entry twenty one — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Final Edit)
Sometimes it feels like there is a different, almost literal space between seconds. A pause the world does not announce.
There is intimacy in those spaces. Love. Beauty. A kind of quiet permission.
There is me, and the moon, and what I remember without remembering. Something about home. Something about spirit. Something about soul.
In those spaces, which turn into a place, then into awareness, then into something conscious without warning, I find myself again. Not arriving. Not searching. Just remembering how to be.
It feels like standing in a doorway I have crossed a thousand times but cannot name. Familiar without history. Known without proof.
And always, even when I wish it were not so, there she is too.
There are all of them. The pieces of my life that have already returned to Source, leaving me here to feel them but never hold them, to love without helping, to remember without any hope of their human realities returning.
Home, not as a location, but as a frequency. And for a moment, I am inside it.
catacosmosis // 2026
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Final Edit)iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Textures Only)iPhone 17 Pro (Original, shot with ProCamera)
entry twenty — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + VSCO
At first glance, it looks like the night sky. Stars caught in dark water, light splintered and scattered across a depth that won’t quite give itself away. But it isn’t the sky.
It’s dead things in the night, drifting on reflections. What’s beneath them still visible in places, obscured in others, the creek bed watching quietly through the murk.
This is what avoidance looks like.
We tell ourselves we are being practical. Responsible. Efficient. We say we can’t afford to stay. That we don’t have the time. That the weight would crush us if we lingered too long in the place where everything ended.
Sometimes those things are true. But truth has layers, and there is always another one underneath the one we say out loud.
I didn’t leave because I couldn’t manage it. I left because staying would have required me to face the finality of it all… and I wasn’t ready to let it be final unless I controlled the ending.
So I doubled down.
If this was the last chapter, I would slam the book shut myself. Sell the house. Let it go. Never look back. Shut myself away from it in the fullest, most tangible way that I could. And I did.
Except that isn’t how grief works. Not in real life. Not in spirit. Not in the psyche or the heart.
What we try to bury doesn’t disappear. What we try to drown learns how to breathe underwater. The things we refuse to look at don’t stop existing. They just wait.
They become shapes beneath the surface. Creek monsters tucked under rocks. Ghouls that don’t announce themselves, only shift when the light hits the water just right.
Running feels like relief at first. It masquerades as strength. As forward motion. As survival.
But it isn’t courage. It isn’t healing. And it certainly isn’t wisdom. It is postponement.
Eventually, the piper comes.
This winter has been that reckoning for me. A season of stillness I didn’t choose, where the water stopped moving long enough for everything to rise.
Regret. Guilt. Shame. The ache of what I didn’t tend to when I still had the chance.
It has been heavy.
But I am here. And I am mid-process of the exhumation.
Instead of running, I am learning (again) to release. To let what I tried to sink float to the surface. To watch it drift, or linger, or soften and break apart with time. To observe rather than flee. To witness rather than erase.
Because drowning it never made it disappear. It only darkened the water.
There is grace even here. Fractured, scattered, refracted through loss, but still light. Still honest. Still mine, in memory and in soul.
I sold my childhood home, and I regret it. Not because it is gone, but because I believed distance could undo what shaped me. It couldn’t. I didn’t forget it. I didn’t erase it. And now I face the ghost of it… even if I must do so from far, far away.
Haze blurs his profile. I grip the thin stem of hope. Current keeps moving.
I came across this photo from a camping/hiking weekend in December 2018 this morning, and it opened something in me… or awakened it.
In the photo, the woods are one giant lens flare: the late-fall sun punches clean holes in the canopy, throws every leaf into over-saturated neon, while the creek becomes a mirror so sharp you feel you could step through it into another forest.
That’s what this last year with my son has been doing to the dial inside me. Faith cranked so high it hums, reality just as loud, and me caught in the bright slash between. I used to soften one side or the other: pray the hard parts dimmer, work until the wonder felt manageable. But the creek refuses to choose between glare and reflection; it holds both, lets them ricochet until you can’t tell which side of the surface is real.
I can see now that I am – or prefer to be – the creek. I practice that same double exposure of my roles, but it has all blurred and blinded me in recent days. In reality, all it adds up to is the fierce mother part of me – scheduling therapies, ordering visual timers, and trying to learn an entirely new language that has no words – and the gentler, whole me. The part of me that still leaves room for hope and comfort in the impossible color of his laugh when a dragonfly lands on his sleeve.
Balance isn’t compromise; it’s letting the light stay blinding and the shadows stay knife-edged, trusting the picture only makes sense when neither is edited out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
catacosmosis 