Tag: gratitude

  • A Pause…

    A Pause…

    Yesterday on my hike, I paused for a long while. I gave nearly an hour of stillness and reverence to the nature around me, watching as butterflies moved over water and earth, dancing with the light in a way that spoke of freedom and trust. I sat with it — what felt like hours, though really only about thirty minutes — before stepping back onto the trail, camera in hand. As I rose from the creek to walk on, almost by instinct — more a photographer’s habit than intent — I pressed record.

    Later, on the drive home, I found myself reflecting on that time as I listened to one of my favorite songs — one I’ve leaned on heavily in recent years, especially since the decline and death of the last of my human teachers and spiritual guides: “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail).” The two moments merged together in my heart.

    After Ralph’s death, I finally understood where I should have been leaning all along. He — and my dad — had both tried to guide me toward this truth while alive in human form, but I depended too heavily on them. And if not on my mother in person, then on her prayers. It wasn’t until they were all gone, when I no longer had any “training wheels” to lean on, that it fully clicked at a conscious level:

    I had been depending on God all along, hearing Him, even resisting His direct guidance. I just hadn’t been consciously aware of it. That’s when I realized my faith had never left me — it had only been muted, even scapegoated, by my dependence on the faith others carried.

    It was only when I allowed this song to become a foundational prayer of my heart that His presence became tangible in a way I could no longer deny. The veil fell from my heart and my eyes, and through His grace I saw with a clarity I had once resisted — the kind of knowing that hurts, yet somehow makes the truth easier to embrace.

    The lyrics of this song speak of stepping out into places where our own strength isn’t enough, and trusting God to steady us anyway. That truth became real to me after Ralph died — especially about a year later, when I found myself in a moment of decision: to choose what I merely wanted to believe, or to stand in what I knew was real.

    I understood the magnitude of that choice. I knew it would break my human heart, and I knew it might stir misunderstanding, anger, and hurt in those around me. It was the hardest place I had ever stood. But I also knew it was time. Time to trust Him not only with my conscious mind, but with my open soul — my entire being. Time to leap.

    So I did. I quietly — nay, silently — forgave all that needed forgiveness, and I let go of everything: past, present, and future… even the things I still and always will love, but that I knew could never take root in this life. For just over a year, all that mattered outside of physical survival — food, shelter — and caring for my son was solitude in His presence.

    I chose God. I surrendered everything. And in that surrender, I rebuilt and reinforced boundaries — not only to protect what was holy from the evils that I knew would seek destroy it, but also to shield those who weren’t ready to walk the path of full and true surrender from the consequences of my choice to do so.

    Almost immediately, things began to unfold around me — things I had long since lost hope for, or had no idea how to overcome or achieve, in my life. None of it happened exactly as I would have liked, nor in the timing I would have chosen, and almost nothing came about in the way I would have planned or orchestrated it. But that was the entire point of surrender.

    And in that realization, I understood something deeper: I had spent years trying to explain surrender to others with words, but the example — living it out, letting God’s hand write the story — was far more important, and a far more powerful testimony for Him.

    Butterflies have always been a reminder to me of my grandmother, and of the simplest analogies of metamorphosis and transformation. But now? What I see most prominently in their flight is this — so fragile, yet so fearless in the air:

    They carry the story of loss and love, of veils lifted and prayers surrendered — of a journey where survival gives way to presence, and presence gives way to peace. And for all of us, just like these butterflies, it is only through full surrender to the grace and truth of something higher than ourselves that we can be — and will be — fully loved, fully supported, and able to flourish.

    Here, I’ve paired them with the piano playing of the song and these reflections as a reminder to myself, and to anyone who reads this, that even when we feel small, it is faith that keeps us aloft. I share this in hope that it might offer whoever sees it a nudge of encouragement as we continue the journey God has given us — the one He has called us to submit to and surrender.

    After decades of seeking, struggling, and trying to show and teach others (while really teaching myself), here’s what I know:

    If we ever want to find purposeful growth or true peace, we must fully surrender to the creator and orchestrator of it all — to His will, not our own.

    xo,

    c.

