Tag: perspective

  • 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.

  • Entropy

    Entropy

    entry seventeen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    Lumix GX8 + Leica DG Macro‑Elmarit +
    Hipstamatic (Salvador 84 + Miles TMax)

    Twenty twenty-five bleeds into me like a half-lit nightmare,

    Stephen King and Tim Burton laughing in the corners.

    AI hums in the air, a static pulse I cannot unhear.

    I want to scream and break the sky…

    …but the real and the familiar fragments of me rein temperance in, in quiet revolt.

    Twenty twenty-six waits like a shadowed carnival, and I am here,

    trembling with light in a society fractured by entropy…

    …still standing.


    When I started exploring textures and analog styles using mobile camera and editing apps like Mextures and DistressedFX a decade ago and Hipstamatic closer to two decades ago, I remember the beef among photographers about how it was cheating.

    Even when shooting DSLR or scanning 35mm negatives and importing to iPhone to manually edit creations, on deviantART it was utter blasphemy to call that work photography… which is the majority of the reason I left that site (alongside the unnecessary drama, petty competition and childishness of it all).

    I remember the same attitudes when the DSLR was introduced as a more convenient option for shooting (as compared to film) back in the nineties, and even more strongly opposed by what I like to call the “haughty and holier than thou professional” photographers (many of whom had never been published, mind you).

    It was all just a whole lot of projection… yet here we are in 2025’s much broader version of those things, getting ready to wake up to a 2026 that looks like a Stephen King and Tim Burton co-conspired reality, and I now find myself itching to raise the same ruckus about AI. I fight the daily urge to scream at the top of my lungs that I hate AI, and that it will absolutely be the death of raw human creativity, not a help or a tool for it.

    Mark my words, and I say this not just from the creative part of myself but from the psychology and computer science educated and experienced parts, from the professor in me, and from the emotionally and spiritually evolved pieces of myself, from my entire being and from the depths of my soul:

    AI is a mistake of biblical proportions, and not just for creatives.

    I have watched what it does to attention, to imagination, to the inner world, to the very scaffolding of how a human becomes themselves. I have already watched it practically eat my child alive, and I banned it from our sphere entirely. I will die on this hill if necessary.

    AI may not be evil incarnate, though I have my suspicions that it is, but it will certainly cause more evil than we can stand or cope with to manifest in this already imploding world.

    The ASMR, the funny animal and parody videos, and the art may be cute today, but tomorrow it will look like proverbial mushroom clouds around the globe.

    With AI more prominently in the mix, the end of true freedom is nearer than you might think… and it is all by design.

    💣😘

    xo

  • 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…

  • On Waking Up to the Truth of Your Own Life

    On Waking Up to the Truth of Your Own Life

    This morning, out of nowhere, I had a strange and sudden realization that felt less like an epiphany and more like a truth finally stepping out of the shadows and clearing its throat.

    It hit me in a way that it never has that I have never lived a “normal” life. Not even close. And for the first time, I felt both strangely happy about that fact and, at the same time, a little bit like life handed me a rigged deck from the beginning.

    Maybe it’s the moon. Maybe it’s a transit. Maybe it’s just timing. Either way, something clicked.

    And if you’ve lived a life anything like mine — a life full of early ruptures, spiritual bends, hard-earned wisdom, and more turning points than you asked for — then maybe this will resonate with you too.

    Some of us woke up “too early.”

    I think there are people in this world who become different because of trauma… and then there are people who were already different before anything bad ever happened.

    I fall into the second category, and maybe you do too. Even before the losses and the betrayals and the hard choices of life, I always had that sense of being “other.” Not better, not worse — just operating at a different depth. And when you put a child like that into an environment that can’t meet them, or worse, harms them, it doesn’t create the strangeness. It simply intensifies the contrast.

    Being awake too early will always make life feel both heavy and crystalline. Extraordinarily beautiful and impossibly painful. More than you can stand, and somehow exactly what your soul signed up for.

    My life began mid-sentence. It began with trauma — separation at birth, adoption, the whole invisible story that comes before the first memory. And when your life starts that way, it’s like opening a book already in motion. You’re responding before you even know what you’re responding to.

    People who haven’t lived this don’t understand it. They don’t understand the tracking, the depth, the intuition, the constant meaning-making, the sensitivity that isn’t fragility but perception.

    They don’t understand why you see everything. Why you feel everything. Why you cannot live on the surface of yourself. But some of us were built this way, and some of us were shaped this way. Both can be true.

    It’s a double-edged realization. As this awareness came in today, I felt two very different truths rising at the same time:

    I love who I’ve become. I love my depth, my discernment, my perspective, my capacity. I love that I can see through people and patterns and illusions. I love that nothing stays on the surface for me. I love that I’ve survived every version of myself I’ve ever had to be.

    I also grieve the softness I never got. I grieve the easy childhood that never existed. I grieve the uncomplicated love I didn’t receive early on. I grieve the sense of safety I had to build by hand.

    And I think a lot of us who’ve lived through big, early, life-defining trauma feel this way: grateful for who we are, but aware of the price we paid to become it.

    This doesn’t make us “confused.” It makes us honest. It makes us the “weird one.”

    Someone I love deeply even to this day, but lost because of my depth, once told me, “Everybody thinks you’re weird.” They meant it to sting, and it did for a second, because it came from someone who should have known better. But after the sting passed, I realized:

    People say “weird” when they really mean, “I can’t categorize you, and that makes me uncomfortable.”

    People like us — the ones who survived too much, grew too fast, felt too deeply — we are not weird. We are densely written. And people who only read in small print will never understand a book like us.

    That’s fine. It is truly okay. We have to learn to let them go, even when it’s the last thing we want to do. We have to learn to let them stay on Sesame Street if that’s the universe they need, and love them from afar. We weren’t made for that kind of world, and that’s what I learned from that “dig.”

    It changed my entire being and life experience, because it gave me vision into both myself and into the psychology of others that I’d only ever read in books and studied during undergrad. It led me to where I’ve been for the last year or so. The crossover point.

    If you’re reading this because you searched a tag related to being somewhere in that liminal space — not who you used to be, not quite who you’re becoming — let me tell you something from the messy, holy middle of my own transformation:

    Your life is not normal because it was never meant to be. You weren’t built for the simple version.

    People like us come in with assignments: to break generational patterns that have the power to wake up entire lineages. To spiritualize the places that were barren. To heal things we didn’t cause. To mother differently.

    We are here to live awake. To see through the noise. To choose purpose over pattern. To walk into the “better” with our eyes open.

    My own perspective, after years of seeking and purposeful, mindful, active awareness, has become that we were born into struggle on purpose. To make mistakes, to suffer, to learn, and then to teach and to use our experiences to help heal the world. Because we can.

    Our struggle prepares us for our purpose, because without that preparation I can promise you that the last five years would have killed me — not grown me or led me to God.

    It’s not an easy calling, and it’s rarely fair. It’s often lonely, and it’s never “easy.” But… it is real. And it will be worth it, in the end.

    If you’ve made it this far — bruised, aware, still standing — then the next chapter will not require the same kind of suffering the earlier ones did.

    This is the turning point. The crossing over. The place where the story stops being about survival and starts being about purpose.

    You’ve earned this part. You really have. Use it to make your life everything you’ve ever dreamed of. I believe you can, because I’ve lived it. I’ve put the pieces together, and I know that if any of this resonates with you, you can do anything.

    It’s what you were made for.

    xo,

    c.

  • 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