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.
Looking down at those leaves, loosened from their season, clinging by the thinnest threads of stem… I see myself. They hover over moving water, suspended between staying and letting go, their edges softened and pulled apart by the trembling creek. The surface never stills long enough for clarity; it stretches every familiar thing into wavering uncertainty.
Since watching my teenage son slip backward, words he’d owned suddenly foreign in his mouth, routines he’d mastered dissolving overnight, and since the autism label arrived with its chorus of “you should have pushed harder, earlier, medicated sooner,” this is where I live:
Perched on a fragile edge, tangled in reflections I can’t seize, balancing on a stem that thins a little each day. I haven’t fallen, but I feel the current waiting to carry me off, a motion I never chose and can never control.
I have experienced sickness, the trauma of caregiving, the many horrors of diseases I pray not one of you ever meet in your life, death and loss and funerals… the last decade of my life has been a nightmare with beautiful trimmings. But of all the moments of utter lost-ness and grief during those experiences (a description which puts it lightly, in fact), this is the most difficult and complicated and heart-wrenching thing I have ever experienced in my life. Not my son, but battling a system far worse than the one I last met two years ago, with his Godfather. Pediatric medicine in the US in 2026.
His therapists and specialists tell me love wasn’t enough and never will be. I still think it was the only thing that kept us both from drowning.
I’m not sure what this blog, or other art sharing platforms, will look like for me in 2026 (let’s be real – when have I ever?), That’s why I have yet to write the yearly “first post.” So, tonight I begin the year with this, with the truth and with reality:
I don’t know what lies ahead, but I do know who is driving. I thank God daily it’s not me, but Him.
Not because it was an easy year. Personally, it has been a year of intermittent, great difficulty. The most challenging thing has been the unexpected diagnosis for my son – this, alongside compound grief that included more than death, and varying massive changes to daily life.
It was a year of seemingly ceaselessly reorganizing, reframing, recalibrating, and managing circumstances and emotions for all of us, at different levels – while continuing to show up every day whether forward progress was visible or not.
For me and my family, it has been a year of awesome trial and challenge. At times, a battle with doubt. Always, a falling back into and onto faith. And so, regardless, peace.
It has obviously not been a year of peace in the way the word is usually used. Not peace because the world was quiet or gentle or healed. The world, broadly speaking, has been at war in myriad ways. Loudly. Relentlessly. At times, blatantly resisting.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Multiply)
The world suffers only because it engages. Because it resists reality, which is that the only truth is love. And the world does not understand love, or much else, as it truly exists or is meant to behave or work.
The world struggles only because it consents to the noise, the fear, the constant pull toward reaction, and because it values personal comfort and ego over soul.
2025 was, cosmically, a 9 year. A year of endings. Of completion. Of letting things finish instead of dragging them forward out of habit, guilt, or fear. A year of cleaning up.
A year of letting go. A year of allowing what was already done to actually be done. There is a strange, almost holy peace that comes with that kind of self-honesty.
2026 rolls into a 10, or a 1 year. A reset. New beginnings. A slate wiped well and fully clean, whether we are ready for it or not. Our inner secrets and shadows brought into the light. Truths revealed that can no longer be denied, avoided, reframed, or buried.
It is going to be a hell of a year, personally and collectively. Not because it is cruel, but because it is clarifying.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Hard Light)
Every time I share what I see, thus expect to see going forward, simply by paying attention and quietly experiencing (as I have above), people tend to squash it. Dismiss it. Explain it away. Excuse it away. Laugh it away. That is fine. Squash this too, if you must or need to.
But I speak only what needs to be heard, not what is comfortable:
Do not fight it, whatever the “it” is at any given moment for you. Do not engage with the distractions. Do not take the bait.
Do not allow society, media, or collective panic to manipulate you into believing that this manufactured “reality” is solid, fixed, or inevitable. Most of it is noise. Most of it only has power because we keep feeding it our attention and our fear.
Peace lives on the other side of that misconception.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Screen)
Not passive peace. Not numbness. Not spiritual bypassing or pretending everything is fine. Real peace. The kind that comes from clarity. From discernment. From choosing where your energy actually belongs.
Choosing these readily available alternatives, through mindfulness and conscious being, through choosing God/Soul over self and ego, is the only reason such an exceedingly difficult year was not merely laced with peace, but filled with it for me.