    🦋💜🕊️

    You call me out upon the waters…
    The great unknown, where feet may fail.
    And there I find You in the mystery.
    in oceans deep my faith will stand.

    And I will call upon Your Name,
    and keep my eyes above the waves.
    When oceans rise,
    my soul will rest in Your embrace…
    for I am Yours, and You are mine.

    Your grace abounds in deepest waters.
    Your sovereign hand will be my guide.
    Where feet may fail and fear surrounds me,
    you’ve never failed, and You won’t start now.

    So I will call upon Your Name,
    and keep my eyes above the waves.
    When oceans rise,
    my soul will rest in Your embrace.
    For I am Yours, and You are mine…

    Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders.
    Let me walk upon the waters,
    wherever You would call me.
    Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander,
    and my faith will be made stronger
    in the presence of my Savior.

    Oceans (Where Feet May Fail), written by Joel Houston / Matt Crocker / Salomon Lighthelm.
  • I died, and it… was okay. | Notes from the Other Side

    I died, and it… was okay. | Notes from the Other Side

    The First Illusion

    How can an illusion free an illusion?

    It can’t.

    Impossible.

    And yet, freedom itself is not impossible.

    But what we often mistake for freedom is only substitution. We trade one mask for another, one prison for another, one dream for another.

    Replacing one illusion with another does not set us free. It does not bring liberation. It simply shifts us deeper into what I sometimes call non-happening happening — the endless cycle of movement that looks like change but never truly is.

    So where, then, is freedom?

    Maybe it’s in understanding that simple truth.

    Maybe it’s in seeing clearly that nothing we have called “freedom” has ever been real freedom at all.

    Maybe that was the point, all along.

    Is that awakening?

    Awakening as Death

    Awakening is the death of the familiar.

    Because what is “familiar” to us — what we call “our life,” “our personality,” “our world” — is illusion.

    Nothing we are familiar with is actually real. None of it is actually us.

    We are not real. We are not what we think — what we are told — we are. And yet, here we are.

    So when awakening comes, it feels like death. Because it is death — the falling away of everything we thought was “me.”

    And without that death, there is no birth of what was real all along.

    Meaning Before and After

    Before awakening, there is no meaning of our own.

    The only meaning available to us is what others have told us is meaningful. Parents, teachers, religions, governments, lovers, friends, enemies, cultures, systems — all of them have fed us their meanings.

    And we absorbed them as if they were truth.

    We were conditioned to believe meaning is handed down, not discovered.

    We were punished for expressing anything antithetical.

    Yes, that is a word. I did not make it up. I checked, as always, when I returned from the other side.

    I digress.

    Even when we think we are thinking for ourselves — are we? Have we ever? Do we even know how?

    This is the prison of the familiar.

    But those of us who have never been able to simply swallow it — those of us who have spent our lives being told we are crazy, too deep, over-analytical, antithetical — maybe we’ve always been a little closer to freedom.

    Because we have always been with ourselves. We have always lived in the company of our own questioning. Our own introspection.

    And that has saved us.

    Moving Through Darkness into Light

    My entire life has been this movement — through darkness into light.

    And then again. And again.

    I never stayed still in a 3D thought long enough to let ideology calcify around me. Never settled enough into the world’s definitions of reality to say: “Yes, this is it. This is reality. This is me. This is final.”

    No.

    I couldn’t.

    Always, incessantly, I questioned. I sought. I chased myself. I chased I am.

    Because each time I reached for that exactness, that rigidity, something in me would die. And something deeper would awaken.

    So instead, I’ve kept moving. Through darkness, into light.

    Through lies, into truth.

    Through death, into life.

    Over and over again.

    And each time, what I found was not more of “me,” but less.

    Until I began to understand that the “me” I thought was the center of the story was never the point at all.

    And then, I actually… died.

    And then, I came back!

    What?

    I know. That’s what I said, too.

    And that is when the fullness of both illusion and irrelevance were clear to me, and the illusion and irrelevance… both shattered.

    Freedom.

    The Irrelevance of “Me”

    “Me” is irrelevant.

    Yet somehow, everything has always been about me.

