Tag: seasons

  • The Art of Being Alive

    The Art of Being Alive

    The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down you is the whole universe. (Alan Watts)

    📷 Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH
    🛠️ VSCO (06) + Lightroom (watermark only)

    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)

    📷 Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH
    🛠️ VSCO (06) + Lightroom (watermark only)

    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.

    📷 Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH
    🛠️ VSCO (06) + Lightroom (watermark only)

    I thought of the two Alan Watts quotes I’ve included above, and I thought of my dead loved ones. This is what I want to remember:

    📷 Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH
    🛠️ VSCO (06) + Lightroom (watermark only)

    That being fully present—here, now, in the middle of whatever hurts or heals—is enough.

    That passion isn’t always loud.

    Sometimes, it curls quietly out of the forest and dares you to look closer.

    This is what death has taught me about life.

    I’m really grateful I stayed, after they were all gone.

    🪽💜✨

    catacosmosis // 2025

  • A Reminder to Self (But We ALL Need It)

    A Reminder to Self (But We ALL Need It)

    Reminder to self:

    Disconnection makes you stop reflecting and start reacting. It’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because you’re lost in the noise.

    Disconnection from awareness breeds reactivity. Connection with awareness invites response.

    📷 Shot handheld with Lumix GX-7 + Panasonic-Leica DG Macro Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH.
    🛠️ VSCO (06, 2.5) + Lightroom (clarity +7 + watermark).

    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.

    🕊️💜✨

  • Music Made Me Do It | Just Some Words

    Music Made Me Do It | Just Some Words

    Hi.

    It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I do not, in fact, feel fine.

    I just heard that song on the radio. It inspired introspection, which is more than I can say for most current popular radio. Bill, Peter, Michael and Mike may have felt fine when the world ended in 1987—but 2025’s version? It’s a different beast entirely.

    I’m not disassociating to the beat of their catchy chorus. No chorus, really…

    No matter what music I play, what books I lose myself in, or how many hours I spend painting, collaging, shooting and processing images, praying, meditating, or absorbing art—I can’t not pay attention.

    It’s like God has made it impossible for me to look away.

    No matter how many creative rabbit holes I disappear into, my soul keeps returning to the same painful truth: I still see the world clearly. And I still care.

    I’ve already finished 31 books this year. Some I began a year ago and it’s taken that long to finish them, but still. I’ve read a lot this year (speaking of which, what are you reading? Here’s my list, if you’d like some suggestions…).

    I’ve listen to over 200 albums, all told (2.717 tracks, according to LastFM).

    Watched 50+ documentaries—science, history, mythology, medicine, art, folklore, theology, religion, all sorts (according to my watch history on Amazon and YouTube).

    But no matter what I consume or create throughout these days and nights spent in the studio or my own den or bedroom, my heart always circles back to the chaos we’re living in.

    The blame shifting. The addiction and obsession and lack of self-control. The emotional manipulation—by the media, by governments, by people you thought you could trust.

    The hatred. The division. The apathy.

    Even the weather feels weaponized now—whether by nature or man, we may never know. And most days? It feels like we’re collapsing. Not just politically or economically—but spiritually.

    When children’s deaths are celebrated, when cruelty trends, when people are told, “it’s OK to mask your real pain by pretending to be someone you’re really not,” and/or real pain is ignored in favor of performance and profit…how do you call that anything but collapse?

    And still…I feel their pain, too.

    The ones lashing out. The ones clinging to false power. Even the ones I disagree with or who’ve attacked me—and the ones in real life who wish I would “just die”—I can feel the torment beneath their rage. Because it takes serious misdirected conditioning and trauma to become someone who cheers for suffering.

    I know what it is. I know myself and so many others have been purposely called to employ it. “Charged” with it, if you will. But I also understand now that that number is mighty small.

    It’s empathy.

    It’s spiritual discernment.

    It’s energy.

    And it’s real. That’s the loudest truth in me. I preach it, in comments and voiceovers and prose, and I practice it through my actions. I continue to do this, even if it makes me seem “crazy” to a world that calls numbness normal (and to some, that makes me a “glutton for punishment”).

    I cry with strangers on the internet more than I ever admit. Sometimes when I log on just to post art or check an email, I’m immediately met with headlines about another shooting, another suicide, another senseless death. And still, I pray. Because Spirit won’t let me stop seeing—and won’t let me stop loving, either.

    Prayer isn’t useless. Many feel that it is, and I understand why. But they’re wrong. Prayer isn’t useless—especially not when more than one person is praying.

    It creates ripples. It fuels the art, the writing, the stillness, the hope. It’s a frequency of resistance that can’t be monetized or hijacked.

