Tag: seasons

  • Stargazer

    Stargazer

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + VSCO

    Stargazer—
    eyes lift past obstacles;
    night opens.

    I wrote that on January 8 when I shared this edit of an iPhone shot I captured in my back yard to Vero and VSCO, and then just… moved right past sharing the image or the words here. I’ve been becoming.

    I’ve been lost in introspection, peeling back layers, observing, feeling it out, integrating it – all of this over and over in this time non-adjacent, beautiful cycle of infinity, that I kind of forgot… most everything lately. I used to think it was just the caregiving and/or the surgical menopause. I thought for a short time, when I surrendered the last earthly thing I had left that had for so long been the treasure of my heart, that I’d finally just overloaded and lost my mind.

    In reality, ultimate surrender to God, truly following where He leads, had removed and continues to remove me from everything, and evolved me into this extremely quiet girl who just stands under the sky and lets it undo her. Not just in posting, but at every level, including who I remember myself to be.

    Coming to Christ – not just saying the words but the evolution itself – hasn’t just been “I believe.” I have believed since I was a child. It hasn’t just been, “I accept, I surrender, I heal, God changes my heart and I change my habits.” It’s been this slow, surgical unmaking down in the deepest parts, and I’ve been metamorphosing through it since the night Ralph died.

    It’s been soaking in depths even I never imagined. And that’s saying something. It’s been being truly alone, except for His presence, and the Holy Spirit’s, and it’s been… excruciatingly, exquisitely beautiful.

    It’s not trauma, it’s not grief. It’s not even grief-induced – not wholly. That’s all nonsense, at least in the way the Western world and Western medicine and psychology and new age and new thought belief systems tell it. It’s more real, more spiritual, more invisibly tangible, than all of that ever thought about being. It was just… time.

    It’s been about the things I thought I understood, the places where I thought I had to earn worth, the parts of me that were performing the gifts of the spirit – the discernment, the temperance, the hard-earned wisdom, the surrender – that I was so desperate to truly embody. It’s been no longer sharing or trying to grow and evolve that with anyone else. It’s been walking into the desert, embracing solitude instead of simply being in it by circumstance, and just… belonging to Him.

    Somewhere in that process, I lost track of a lot of things. A lot of people. Somewhere in the slow, surgical unmaking of solitude, I lost track of almost everything I used to believe was real. I’ve been letting Jesus have the layers, not just the words. Letting Him name me again, in the dark, where nobody’s clapping, where it’s just me and the sky and the God who knows my real name, and actually treasures, doesn’t just hold, my heart.

    I’m not sure what this post really is. I’m returning this scrap of sky to this quiet place, in part because I hope it helps someone else, as always… but also because I don’t want the girl who stares up and ultimately surrenders to the peace of solitude and to the Creator Himself to be a footnote in her own story. I don’t want the becoming to swallow the one who simply is. This is me remembering me, and thanking God for the long, slow unmaking that made room for the becoming in the first place.

    Even if it meant losing almost everyone I ever loved, I’ve found a love within myself I never could have imagined, and it all comes from and returns to Him.

    Catastrophe in osmosis. That’s where catacosmosis began. And the name won’t change, though the person has, because that’s the entire point of that journey.

    Tetelestai (ܬܫܠܡ). John 19:30

    And yet, for me, it feels like it’s only just begun.

  • Veil. 

    Veil. 

    entry twenty two — 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)
  • Exhumation

    Exhumation

    entry twenty one — 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.

    catacosmosis // 2026

  • A Reflection on the Behavior of Creek Water and the Mirror of Myself as the Mother of an Autistic Boy

    A Reflection on the Behavior of Creek Water and the Mirror of Myself as the Mother of an Autistic Boy

    Lumix GF3 + Mextures + VSCO

    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.

    Onward.

    c.

  • Unhidden

    Unhidden

    entry twenty — 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.

  • December Sunrise

    December Sunrise

    entry nineteen — 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.

  • 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 eighteen — 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.

  • Always look up.

    Always look up.

    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.

    Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays,

    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…