    That’s the paradox.

    The small “me” — the conditioned self, the mask, the name, the history — means nothing. It is dust. Illusion. A temporary construction.

    But the deeper “I” — the one who moves through the dying and the awakening, the one who is aware of even that dust falling away — that “I” has always been the ground of everything.

    So in a sense, “me” does not exist.

    And in another sense, “me” is all that has ever existed.

    It was always… the I Am.

    The Misunderstanding

    This will be misunderstood.

    Mostly by anyone and everyone who reads it.

    If they even make it past the first few lines.

    Because illusion defends itself. It doesn’t like being called what it is.

    But misunderstanding doesn’t matter.

    Life takes care of itself.

    Life Happens

    Even when you are not there to see it, life still happens.

    Everything still unfolds — rivers flow, winds move, earth shifts.

    Even if you choose inaction — even if you refuse to eat, drink, or sleep — things still happen. The body dies, yes, but death itself is a happening.

    Because everything is always happening. Always in motion.

    Even in stillness, there is happening.

    And everything that happens has a result. Even nothingness produces consequence.

    Life is self-correcting. Even ungrounded, it finds its own balance.

    Sometimes that balance looks toxic. Sometimes it looks destructive. But it is always balance. Always motion. Always happening.

    Death Must Occur

    Death, then, is necessary.

    Not the physical death we fear — not suicide, not the cutting short of the body’s days.

    Though that death is really not all that bad, in my experience.

    The dying part itself is no fun.

    The death?

    Too many words — words are funny for this one; there is not a word, other than death.

    It is nothing, and everything.

    Alpha, omega.

    I am.

    Here? What must die is the illusory self.

    The self we defend, cling to, and worship without even knowing it. The self we call “me.”

    That death is the doorway.

    The Last Illusion

    And yet, even here, there is a final paradox:

    If the self is illusion, then death is illusion too.

    Which means — death cannot free us either.

    Because an illusion cannot free an illusion.

    I do not fear.

    Why is none of this terrifying to me?

    Maybe because fear only exists where there is something to lose. And what I am losing was never real in the first place.

    Maybe because I have already died a thousand small deaths, the fear has already been burnt out of me.

    Maybe because I saw it:

    That what I am cannot die.

    And maybe that — quiet, simple, unshaken — is what freedom has always been.

    ✨

    xo,

    c.

  • Maintenance as a Creative | Not Broken, Just Built Differently

    Maintenance as a Creative | Not Broken, Just Built Differently

    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.

    xo.

    c.

  • Wilderness

    Wilderness

    Lumix GX7, Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm Tele-Lens. Handheld. Lightroom (watermark and contrast).

    The wilderness is the oldest, truest friend a human can have, both in body and in spirit.

    Lumix GX7, Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm Tele-Lens. Handheld. Lightroom (watermark and contrast).

    It teaches in silence.

    Lumix GX7, Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm Tele-Lens. Handheld. Lightroom (watermark and contrast).

    It speaks without words.

    Lumix GX7, Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm Tele-Lens. Handheld. Lightroom (watermark and contrast).

    It holds space for your becoming, your undoing, your return.

    Lumix GX7, Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm Tele-Lens. Handheld. Lightroom (watermark and contrast).

    And it is only “dangerous” when we forget to honor it, or refuse to learn from and respect it.

  • Coffee Thoughts | #1

    Coffee Thoughts | #1

    Saw an intriguing article about Waffle House this morning.

    I never frequented Waffle House. Not many people around here did, apparently—ours closed a while back. The building was recently torn down, the lot cleared to make room for yet another gas station…or maybe another drive thru ATM. I’m not sure.

    I ate there a handful of times over there, never much caring or giving it a thought. But now, strangely, I miss it. I find myself wishing I had the chance.

    It’s become a metaphor for a lesson life keeps offering, and most people keep ignoring: You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

    It’s true. You’ll miss a lot of things you once took for granted. I certainly do.

    Waffle House isn’t a major one—but it is a reminder.

    I miss my parents.

    I miss my best friend.

    I miss my spiritual teacher, and the person who gave me Alan Watts’ The Book for Christmas two decades ago—the gift that changed the course of my inner life.

