Tag: self discovery

  • The Freeze

    The Freeze

    Every so often, I experience what I call the freeze.

    Artists will know exactly what I mean. It is that moment right before you begin a new piece, canvas blank and supplies ready, when something inside you locks up. You want to move, but you don’t. You know what to do, but suddenly you can’t do it.

    It’s not laziness and it’s not a lack of ideas. It’s more like a quiet paralysis, the sense that whatever you do first will somehow be wrong, wasteful, or irreversible.

    I experienced that tonight, and it surprised me. I haven’t frozen like that in a long time.

    Maybe it is holiday stress. Maybe it is the cumulative weight of life, reality, and empathy for a world that feels perpetually on edge. Maybe it is something smaller, or something that would sound completely absurd to anyone watching from the outside. But absurd does not mean invalid.

    Any time we experience something like this, there is a reason… and I am the kind of person who looks for it. I look inward and outward, I sit with the discomfort instead of trying to bulldoze through it, and I pay attention to what is actually happening in my body and mind.

    I find that process purposeful, and sometimes even enjoyable, not because it’s comfortable but because it gives me agency. When I understand what is happening and why, anxiety loses its grip. I can experience it and coexist with it at the same time. More often than not, that approach resolves the issue in a deeper and longer-lasting way than simply forcing myself forward.

    So this is the internal conversation I had tonight, and how I talked myself through it once I reached a clearer understanding of what was really going on. This is where my professional training in psychology meets my self-taught training in art, I suppose.

    If you have similar experiences to what I’ve described above, I hope some part of this is useful to you.

    Step 1. Pause for a moment. Not to analyze or fix anything, just to name what is happening. Once something is named, it tends to lose a surprising amount of its power.

    What you’re feeling when you experience “the freeze” as soon as you pick up a brush or a palette knife, or face whatever in life it is that makes you freeze in a similar way, is not a personal flaw. For artists and creatives, it’s not proof that you are bad at being creative.

    It’s a very specific nervous-system response, and it shows up most often in people who actually care about what they are making. In psychology, this response is often described in a few overlapping ways.

    It can be understood as a conditioned approach and avoidance conflict within you, where the part of you that wants to create is simultaneously held back by fear of loss or failure.

    Funny story: I wrote an entire 23-page research paper on this in my junior year of undergrad. In my opinion, it was incredibly boring, personally insulting, and the worst three months of my life at the age of 21, but somehow I shockingly got an A.

    I digress.

    It can also appear as performance anxiety, though not in the social sense, more as an internal pressure to do it right. For me, it is absolutely perfectionism as a defensive strategy, a way of protecting myself from imagined mistakes or wasted effort (thanks, Mom, may you rest in peace). In many cases, it can even be the brain or your physiology responding to dorsal vagal activation, which includes fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, but we will not go that deep here.

    To put it in easy, normal language, this reaction almost always appears right before commitment. Any commitment, but especially one that means “if it goes wrong it’ll really cost me.”

    In the art scenario, up until this point, the work has existed only in imagination. In that space it is infinite, perfect, and safe. The moment you are about to touch the canvas, it becomes finite and real. Something is chosen. Other possibilities fall away. Your (my) system hears that as loss, and it tries to protect you by freezing you in place.

    That feeling that it has to be a certain way to be right is not creativity. It is internalized surveillance. Somewhere early on, many of us learned that mistakes mean waste, mess means failure, and a wrong choice causes permanent damage. Even when those rules no longer apply, the body remembers them. So when you are free, your body does not quite believe it.

    That is not weakness, or incompetence. It is conditioning that has simply outlived its usefulness.

    At the center of this response is a quiet lie: “If this turns out bad, the supplies are ruined.”

    That is just not true. Acrylic can be scraped, painted over, sanded, cut up, or turned into texture. A canvas can become a foundation rather than a final statement. Materials are meant to be used. That is their purpose. Paint that sits untouched out of fear is already wasted.

    Canvas is not sacred. You are. Please remind yourself of that immediately, and lock it in.

    Another lie slips in just as easily: “It has to be a certain way to be right.”