I hope and pray that you find and live in peace in 2026. Your own peace, first and foremost. Because that has to come first. That is what matters before it can ever combine, ripple outward, and become something shared. Collective peace is built from individual truth, not the other way around.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
(Matthew 5:3–10)
One important note, since this is so often misunderstood:
“Peacemakers” does not mean peacekeepers.
It does not mean avoiding conflict. It does not mean keeping things comfortable, quiet, or polite. It means actively making peace. Often at cost. Often through truth. Often through disruption, reconciliation, and righteousness.
Peace is not the absence of tension. It is the presence of integrity.
entry nineteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + Mextures + VSCO
There’s a softness to this kind of morning light… the kind that slips in without ceremony and still manages to uncover what the heart has tried to tuck away. The silhouettes stand like witnesses, thin and unassuming, yet somehow they hold the whole ache of the season.
And maybe this the truest gift of December: that almost nothing blooms, yet everything speaks.
The sky daily turns itself into a quiet oracle, whispering that even in the stripped-back places, even in the stark-cold bare and in-between, there is still beauty gathering itself at the edges, waiting to rise every morning with the sun.
entry sixteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
iPhone 17 Pro + VSCO + DistressedFX + Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).
Evening gathers in a bluish-purple hush, and the crunch of dirt and rock seems to echo around me. Steadily and with intention, I put one foot in front of the other.
The birds fall silent, and the wind begins its quiet work. Loosening what I’ve held too tightly. Lifting the thin, trembling pieces of me that never settled into place.
They rise like seeds learning the shape of their own release, drifting out of me in a soft unspooling. The silhouette remains. Stem, leaf, the stark line of what endures. Everything lighter unthreads itself into motion.
What once felt like a tangle becomes a brief choreography, a small mercy in the dimming light. Loss, I’m learning, is sometimes only a shifting of weight.
The wind carries the rest. The jumbled thoughts. The old ache. The unspoken sentences that kept circling my ribs. Let them scatter. Let them drift beyond reach.
What stays is quieter, but honest. A rooted shape against the fading sky, held together not by certainty, but by the simple grace of letting go.
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.
There’s a quiet kind of healing that happens when no one is watching. It doesn’t perform. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need a platform. That is where I was when I was away—not just from social media, but from this space and this blog.
A young woman named Jillian, in a YouTube video I stumbled across recently, captured this so simply and so beautifully: what life looks and feels like when you’ve stepped away from social media—and stayed away long enough to actually notice the difference. What struck me most, though, was hearing her perspective as someone going through this process for the first time.
It’s lived in my thoughts and I’ve contemplated this post ever since. It was so interesting to me because I’ve taken breaks from the internet many times over the past two decades, always for the same reasons—and always with this same depth of understanding about the psychology of it, and why those breaks were necessary.
This most recent (and longest) season of removal hit different. After the last caregiving stretch, after Roshi Ralph’s death, after the silence that came when others (who had no real understanding of the compound caregiving and loss I’d just lived through—and in many cases, never will) rushed in with attacks and projections and judgments, as if my grief was theirs to dissect—I pulled all the way back. And I’ve stayed back.
I’ve stayed away from social media not because I needed a break, but because I reached the point where it just doesn’t matter to me. The truth is, it never really did. The performance of it all—the curated personas, the noise, the performative alliances, the hollow outrage, the likes-as-validation—means less than nothing. I never played the game anyway, and when I tried to be real, I was punished for it—called out for oversharing instead of respected for being honest. So now, I simply choose not to engage.
That’s the decision, and it’s permanent. I stick to my own space—my blog(s)—now. I share some of my creative work on YouTube and Instagram, but I don’t engage socially. The work is there for anyone who wishes to enjoy it, just like my writing: simply because I’ve made it—and it feels like a waste to let it collect digital dust on my hard drive or memory cards. That’s it.
And what I’ve learned—what I’ve earned—is this:
Own your own thoughts. Own your own opinions. Stop looking to the crowd to inform you of what you feel, believe, or need. If you want to share your truth, explore your voice, or process your experience—do it in your own space. Even if that space is digital.
