“So you think you’re an artist, but you haven’t been to art school?”
Well, then yes. You are.
That’s exactly the right mindset — especially if you’re building skill and intuition at the same time.
I say this both as a person with a Master’s in Arts (which I mention only to say, “I’ve been through your system, I know how it works, and I still reject the gatekeeping!”), and as an absolutely NON-PROFESSIONAL, non-conforming artist who also rarely shares any of their actual work:
You’re not just “playing artist,” and being recognized as one is not the point. Those people trying to convince you of anything otherwise are wrong.
Whatever you’re creating is absolutely valid.
Don’t let anyone — especially those offering discouraging, destructive feedback rather than genuine critique — convince you otherwise. Just because some believe the creative or applied arts diploma they hold in one hand somehow validates the brush or pencil they hold in their other, along with the harsh judgments and negative opinions they’re vomiting all over you, doesn’t make it the truth.
Regardless of who you are or where and how you learn, when you approach art as both a learning experience and an emotionally expressive therapy, you’re doing it right — not failing. You’re not just slopping paint on paper, scribbling in a sketchbook, or gluing down collage scraps at random.
The difference is night and day — especially with watercolor (the medium I see people abandon most) — when you’re doing things like:
• Consciously learning the muscle memory for how each brush moves.
• Recognizing how the spring, belly, and tip affect water control.
• Having fewer “happy accidents” and more intentional effects
Painting is not just the act of moving pigment across a surface. It is the deliberate conversation between your hand, your tools, and your vision. It’s problem-solving in real time, learning how water, pigment, and paper (or canvas) respond to each other, and adjusting with both skill and instinct.
It’s as much about restraint as it is about expression, and as much about observation as creation. When you understand that, every stroke becomes intentional, even in your loosest, most playful work.
Watercolor especially rewards this kind of discipline because it’s less forgiving than acrylic or oil. You can’t just pile on more paint to hide a mistake — in a way, you have to work in reverse.
No medium, but especially watercolor, is as easy as “the professionals” make it look. But if you keep going, keep learning, and keep focusing on technique and purpose — no matter what the art-school elite try to tell you — the control you gain over water, pigment, and paper will make even your loose, expressive or abstract work stronger. It will be loose or abstract by choice, not necessity.
That deep dive into technique is probably why so many of you express so often how your art process is helping you mentally and emotionally, and why many artists pick up a pen, pencil, or brush in the first place. It’s meditative — but also empowering — to know exactly what your tools can do.
So keep learning. Keep practicing. Keep playing! Keep a balance between the fun and the serious aspects. Sure, we all appreciate skill and technique. But what is the point if it’s just a job and not a fun expressive process with purpose?
Nobody owns art as a process — and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they’re not talking about art. It’s still a free world, regardless of how it may seem on the surface and no matter what the uppity, judgmental types try to say.
Keep making art. Because your kind of art — the kind that comes from soul combined with technique rather than straight line, hard rules — is what art should still be all about.
There’s this list — never written down in one place, but always hanging over me like the hum of an old fluorescent light. It’s made of things that should be straightforward:
Back up the photos.
Untangle the art supplies.
Organize the sketchbooks.
Move the ideas from my head to a place they can breathe.
Put the words onto the pages.
Clean the brushes.
Organize the books.
Organize the ideas.
But they are never straightforward. Not for me. Not for anyone whose mind has a thousand open windows and refuses to shut them just because the world prefers tidy blinds.
Society has found a name for this: ADD. ADHD. Neurodivergence. The diagnosis may be true for some, but here’s what I believe — it’s not a flaw. It’s the original wiring of the artist, the philosopher, the restless creative soul. It’s the part of the mind that won’t collapse into the assembly-line cadence of “normal life.” And that refusal has always been a threat to the people who rely on compliance.