    They’re all dead. Dementia and Cancer.

    I miss the dogs I’ve loved across decades, the ones who were more than pets—they were companions with souls.

    I miss the version of myself before my hysterectomy and menopause—before synthetic HRT dulled the edge of my vitality. I wish I had chosen a more natural route, even if it had been less convenient.

    I miss my child being a child.

    I miss the eras of my life that were stunning in their beauty, even though I didn’t see it at the time—too blinded by hardship to notice the glory braided into the struggle.

    I miss my opportunities—ones I didn’t recognize until they’d passed.

    I miss what it meant to be a woman before the world started reducing us to caricatures. Despite all the so-called “feminism” and “women’s rights,” it feels like women are more undervalued than ever.

    I miss being able to raise chickens and grow food without running into city ordinances telling me what I can and can’t do with my own land.

    I miss the forests and wild places I used to roam freely—now gated off for hunting clubs or planned graphite mines, despite the fact that nobody seems to be doing much hunting or mining.

    I miss when the weather was more stable, more alive.

    I miss a society that at least pretended to aim for peace.

    I miss healthy masculinity—not the social performance of “manhood,” but the actual divine masculine: rooted, mature, strong in spirit. The kind of strength both men and women are capable of carrying, choosing, embodying.

    I miss the wildlife. The abundance. The bees, the butterflies, the owls, the foxes, the birds, the bats. I don’t miss the mosquitoes, but I miss the balance they were once part of.

    When I look back over my life, I hear the same message whispered in memory, echoing through every loss:

    You’re going to miss it when it’s gone.

    I didn’t mean to miss it. I didn’t know I was actively, very literally missing it.
    But I did.

    My body. My femininity. My strength. My time. My freedom. Those are the things I miss the most where I am now.

    Don’t be like me.

    Do better.

    Let something as simple—even silly—as Waffle House become a gateway. A reminder. An invitation to gratitude.

    Live with more presence. Choose more wisely. Love more deeply.

    Speak more freely—not with opinion masquerading as truth, but with emotional intelligence rooted in what truly matters. Not just to be heard—but to be known. Let your words carry truth, not ego. Let them build bridges, not burn them.

    Be better, while you still can.

    It’s never too late…

  • Lifted

    Lifted

    entry twelve — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. VSCO (A6 PRO) + DistressedFX + Lightroom (watermark only).

    There is a moment, early in a few blessed summer evenings, when the heat—the oppression—sighs and lets go.

    Not in protest, but in quiet surrender—the sun lingers, the sky softens, and a hush moves in with the rain.

    Steam rises like incense from the bones of the earth.

    You’ve felt that coveted shift.

    It’s not loud. Not showy. Just the heaviness loosening its grip on your ribs as breath returns without warning.

    This is how some battles end—

    Not with victory, but with survival.

    Not with a roar, but with a breeze.

    No fanfare—just rain through fractured light, and the ache leaving your body before you even know it’s gone.

    What remains?

    A field of yellow flowers—bent but blooming.

    Tired, but free.

    And air that smells like something holy—finally lifted.

    catacosmosis // 2025

  • Where Abundance Lives

    Where Abundance Lives

    It’s never been money or material success that has defined wealth for me.

    For most of my life, I chased meaning in moments loud enough to echo—grand gestures, perfect timing, outcomes wrapped in validation. But it was my most treacherous and grueling experiences—the ones that stripped me bare and rebuilt me from the soul up—that taught me something higher.

    They taught me to be still.

    To be quiet.

    To kneel at the altar of the subtle.

    A blurry cloud, simultaneously barely and boldly defining its own form, illuminated at just the right angle.

    Lumix GX7 + Lightroom (watermark only)

    A battered feather, found in the dead center of a forgotten dirt road, caught in evening light.

    Lumix GX7 + Lightroom (watermark only)

    The soft hush of trees at dusk, whispering the memories of the ghosts that still roam underneath them.

    Lumix GX7 + Lightroom (watermark only)

    This is abundance.