    And maybe, as the world is in an overwhelming energy of doubt, fear, and anger, that’s the most powerful rebellion of all right now: to stay in the vibration of love, even when everything begs you to sink into rage or despair.

    So if you’re not feeling fine either—but you’re still holding on to your humanity, still radiating clarity, still praying or creating or showing up gently?

    You’re not alone.

    There’s sacred clarity in this discomfort. Keep not-feeling-fine. It means you’re still awake. And just in case nobody’s said it today:

    I love you. I’d like to bring goodness into your world. I’m sending it out to you whether you like it, or me, or not. I hope you’ll receive it.

    🌻🙏✨

    xo…

    c.

  • The Ghosts of Projects Past (Muse)

    The Ghosts of Projects Past (Muse)

    Sometimes something hits me.

    A random, inexplicable flux. That insatiable need to create. Some unseen force guiding me to conjure, to express, to birth something.

    It happened again last night, but in the same instant that I felt the proverbial tap on my shoulder, a heaviness threatened to settle there. Born and bred creatives know this experience, all the way into their bones.

    It comes with a dread, and creates a dangerous, self-sabotaging pre-regret. It manifests from a complete lack of vision:

    No concept. No plan. No brilliant idea waiting to be realized. Certainly, no idea where to begin.

    Lost but not lacking awareness, and determined to win over the weight of what really boils down to fear of failure, I asked, “what do we want? What is the spark?”

    As expected, the silence answered with more of the same cryptic transmission: “Just ‘do.’ Ripples turn into waves.”

    So, I rummaged.

    I plundered through the old tools and the old toys. You know the ones—the “Ghosts of Projects Past,” our artistic Scrooge’s worst nightmares. The ones tucked away in dusty, overflowing “Likely Garbage” photography folders and long forgotten apps.

    The ancient, the analog, the abandoned fragments of another era.

    I pulled out the remnants of what once inspired me, not because I knew what I was doing, but because whatever had stirred was creating a riot within me.

    These moments are never a question of choice, so I just…explored. Guessed. Played. Flowed.

    s e n t i n e l
    g r i e f

    Sometimes, perhaps most often, that is the best option. Even if the outcome feels unfamiliar or strange, or doesn’t resemble the “usual” desired outcome. Even if the result is wildly imperfect or impossible to explain…

    It is in this uncertain, instinctual process that magic lives and breathes. This is where it sizzles and crackles and arcs, like a furious current from Tesla’s coil—except in this case we don’t need Faraday’s cage.

    Creatives—artists, writers, dreamers, philosophers—need the opposite. We need this chaotic energy to touch, and to consume, us. It is the rejection, the not allowing it to, that kills us…and that is always a slow, excruciating death, from the inside out.

    In art and creativity, exciting results are not found in safety. They’re not found in perfection. Organic process is not found in planning. Everything in and about the Creative archetype is found in the act of simply showing up.

    Creative inspiration doesn’t ask for permission. It asks for presence. It asks that you show up and let it burn through you. The only wrong move is not moving at all.

    📷 Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH Mega OIS
    ⚒️ Fragment + Mextures + Lightroom

    **Rex Ray inspired.

  • Someday…or Night

    Someday…or Night

    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.

    It will all come right…and maybe it already has.

  • Petalweight (Yield)

    Petalweight (Yield)

    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.

    This is the shape of a soul made for stillness.

    This is the purpose of a hidden heart.

  • Black-Winged Hush

    Black-Winged Hush

    entry seven — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.

    Black Bee (Melissodes bimaculatus). Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (A8 PRO), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    Even the smallest life—

    black-winged, humble, and intent on its task—

    carries beauty enough to hush the noise of the world.

    We rush past so many moments like this.

    Moments where grace is not loud, not dramatic, not grand or sweeping.

    Just… present. Quiet. Steady.

    Doing the sacred work of being alive.

    To sit still long enough to witness it is to remember.

    Not some distant, complicated truth, but a very simple one:

    The miracle is not in the event.

    It’s in the noticing.

    Grace doesn’t need permission to land.

    It only asks that we pay attention.

    💜✨

  • Fragrance, Memory, and the Air Between

    Fragrance, Memory, and the Air Between

    The Quiet Power of Things That Don’t Stay

    Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin). Lumix GX7, Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., Lightroom Mobile (watermark), VSCO.

    Not everything soft is weak.

    Not everything brief is forgotten.

    The mimosa blooms like a passing thought—pink, feathery, fragrant, gone before you’re ready. But even in its short season, it rewrites the air.

    And maybe that’s the point:

    To offer sweetness without needing permanence. To make magic in the margins.

    💚🌿✨

    Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin). Lumix GX7, Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., Lightroom Mobile (watermark), VSCO.