Quiet is not the same as silent. Solitude is not absence. Privacy is not erasure. And just because the crowd isn’t clapping doesn’t mean the work isn’t working—or that it’s not sacred, necessary, and deeply alive.
A hike on Flagg Mountain.Flagg Mountain is part of Weogufka State Forest.My favorite place in these woods……is where you’ll find my favorite tree (a post all about her is coming soon).A few photos from where I’ve been this past year, instead of online…
Mirrors, Screens, and Silent Knowing: Personal Reflections after Watching Jillian’s Journey
Part One: The Slowness That Saves You
Jillian talked about how, in the silence of that first year offline, she realized she wasn’t who she thought she was. That her sense of self had been filtered through algorithms and aesthetics for so long that she didn’t know what parts were her and what parts were just performance.
She said she didn’t want to be a cottagecore girl, or a vanilla-beach-aesthetic girl, or even a tomato queen—she just wanted to be Jillian. And that’s what life offline gave her space to rediscover: the Jillian aesthetic. Not a genre. Not a trend. A person.
That kind of reclamation doesn’t happen in front of a ring light. It happens when you’re still. When the feedback loop breaks. When your body and soul finally stop bracing for the next notification, the next birthday story repost, the next dopamine drip that doesn’t land right.
She didn’t pretend her life suddenly looked different. In fact, she said:
“Does my life look any different from this… to this? No. But how I live is what’s different.”
That line stuck with me because it’s the same thing I’ve experienced. The world outside didn’t change. The people didn’t change. The pain didn’t vanish. But something in me stopped handing over power to what others might think—or worse, what they might not think if I didn’t stay visible.
Part Two: The Real Cynicism Is a Smile That Lies
There was a comment I wrote recently in response to someone who was tired—tired of being called negative for telling the truth. Tired of being cast as cynical for not dressing pain up as purpose. I told them this:
“People will call the truth pessimism and negativity because they’ve either never seen true rock bottom—or they’ve never experienced it (yet).”
Because the people who have known real loss, real chaos, real collapse?
We don’t need false light. We need real clarity.
That’s why toxic positivity is so insidious—it masquerades as hope, but it’s really just fear dressed in bright colors. It says: Don’t go there. Don’t feel that. Don’t name it. But the truth? The truth sits with the mess. The truth makes a chair for the grief and the rage and the complexity and says: stay as long as you need.
“It’s madness to try to be sane in this crazed world… You can just quietly speak your truth.”
That’s it right there. That’s why I’m not interested in “engaging” anymore, and why I’ve stopped posting where people feel entitled to misunderstand. This world has enough noise. Enough image management. Enough hollow back-patting in the name of “support.”
Part Three: Stillness Is Not Stagnation
Jillian said she thought she was going to return to social media after a year. She even looked forward to it. She imagined her big return, her “look how I’ve changed” content. But then the new year rolled around… and she didn’t want to go back. Because the more she paid attention to her real life—the one where she wasn’t performing for anyone—the less she needed to curate it.
That’s a shift I understand at a soul level.
Sometimes we don’t need reinvention. We need to not be witnessed for a while, so we can see ourselves clearly again.
And no, it doesn’t mean becoming some pure, evolved aesthetic monk who never has insecure days. Jillian was honest about that too—she still compares timelines, still feels the pressure. But she said something I think most people miss:
“I still have those moments. But I’m learning. And that’s enough. I’m having a great time.”
A great time—not because everything is perfect, but because she’s present. Because she’s not outsourcing her attention, affection, or identity anymore. And because she gave herself the gift of being nobody for a while, so she could become somebody real again.
Closing Thoughts: Your Life, Your Lens
So no—this isn’t a how-to guide. This isn’t a five-step digital detox plan. This is just a reflection on what it means to live inward in a world obsessed with being outward.
It’s a reminder that your worth isn’t measured in visibility. That your healing doesn’t have to be documented to be real. That privacy isn’t a lack of connection—it’s a form of spiritual hygiene.
Social media isn’t evil. But it’s not sacred, either. Use it if it serves your soul. Leave it if it steals your peace. And if you ever wonder whether your absence would be noticed, ask this instead:
“Would I still feel whole if no one saw me for a while?”
If the answer is no, then maybe it’s time to come home to yourself—quietly and on purpose.
catacosmosis 