This is why so many people who are miserable in the 9–5 grind feel like they’re constantly drowning. They fight from one day to the next just to keep their priorities in order, forgetting things, feeling scattered, wondering why life feels like a treadmill they can’t get off. It’s not because they’re lazy or incapable — it’s because they’ve been convinced, by family, by school, by the whole machinery of society, that their purpose is something other than what their soul already knows it to be.
They’re creatives, not conformers. But they’ve spent their entire lives pouring all their energy into staying afloat in a stormy, chaotic sea they were never meant to swim in. And not only has the world’s rules kept them from living their purpose, they don’t even remember what that purpose is… and they certainly haven’t been taught how to manage or maintain reality as a creative.
The problem is, the tools that work for type A people don’t work for type B people — and vice versa. But the world, the powers that be? They don’t want any creatives to thrive. Why? Because thriving creatives don’t line their pockets, and they can’t control what they can’t contain.
By the late ’90s and early 2000s, the strategy had shifted. They started medicating us into focus, pressing Adderall into palms while preaching “Say no to drugs” in the same breath. It wasn’t just hypocrisy; it was the perfect kind of doublethink. They couldn’t get my generation — Gen X, especially — to trade curiosity for clock-punching, so they tried to sedate the wonder right out of us.
It had started long before my generation. From the ’60s onward, every decade had its rebellion, but something about our era cracked the pattern wide open. We remembered how to slip back into our creative current, to say — without apology — that the system wasn’t built for us, and we weren’t going to rewire ourselves to suit it.
The boomer generation fell for it enough to punch the clock and hold the grind in both hands. But my generation? The ones who were school-aged in the ’80s and especially high school/college aged in the ’90s, raised as latchkey kids, left to our own devices? We had just enough space to keep our own ideas and double down on our self-expression. We rejected the rhetoric outright, but we still had the foundational work ethic, the grit, the stubborn drive to show up.
Unfortunately, that refusal was met with more control, more noise. By 2012, the hum had become a low, constant pressure. By 2016, the unexpected and unorthodox split the air like lightning, and nothing went back to sleep after that. By 2020 — and certainly by 2022 — largely thanks to Covid (which I will forever believe was a purposeful attempt to tighten the reins of control), the result wasn’t the obedience they hoped for. It was the opposite. People were waking up in numbers that mattered.
And here we are. And here I am.
Sitting with a computer that holds hundreds of gigabytes of uncataloged photographs, each one a memory or a moment, all of them waiting for me to find them a home, if not on someone’s wall then in beautiful posts they can enjoy on their computer screens. Art supplies scattered in a way that makes them impossible to ignore and yet impossible to start sorting. Projects that live half in the physical world and half in my head, where they multiply faster than any app or planner could contain.
Digital tools have not tamed the chaos — they’ve only given it better hiding places. They’ve bred a new kind of loathing, a quieter form of procrastination and lethargy, one that makes the struggles of pre-technology life feel almost romantic in hindsight — like a fairy tale we didn’t know we were living, a beautiful dream we only learned to miss once it was gone.
This morning, I pulled a book from my shelf. It’s been there since Ralph died:
How to Be an Explorer of the World — Portable Art Life Museum.
I haven’t opened it yet. The title alone feels like someone has tossed me a rope, and I’m still deciding whether to pull. Even without turning a page, I intuitively, automatically know — as every creative does — what waits for me inside. The “Art” in the title has been struck through and replaced with “Life” for a reason: because that’s what it truly is. A reminder that we’re not here to live as curators of someone else’s museum, dusting off exhibits we never chose. We’re here to explore — to step into new rooms, to rearrange them until they make sense to us, to claim the space as our own.
And yet, here’s the truth I keep circling: maintenance is the perpetual loop where I always seem to get stuck.
Not the dreaming, not the making, but the keeping. The tending. The part where you have to hold the door open for what you’ve already made so it doesn’t fall apart while you’re off chasing the next thing. Somewhere in the tug-of-war between vision and upkeep, I drop threads. And when enough threads fall, the rest of my life starts tangling with them — homeschooling, daily meals, the way the pantry and the jumble of household chores scribbled on random scraps of paper looks like a metaphor for my brain.