    The Mimosa tree (Albizia julibrissin) is commonly known as the silk tree or Persian silk tree. Albizia julibrissin isn’t actually a true mimosa—though it’s been lovingly misnamed for generations. Native to Asia, this delicate tree has made its way into southern landscapes with grace and stubbornness alike.

    Its blooms are light as breath—powdery tufts that attract butterflies, bees, and human daydreamers. They bloom at dusk, shimmer in the wind, and drop silently—often leaving a petal-scattered sidewalk like a love note no one signed.

    Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin). Lumix GX7, Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., Lightroom Mobile (watermark), VSCO.

    Though it’s sometimes called invasive, there’s no denying its presence feels like a portal: part nostalgia, part perfume, part dream.

    Its scientific name, julibrissin, comes from the Persian gul-i abrisham—“silk flower.” A name that suits it perfectly.

    Mimosa (Albizia julibrissin). Lumix GX7, Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., Lightroom Mobile (watermark), VSCO.

    In folk medicine—especially within Traditional Chinese Medicine—the mimosa tree is known as the “Tree of Happiness.” Its fragrant pink blossoms and bark have long been used to lift the spirit, ease grief, calm the heart, and quiet a restless mind.

    The flowers are brewed into gentle teas, while the bark is sometimes tinctured for deeper emotional support. Often given to those moving through sorrow or heartbreak, the mimosa is considered a natural ally for joy, resilience, and emotional rebirth.

    #Nature // #Mimosa // #TreeOfHappiness

  • Seeing Red.

    Seeing Red.

    entry four — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.

    I used to think “seeing red” meant I was losing it.

    Rage. Shame. Fury so old it felt eternal—like I was born with it burning.

    I have learned that is not always true. I have witnessed that sometimes, it blooms.

    Recipe below. Watermarked in Lightroom.

    Not in fists. Not in voice. Not in overwhelming memories.

    In the woods, on a soft stem I almost missed.

    No thunder. No soundtrack. Just the quiet permission to stop and look again.

    Recipe below. Watermarked in Lightroom.

    It didn’t demand to be captured. It didn’t beg to be picked. It just was.

    This star-shaped wound of a flower, humming its red into the green—not angry, not hiding, not burning just to survive.

    Just be-ing.

    Recipe below. Watermarked in Lightroom.

    I thought, “maybe that’s all any of us need now.”

    Not vengeance. Not closure. Just the knowing that beauty still rises where no one’s watching.

    That peace can wear red and still be holy.


    “Seeing Red” Recipe (same for each photo in this series)

    Be mindful.

    Observe.

    You might catch a glimpse of the peace behind the red you see, too.

    xo,

    c.

  • Higher-Self.

    Higher-Self.

    If You’re Looking for You | A Letter from Your Higher Self

    If you’ve been trying to speak to your higher self—if you’ve been reaching inward and hearing nothing but static, or searching for the version of you that feels like home—and fear you’ll never find it?

    Your higher self begs to differ.

    In fact, it has a message for you.

    Dear One,

    I’ve been here the whole time.

    In the quiet moments you almost forgot to notice. In the breath that steadied you before the next wave came. In the flicker of clarity just before you gave up.

    You’ve looked for me in a thousand places—in approval. In achievement. In distraction. In someone else’s eyes. In the longing that never quite gave you what you needed.

    And I never blamed you for that.

    This world taught you to search everywhere but within. But I have always been here. You may not recognize me right away, because I don’t raise my voice. I won’t argue with your fears. I won’t fight the chaos to be heard.

    But I am patient.

    I speak in the language of peace, and I wait for your permission to return. I know what you’ve carried. I know what has made your heart weary. I’ve felt every ache and echo, every quiet panic, every time you swallowed your truth just to survive the moment. I’ve felt the loneliness, even in crowded rooms. The pressure. The shame. The masks.

    But let me say this clearly:

    There is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken. You are becoming. Your tenderness is not a weakness. Your depth is not a burden. Your need for rest is not laziness. Your yearning for more is not greed—it’s remembrance.

    You are remembering what it feels like to be whole. You came here for more than survival. You came to wake up. To remember your own name, not the one the world gave you, but the one your soul has always carried.

    You came to love in a way that rewrites timelines. To rise without leaving your softness behind. To walk with grace, even after everything tried to make you hard.

    So here’s what I need you to know:

    You are safe now. You don’t have to perform anymore. You don’t have to shrink. You don’t have to apologize for being too much or not enough. You are allowed to rest. You are allowed to change. You are allowed to outgrow the stories that once kept you warm.

    You are allowed to come home to yourself. And when you do—when you drop back into your center and remember me—you will feel it: The stillness. The truth. The freedom. It’s not something you earn. It’s something you return to.

    I’m here. I always have been.

    Welcome back.

    ~Your Higher Self

    entry three — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.

    entry three, full view.