint.

    You are free to feel
    without having to be felt back.
    Free to present
    instead of perform.
    Free to sit beside your own silence,
    and know that it understands.

    Because your creation…
    exists.

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