This is the quiet battle no one talks about: how to keep creating without losing the things you’ve already created. How to tend your work without caging your mind. How to make room for the next idea without letting the last one turn to dust.
For people like us, maintenance is never just maintenance. It’s a negotiation between the world’s idea of order and the wild way our minds are built to move. And maybe the truth is that we aren’t the ones in need of repair.
Maybe the wiring was never the problem. Maybe it’s the world that’s broken.
And what does all of this lead to? Yet another idea tossed onto the pile: maybe I should explore it in an in-depth series of articles here.
Ha.
For now, though, here’s a brief gallery of shots of my favorite tree — the oldest in my state, and one I’ve found myself referencing often lately. A couple are completely blown out. One feels especially dull to me. But while they may seem ordinary, even boring, to the casual observer, my passion for this incredible 400+ year-old short-leaf pine runs deeper than any skill or lens could ever capture.
And that’s exactly the point — this tree is the living embodiment of what I’ve been trying to say above. The uncreative soul may never understand the pull, the quiet reverence, or the way beauty lives in the details that can’t be measured or monetized. But to those who do understand, no explanation is needed.
I hope you enjoy these images as much as I enjoyed the process of shooting and processing them.
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.
It’s as important as perspective. Perhaps even more so…
We talk so much about perspective—about changing our view, reframing the story, finding the silver lining in the storm cloud.
But sometimes, perspective doesn’t shift easily.
Sometimes, circumstance leaves you standing exactly where you’ve always stood. The view is the same. The light hits the same edges. The shadows fall in familiar places.
But even when the scene remains unchanged…the focal point doesn’t have to.
Focus is a choice.
A sacred, stubborn one.
It’s the difference between staring at the problem and noticing the petal behind it.
It’s where your attention lands, and where your energy follows.
It’s learning to zoom in on grace even when grief is still in the frame.
And with that subtle shift, a new vision — a new truth— came forward.
Almost always—including in life, and despite circumstance—the best composition doesn’t come from changing the scene but from learning which part of it to focus on.
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)
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.
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
entry ten — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), a fading ember of late summer—graceful even in decay, still holding the shape of sunlight after the bloom has passed. Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A10PRO), Mextures (personalized texture formula: MEZPZZC), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).
My mother always told me, in every possible circumstance a child might ever need encouragement, “Do your best, and leave the rest. It’ll all come right some day or night.”
It was a line from “Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell.”
She was a third grade teacher, a grammar Nazi, and a mother trying her damndest to connect with me and, well, do her best.
And, as ornery and difficult a young person as I could often be, she never knew that I believed her…
…even when I forgot I did.
Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), a fading ember of late summer—graceful even in decay, still holding the shape of sunlight after the bloom has passed. Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A10PRO), Mextures (personalized texture formula: MEZPZZC), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).
There was so much distance between us as I struggled through high school with her overbearing “sin obsessed” guidance, and she struggled to save my soul.
Even when the days were so long, when they bled into each other, and when the nights felt like punishments I hadn’t earned, as her brain and body were swallowed by Alzheimer’s.
Even when the thread broke, or maybe I cut it, when she died…I honored and nursed a clean, holy wound in the shape of freedom for both of us, from past grievances, from debts yet unpaid, from fear, from tension, from aching hearts and confused minds and the evils of that horrific disease.
Still, that line stayed, like a soft breath. Like a healing balm. Like the part of her that couldn’t leave, because it lived in me.
Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), a fading ember of late summer—graceful even in decay, still holding the shape of sunlight after the bloom has passed. Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A10PRO), Mextures (personalized texture formula: MEZPZZC), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).
Do your best. Not more than that. Not perfection. Just presence. I tried, truly.
Leave the rest… The story. The tragedy. The one who couldn’t stay.
catacosmosis 