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.
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
Fall is already upon us. Nature seems to have gotten ahead of itself in recent weeks and the world around me, from my backyard to the vast wilderness, has already begun to experience the cycles of death and decay that the fall season brings to prepare us to enter a season of rest.
I’ve found myself meditating on this as I’ve observed the process and explored the details of it with my camera lately. Here are some of the fruits of these meditations — especially the ones I experienced while studying this little corner of my backyard that has been unseasonably filled with the tiniest but cutest mushrooms.
We so often use falling leaves as the symbol of letting go in autumn — but mushrooms tell another side of the story. They are decay in action, the hidden transformation beneath the surface, breaking down what once was so that life can be nourished again. They remind me that endings are not passive; they are active processes of renewal, just as necessary as the more obvious metaphors we tend to notice.
What follows in this post may not feel “light and pretty,” but the deeper work is still life-giving. Much of it was born from reviewing and processing my recently captured mushroom images — small, humble, not glamorous, yet quietly essential. These considerations and introspections, though they may seem less than inviting, have at their core offered me encouragement.
When you strip away the politics, money, and power structures, what you’re left with is a spiritual war. That’s the root of it all.
The “deep state,” the “new world order,” whatever names we slap on it in the 3D — those are just costumes. The real battle is what Paul described in Ephesians 6:
“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world, and spiritual wickedness in high places.”
In short, demonic and low-level forces that have always tried to mimic, distort, and overthrow the authority of God.
From Babel to Babylon to Rome to today, it’s the same rebellion recycled. Every empire that tries to erase God ends up becoming a shadow play of Babel — the same arrogance, the same lust for control, and the same inevitable collapse. The schemes shift form — empire, propaganda, deception, perversion — but the spirit behind them hasn’t changed.
It’s the same old serpent trying to counterfeit creation and place itself on the throne. But here’s the thing you need to remember, if you are of the light:
Humans can choose to align with that darkness or resist it. That’s why it looks like whole institutions, movements, or leaders are “possessed” by this agenda. But the truth is, they’re vessels. Some willingly, some blindly. And even when people align with darkness, they are never the true source of its power — and they are never beyond God’s reach if they repent of and rebuke the darkness.
The vessels may change, but the spirit behind them is the same counterfeit. It’s not their power. It’s borrowed power, and because the Devil is a trickster and a liar, it cannot outlast the sovereignty of Source truth.
That’s why, in the light of evil tragedy, the instinct to pray “God bless and protect” is attacked and pushed down so brazenly by some, and depended upon and held on to so tightly by others. The only way for the dark to win is to try to sniff out the light.
The only shield that stands against the dark, though, isn’t more politics, more anger, or more fleshly fight — it’s divine covering. That’s why light beings, from Buddha to Jesus, called us salt and light — because no matter how deep the night gets, even the smallest flame cannot be overcome.
Light exposes. Truth cuts through lies. And no empire, no “order,” no demonic hierarchy driving human ego has ever been able to out-rule the Source of the Universe: Love.
The darkness may rage, but it has already lost. Its decay is inevitable. Our task is not to fear its noise, but to keep carrying the light that cannot be extinguished.
if you are only just beginning to see the reality of this battle and sense that light, do not be afraid of how small it may seem in you. Even the faintest flicker is enough to drive back the dark. Nurture it. Walk with it. Let it steady your steps.
The path may feel unfamiliar, but you are not walking it alone. Every spark joins the greater flame, and together we rise.
Keep going — the light you carry is already proof that the darkness has not won.
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.
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.
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.
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.
entry nine — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
Weevil (Meibomeus musculus), a quiet laborer of the forest and the fields…carrying the weight of being, petal by petal. Vision: Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S. Tools: VSCO (KP3), Mextures (personalized texture formula: QBHASZK), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).
There is a kind of presence that doesn’t announce itself.
No sound. No shimmer. No need to be noticed. Just a body doing what it does.
Clinging to a petal, breathing the moment, belonging to the quiet. Sometimes, that is the work.
Not saving, not proving. Just being.
And somehow…it shifts the entire forest, the entire field.
For some souls, there is a burden in being seen —not the fear of visibility, but the ache of being misread when presence itself was the offering.
catacosmosis 