Yesterday, I went shooting. I collected over 1,500 photographs in a single morning.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been that focused, that immersed in the creative energy that sustains me. It felt good to be so deeply aligned with The Flow—Nature’s and God’s flow, not mine, not anyone else’s.
For hours upon hours, I alternated exploration and randomly sitting still with nature, and with my favorite tree—the oldest documented in my state—for a long time. I quietly observed every detail, inner and outer, letting my mind wander and my spirit settle.
So long, in fact, the chiggers are still feasting on me. A worthy price, though, for what was finally made clear to me—the missing puzzle piece that’s been keeping me from being able to help others fully grasp my perspective when I talk about grounding and meditation:
It’s not about escaping the body, 3D reality, or floating above your life. It’s not about leaving. Healthy, true meditation is the opposite of escape.
Meditation is about stillness, observation, and rooting in. It’s about grounding into the physical body, and the earth itself, consciously connecting with both.
It’s about sinking into the body—not running from it. Anything rooted in “escape” isn’t meditation. At any spiritual or energetic level, escapism is a cop-out. Worse, it’s a lie.
Meditation is about bringing the physical, mental, and emotional into balance so that rising energetically, emotionally, and intellectually becomes not only natural… but possible in the first place.
This shift in understanding can (and will) change everything for anyone who is willing to open their minds and hearts enough embrace it.
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.
Stillness leads to loving thoughts. Loving thoughts lead to loving actions. Loving actions lead to peace.
Stillness and quiet aren’t the goal. Together, they’re a doorway. Stillness creates the space for quiet to arrive. Quiet creates the environment for answers and understanding to materialize. But what shows up first might not feel quiet at all.
What you meet in the quiet depends on what’s been locked inside. If your default state is anxious, chaotic, or angry, then stillness might feel like it’s amplifying that and quiet might sound like it’s yelling at you. But neither is the case. Stillness and quiet are just revealing what is making things chaotic or difficult, and giving you a space to understand those things so that you can genuinely sort them out.
Stillness and quiet give us the opportunity to tame your own beasts, to take control of our own demons. This is what I mean when I reference “shadow work,” and it truly is necessary to experience the best version of yourself.
Stillness and quiet reveal what needs to be healed. Continued stillness and quiet help you begin to heal whatever those things are, as you sit with them through introspection, prayer, and slowly shifting perspectives that lead to deeper understanding.
It takes practice, and effort. Sometimes, weeks or months. Sometimes, years. It took you a lifetime to be conditioned and convinced that you’re who you think you are, most of which is a lie. Why would you expect to understand or overcome that in a single meditation session? Give yourself a break. Give yourself grace. God does…you can, too.
You’re not “doing it” wrong if you find stillness difficult. You’re being given the sacred opportunity to feel what’s true without distraction. It takes time, and practice, to reach the peace beyond the noise. It’s not rainbows and roses. It can be gruesome. It can be literal war within. But it is the journey itself—the journey to that place of self-revelation and understanding—that becomes the goal, the purpose, and the truest solution to your concerns and your suffering.
Rage, frustration, even self-loathing—they don’t mean you’re unspiritual or too broken to help yourself. They mean you’re carrying something too heavy to hold quietly. Stillness teaches you to listen to the noise around, and within, you—without becoming it.
It teaches you to observe rather than to embody…which is the first step in putting down what doesn’t serve you, what isn’t yours to carry, what isn’t in your control, what isn’t your fault. That is surrender—whether you view it as surrendering to God, to peace, to stillness, or to whatever name you need to give it.
Surrender is where we find wholeness. It is strength, not weakness. The greatest strength, I’ve come to understand. It is not giving up—it is giving over, releasing the grip of resistance.
Even if you’re struggling, if you want to master yourself, then continue to try. “Unless, of course,” as my greatest teacher and dearest friend, Ralph, told me many decades ago, “you’d rather require more energy of yourself than stillness and quiet will ever require of you, only to fight the same battles you’ve been losing for however long, that are utterly controlling—and ruining—your life.”
Continue to practice stillness and being quiet. Continue to meet yourself where you are. If you need help, many can help you—a teacher, a spiritual guide, or Source itself. Reach out. Ask for help. Don’t give up because it feels pointless or too difficult. Steadfastness is the key to any true success.
Eventually, with compassion, with repetition, with breath and grace, those heavy, dark, negative, and painful feelings shift. They start to speak softer. And what’s underneath them—the longing to be loved, heard, and understood; the exhaustion; the soul underneath the survival mode—that’s when loving thoughts begin to rise, because you’ve learned to give those things to yourself. You’ve learned to become everything you always felt was missing.
But you can’t skip steps.
Stillness and quiet is not where peace begins. It’s where truth begins. Peace follows the truth, but you have to face and accept the truth, first.
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.
It’s never been money or material success that has defined wealth for me.
For most of my life, I chased meaning in moments loud enough to echo—grand gestures, perfect timing, outcomes wrapped in validation. But it was my most treacherous and grueling experiences—the ones that stripped me bare and rebuilt me from the soul up—that taught me something higher.
They taught me to be still.
To be quiet.
To kneel at the altar of the subtle.
A blurry cloud, simultaneously barely and boldly defining its own form, illuminated at just the right angle.
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A battered feather, found in the dead center of a forgotten dirt road, caught in evening light.
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The soft hush of trees at dusk, whispering the memories of the ghosts that still roam underneath them.
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This is abundance.
There’s something sacred about catching these quiet offerings—the ones that ask for nothing but your presence. No performance. No hustle. Just your full attention. And I think that’s what I’ve been learning to fully morph into, slowly but surely, all my life.
I’ve always been in love with nature, and over the past few years, I’ve begun to understand why—consciously, spiritually, viscerally:
Nature doesn’t demand applause, but it offers everything to those who notice.
Before caregiving and grief, nature called to me—quietly, consistently—and I always accepted her invitation to explore and to wonder. During caregiving, she became an escape. I retreated there as often as possible, weary and begging for rest that not even sleep could offer…and nature always obliged.
Now? I don’t go to escape or to retreat, I don’t just visit. Nature meets me. Whether I’m deep in the woods or walking my yard…hiking a trail or running my neighborhood…now, I am always home.
We live in a world trained to skim, to scroll, to monetize every breath of stillness. But this—this sky, this feather, this light that passes and never repeats—reminds me:
Presence is the prize.
It’s all around us, all the time, no matter where we are…but people don’t see it anymore. They no longer observe. Most have forgotten—that observation is a form of reverence. And reverence, when practiced daily, becomes a kind of homecoming.
“Abundance is not found in money and material gain—at least, not for me. To me, it is found in nature’s unexpected surprises.”
I wrote that in my memory while standing beneath the canopy of trees shared above as it held the last light of evening. There was no one else there. No applause. Just me, and the divine choreography of stillness.
In that moment, nature herself invited me to remind you:
If you’re searching for proof that you’re loved, that you belong, that there’s meaning woven through even the hardest days—
Look up.
Look closer.
Be still.
The abundance you’re looking for is already here.
It’s been waiting for your eyes—and your heart— to land on it.
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
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