    There’s something sacred about catching these quiet offerings—the ones that ask for nothing but your presence. No performance. No hustle. Just your full attention. And I think that’s what I’ve been learning to fully morph into, slowly but surely, all my life.

    I’ve always been in love with nature, and over the past few years, I’ve begun to understand why—consciously, spiritually, viscerally:

    Nature doesn’t demand applause, but it offers everything to those who notice.

    Before caregiving and grief, nature called to me—quietly, consistently—and I always accepted her invitation to explore and to wonder. During caregiving, she became an escape. I retreated there as often as possible, weary and begging for rest that not even sleep could offer…and nature always obliged.

    Now? I don’t go to escape or to retreat, I don’t just visit. Nature meets me. Whether I’m deep in the woods or walking my yard…hiking a trail or running my neighborhood…now, I am always home.

    We live in a world trained to skim, to scroll, to monetize every breath of stillness. But this—this sky, this feather, this light that passes and never repeats—reminds me:

    Presence is the prize.

    It’s all around us, all the time, no matter where we are…but people don’t see it anymore. They no longer observe. Most have forgotten—that observation is a form of reverence. And reverence, when practiced daily, becomes a kind of homecoming.

    “Abundance is not found in money and material gain—at least, not for me. To me, it is found in nature’s unexpected surprises.”

    I wrote that in my memory while standing beneath the canopy of trees shared above as it held the last light of evening. There was no one else there. No applause. Just me, and the divine choreography of stillness.

    In that moment, nature herself invited me to remind you:

    If you’re searching for proof that you’re loved, that you belong, that there’s meaning woven through even the hardest days—

    Look up.

    Look closer.

    Be still.

    The abundance you’re looking for is already here.

    It’s been waiting for your eyes—and your heart— to land on it.

    Be present.

    Pay attention.

    Be observant.

    Your presence in the present matters.

    It’s where abundance lives.

    🪶💜✨

    catacosmosis // 2025

  • The Art of Being Alive

    The Art of Being Alive

    The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down you is the whole universe. (Alan Watts)

    📷 Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH
    🛠️ VSCO (06) + Lightroom (watermark only)

    The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves. (Alan Watts)

    📷 Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH
    🛠️ VSCO (06) + Lightroom (watermark only)

    I stood in the green hush, face to face with a bloom so intricate it felt like a secret whispered by the wild. The passionflower doesn’t need to perform. It simply is. Unapologetically strange. Beautifully complex. Alive.

    📷 Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH
    🛠️ VSCO (06) + Lightroom (watermark only)

    I thought of the two Alan Watts quotes I’ve included above, and I thought of my dead loved ones. This is what I want to remember:

    📷 Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH
    🛠️ VSCO (06) + Lightroom (watermark only)

    That being fully present—here, now, in the middle of whatever hurts or heals—is enough.

    That passion isn’t always loud.

    Sometimes, it curls quietly out of the forest and dares you to look closer.

    This is what death has taught me about life.

    I’m really grateful I stayed, after they were all gone.

    🪽💜✨

    catacosmosis // 2025

  • One Decade | Sanctum

    One Decade | Sanctum

    This image wasn’t meant to carry all this, but tonight, it does. It holds the rupture I didn’t know I’d been tiptoeing around all week.

    A decade ago today, my father died. Not on the 13th, when the machines started breathing for him—that was just when I knew he was gone. On the 18th, at this hour, the veil broke open for real. And now here I am—ten years later—haunted by dreams I couldn’t explain and a sudden stillness in my creativity I couldn’t shake.

    Until now.

    I thought I was just tired. Distracted. Stuck. But it was grief. It was reverence in disguise.

    My soul remembered the date even when my mind forgot. That’s the strange thing about grief that matures—it doesn’t scream anymore. It hums, low and holy, beneath everything. It clouds the light, then sharpens it. It takes your voice, then gives it back with new timbre.

    This image—originally photographed by Mikhail Nilov—became a sort of altar. I edited it using Mextures, VSCO, DistressedFX, and Lightroom, layering texture over color, blurring presence and absence, trying to capture what it feels like when sorrow doesn’t knock—it just saturates.

    Sanctum.

