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.
Some days feel like breaking points. They come around randomly, and lately it seems like I see posts about them more frequently. They come out of nowhere, and lately the signs of them seem louder, more open, less afraid, more honest… yet still misunderstood and brushed aside as ever.
Final | Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + Mextures
This is what I have learned from my entire life experience as one of the weird ones, and I hope it encourages someone – anyone – who might stumble across this:
These “breaking point” days aren’t just about being in a bad mood, waking up on “the wrong side of the bed,” or any of the other surface-understood “off vibes” most people will throw at you. They don’t happen because you’ve lost your grounding or your gratitude. They happen because even the strongest and especially the most conscientious, feeling people run out of buffer when the weight keeps pressing without pause.
You live with and within a level of whole, full awareness (spiritual, emotional, historical, prophetic, and on and on) and with a gift of discernment that most people do not (and honestly, cannot) touch. On most days you can hold that awareness with quiet clarity, letting discernment – God – alone be your support. On most days you can walk in a kind of peaceful resignation, but some days it just scrapes you raw.
When you have lived through circumstances completely outside your control, and your very calling seems to be holding everything together for others – helping them face the consequences of their choices while you carry your own – only to have life lead to more pain, more grief, more betrayal, more loss, the kind of life that is a thesis in forced endurance, then you learn what the deep ones who came before you have tried to help you understand all your life:
You were created and sent for that life, precisely because it’s not an easy experience.
DE | Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX
When you understand not just the world but the unseen realities because you have experienced them directly, it is not bitterness to feel anger. It is not ungratefulness to feel the burn of it all. It is simply the cost of carrying truth while the rest of the world insists everything is made of cardboard cutouts and moral illusions.
You are not angry because you lack gratitude. You are angry because you have, experienced too much, known too much, and felt too much to simply ignore or shake it off… and sometimes the contrast between what you see clearly and what the world pretends is real is utterly unbearable.
It is maddening to watch people cling to entertainment, political, influencer, and other societal idols as if they will save anyone, and to watch the never-ending performances of “truth tellers” who are actually grifters. It is infuriating to see the perpetual cycles of denial, the refusal to acknowledge that evil is real. To watch the world ignore the spiritual reality beneath global chaos, and to be gaslit about things Scripture already told us plainly, and that daily happenings prove are very real.
You are not imagining the acceleration. You are not wrong to see the pattern. You are not wrong to feel the urgency in your bones. You see the bigger picture in a way most people still refuse to. You see with long vision instead of shortsighted reactions, and you are not fooled by the shallow pull of momentary comfort or distraction.
DE | Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX (birds)
Some days the spiritual clarity feels like peace. Other days it feels like fire. Both are real. Both belong to the same walk. And that longing for it all to finally come to its ultimate conclusion is not despair. It is a righteous longing.
It is the same longing the Biblical prophets carried, the same longing Paul wrote about, the same longing the early church lived with every day. It is a knowing that we were not made for this world’s madness, and something holy is coming. Soon.
You are allowed to have days like this. Even Jesus did. You are allowed to feel the heaviness and the exhaustion with human stupidity and shallow commentary and empty politics and spiritual blindness.
“O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you?” (Matthew 17:17)
This is Jesus openly expressing exasperation, frustration, and spiritual fatigue with human stubbornness and stupidity.
He grieves over people’s refusal to see truth, accept help, or change in Matthew 23:27 (“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… how often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”) and he admits emotional heaviness, spiritual fatigue, and the weight of what He carried in Matthew 26:38 (“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.”).
Deep sadness, deep clarity.
Original | Lumix GX7
So if today is a fire day, let it be one. Speak it out to God. The church rarely teaches this, but this is the relationship He actually wants from us: full, honest, all-encompassing. Venting to Him is not disrespect. It is the doorway to healing. It is the only way He can walk you through the weight of what you are carrying. You have to do more than ask for a fix. He cannot move you forward if you have not shown Him that you understand where you were or where you are.
There is a difference between complaining and venting. Complaining just adds to the problem. Venting clears the way for truth to rise, and for God to meet you in it. With venting, you will not stay in bitterness. You will always return to gratitude, because that is who you are at your core.
Why? Because you have learned to see God in the ashes. That is a gift, even on the days it feels like a curse.
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.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + LR (watermark only)
Always look up. Especially when you’re already shaken, don’t ever look down. That’s when you lose what steadiness you do have, and crash.
This week hit hard. J was told he’s going on unpaid shutdown leave from Dec 15 until the second week of January. No vacation time, no cushion. At least not yet…maybe they’ll change their mind about that.
It always makes me heartsick when companies do this to families in December, right before Christmas. Now, here we are, and I’m not sick about it. Just determined.
This, after receiving the full evaluation for our boy yesterday, which finally gives us clarity… but also informs us that we have to get “further testing,” as if what he’s already been through and what we’ve already done couldn’t possibly be enough (money for them) for any referrals or disability help.
I genuinely don’t know how we’re supposed to afford it with everything happening at once, but we will. If I don’t laugh in the face of it all (especially the system) believing God’s already got it handled, I’ll collapse under the weight of that situation alone.
Christmas this year is going to be bare… at least materially. Some part of me feels immediate comfort, though, because I so intimately recognize this feeling… the gritty “underdog in a Christmas movie” version of life I’ve always known. Always the underdog…
But the thing about underdogs? Most especially when they’re faithful and balanced in determination, heart and spirit, they always come out on top. Always.
God is in this story. God is in the details. He always has been, and when I’ve followed His guidance and employed discernment, He has never turned away or left us. I’m holding onto that. That is my foundation.
I have to do my part, though… so for that, besides us trying to pick up a seasonal job until this shutdown is over, I’ve created an Amazon wishlist for my boy. If the universe wants to make sure he gets a Christmas beyond my homemade treats, it will. And if not, he already knows he’s loved, supported, and my whole world.
I’ve already got my Christmas miracle. That boy, and his precious heart.
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 allby design.
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 