Tag: nature

  • 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.

  • December Sunrise

    December Sunrise

    entry eighteen — 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.

  • 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.

  • Lovely Dead Crap

    Lovely Dead Crap

    It’s that time again – #lovelydeadcrap season.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX

    As most of you know, I have a strong familiarity with death and its unfolding, especially in humans, and a fondness for and kinship with death and dead things, all in the most holy, positive and beautiful sense… in the way one honors the combined soul and humanity of a teacher they have come to not only respect but to understand to such a depth that they recognize in them a truly kindred spirit.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX

    Endings speak a language I have learned well: honest, unpretentious, and oddly comforting once you understand and accept that there is no escaping them. In fall and winter, I find that endings, at least in nature, also make for the most interesting and oddly beautiful subjects. Therefore, prepare to be lovingly spammed with my perspectives and perceptions. 😌

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX

    Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here.

    — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

    xo…

  • 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…

  • Winnow

    Winnow

    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.

  • 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

  • Things Unseen

    Things Unseen

    entry fourteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    Lumix GX7 + VSCO (A9Pro) + DistressedFX + Lightroom (watermark only).

    Have you ever been sitting in the woods, in the quiet and minding your own business , just breathing it all in, when out of nowhere the birds seem to spring into motion?

    One moment, they’re scattered through the trees, singing softly into the hush; the next, they take flight as one, their calls vanishing into a deathly silence. All that remains is the trembling of wings and the echo of something unspoken moving through the air.

    It’s strange how quickly stillness can shift, how a single gust or unseen presence can ripple through an entire forest. You can feel it, even if you can’t name it. The temperature drops, the light changes, and the ordinary world folds itself back like a curtain.

    And then you’re left sitting there, swallowed by wonder. Not fear, not exactly, but that beautiful, unnerving awareness that something else is here. Something wild and watching.

    For days afterward, it stays with you, that soundless moment when the forest seemed to remember itself. It makes you question what else is living in the margins, what other forms of life or spirit move just beyond the limits of our hearing.

    I think that’s when I understood that silence is not absence. It’s presence, waiting to be known.

    The forest wasn’t empty. It was full of attention.

    💜🐦‍⬛🪽

    catacosmosis // 2025

  • Vesper

    Vesper

    📷 iPhone 7 Plus.
    ⚒️ VSCO (06, +3) + Lightroom (watermark only).
    entry thirteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.

    There is a moment every single day when golden hour gives way to blue hour. In that moment, the world pauses between heartbeats.

    The warmth of the sun hasn’t fully left, but it’s fading, slipping behind the horizon while the cool hues of twilight begin to take hold. For a few fleeting minutes, everything softens. The light is neither day nor night; it’s an in-between realm where time seems to hold its breath.

    Shadows stretch. The air shifts. The gold turns to amber, then to lavender, then to blue, a slow dissolving of one truth into another. It’s the day’s last whisper and the night’s first sigh, a moment that belongs to no one and everyone at once.

    Most people miss it. But for those who are still and detached from the noise of the world enough to notice, it feels like standing at the seam of two worlds – the visible and the unseen – the known and the infinite, as light gently hands the sky over to darkness.

    If I were still as attached to the idea of controlled outcomes as I used to be, I’d still not know it exists… much less recognize it and be aware enough to take it’s photo as it occurs.

    This is the product – nay, the gift – of mindfulness. 🧘

    Detachment is not that you own nothing.
    Detachment is that nothing owns you.
    —Bhagavad Gita 2.47

    catacosmosis // 2025