    There’s chaos in this. Petals and light blurred through glass and rain. Beauty you can’t quite hold. A yellow rose—like the ones we laid at his grave—folding in on itself. A daisy, centered in clarity, yet surrounded by blur.

    That’s what this night feels like. Clarity in the middle of confusion. Stillness in the swirl.

    Earlier tonight, as I outlined these words in my head while I felt my way through the shift I felt in real-time in the energy, I said to myself:

    “You didn’t lose your creativity. You’re in holy pause. This isn’t numbness—it’s reverence. You were unconsciously grieving a resurrection-day anniversary, and your spirit bowed its head before your body could even name the loss.”

    And now, I feel it even more deeply: Tonight isn’t for making things happen. It’s for honoring what already did.

    Tonight is for prayer—prayer and intercession not only over the souls of loved ones who have already crossed over, but over one very important soul who’s still here. One who I know doesn’t understand why I had to go.

    The truth is, those crossed over souls didn’t leave to hurt me…even though it did. They left because it was time. That was my burden to bear. The lessons they left me with were my responsibility to sort through, clean up, and learn.

    Likewise, I didn’t leave the living out of anger or rejection, or even lack of love. I left because God Himself guided me in a different direction, even if they didn’t want to go that way, or grow that way, too. I will never have a choice above God. And I know that hurts…it hurts me, too.

    Forgiveness is an ongoing action, reflected not in words but in the quiet practice of letting go. The love is, and always will be, unconditional. “Anyway love” always is. And my soul will carry a piece of all of their souls within it. Always.

    A lot of things are coming full circle for me tonight. Invisible messages carried by unseen energies are releasing a kind of clarity within me—one of deeper substance and fuller understanding, puzzles pieces arriving and falling into place in a way I’ve never experienced before. The spiritual warfare, the dreams full of ghosts, the aching grief—none of that is new. But the understanding I have tonight…it reaches deeper than anything I’ve ever touched before.

    Tonight isn’t for sorting through the rubble, cleaning up the floors of my memory, or putting all the lessons learned into neat little compartments in my mind. After all, I’ve already been processing through that, and slowly overcoming it all, for some time now.

    No, tonight isn’t for being swallowed by the hauntings of my own heart. Tonight is for letting grief rain gently through the window, washing my soul—and watching how even the blur, when looked at with love and patience, can be textured out, shaped into a symbolic snapshot in time—capturing both the beauty and the chaos—and become art.

    It is the emblem of the closure of what has, all at once, been the most painful and the most beautiful decade of my life: the one where, in the end, I finally met God.

    I speak the name of Jesus over you
    In your hurting, in your sorrow
    I will ask my God to move
    I speak the name ’cause it’s all that I can do
    In desperation, I’ll seek Heaven
    And pray this for you:

    I pray for your healing
    That circumstances will change
    I pray that the fear inside will flee in Jesus name
    I pray that a breakthrough
    Would happen today
    I pray miracles over your life in Jesus name
    I pray for revival
    For restoration of faith
    I pray that the dead will come alive in Jesus name

    In Jesus name…

    -Katy Nichole, In Jesus Name (God Of Possible)

  • A Reminder to Self (But We ALL Need It)

    A Reminder to Self (But We ALL Need It)

    Reminder to self:

    Disconnection makes you stop reflecting and start reacting. It’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because you’re lost in the noise.

    Disconnection from awareness breeds reactivity. Connection with awareness invites response.

    📷 Shot handheld with Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH.
    🛠️ VSCO (06, 2.5) + Lightroom (clarity +7 + watermark).

    When you’re connected, you pause. You listen, and ask better questions. You observe your own patterns, and stop attacking or blaming others for theirs.

    When you’re connected, you become a space of calm in a world of storms rather than another disruptive, destructive wave in a sea of chaos.

    When you forget how to listen inward, when you stop grounding in self-awareness, you lose your anchor.

    Check yourself before you wreck yourself. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being aware.

    Pause, and come back to yourself.

    Reconnect, and become the clarity you’ve been searching for.

    Remain connected, and become the clarity that helps to guide others home.

    🕊️💜✨