    Right for whom? There is no audience in the room, no rubric, no grade. There is only motion, pressure, color, and the physical relief of making contact with the surface. Art does not exist to behave! Remember?

    This kind of freeze does not happen to people who do not care. People who are shallow about creativity do not spiral like this. It tends to happen to people with depth and sensitivity, to people who were corrected more often than they were encouraged, and to people who learned how to perform before they learned how to play.

    The nervous system is not sabotaging anything. It’s trying to protect something precious: the ability to feel and express. It’s simply using outdated rules.

    Step 2. A small reframe helps here. You are not making a painting right now. You are making the first layer of a surface. Nothing more. Not meaning, not outcome, not art with a capital A. Just noticing what happens when color moves downward. That layer is allowed to be ugly. It is allowed to be scraped away. It is allowed to disappear entirely under the next thing. You are allowed to stop at any time.

    There is one gentle but important rule I follow that can helps me quiet the pressure. Say out loud that nothing you do in the next fifteen minutes counts. Set a timer. When it ends, you can walk away with no obligation to continue, fix, or judge. This is not about pushing through fear. It is about making fear irrelevant.

    And finally, this matters. The experience, the art, and your simply being. But also, the fact that you sometimes freeze. It’s not invalid. You do not need to get over it already. That voice was built over years. It softens through safe repetition, not self-attack. Every time you begin anyway, tentatively and imperfectly, you rewrite it.

    You are not broken. You are unwinding.

    I hope this helps someone…

    xo.

    c.

  • Unhidden

    Unhidden

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • I died, and it… was okay. | Notes from the Other Side

    I died, and it… was okay. | Notes from the Other Side

    The First Illusion

    How can an illusion free an illusion?

    It can’t.

    Impossible.

    And yet, freedom itself is not impossible.

    But what we often mistake for freedom is only substitution. We trade one mask for another, one prison for another, one dream for another.

    Replacing one illusion with another does not set us free. It does not bring liberation. It simply shifts us deeper into what I sometimes call non-happening happening — the endless cycle of movement that looks like change but never truly is.

    So where, then, is freedom?

    Maybe it’s in understanding that simple truth.

    Maybe it’s in seeing clearly that nothing we have called “freedom” has ever been real freedom at all.

    Maybe that was the point, all along.

    Is that awakening?

    Awakening as Death

    Awakening is the death of the familiar.

    Because what is “familiar” to us — what we call “our life,” “our personality,” “our world” — is illusion.

    Nothing we are familiar with is actually real. None of it is actually us.

    We are not real. We are not what we think — what we are told — we are. And yet, here we are.

    So when awakening comes, it feels like death. Because it is death — the falling away of everything we thought was “me.”

    And without that death, there is no birth of what was real all along.

    Meaning Before and After

    Before awakening, there is no meaning of our own.

    The only meaning available to us is what others have told us is meaningful. Parents, teachers, religions, governments, lovers, friends, enemies, cultures, systems — all of them have fed us their meanings.

    And we absorbed them as if they were truth.

    We were conditioned to believe meaning is handed down, not discovered.

    We were punished for expressing anything antithetical.

    Yes, that is a word. I did not make it up. I checked, as always, when I returned from the other side.

    I digress.

    Even when we think we are thinking for ourselves — are we? Have we ever? Do we even know how?

    This is the prison of the familiar.

    But those of us who have never been able to simply swallow it — those of us who have spent our lives being told we are crazy, too deep, over-analytical, antithetical — maybe we’ve always been a little closer to freedom.

    Because we have always been with ourselves. We have always lived in the company of our own questioning. Our own introspection.

    And that has saved us.

    Moving Through Darkness into Light

    My entire life has been this movement — through darkness into light.

    And then again. And again.

    I never stayed still in a 3D thought long enough to let ideology calcify around me. Never settled enough into the world’s definitions of reality to say: “Yes, this is it. This is reality. This is me. This is final.”

    No.

    I couldn’t.

    Always, incessantly, I questioned. I sought. I chased myself. I chased I am.

    Because each time I reached for that exactness, that rigidity, something in me would die. And something deeper would awaken.

    So instead, I’ve kept moving. Through darkness, into light.

    Through lies, into truth.

    Through death, into life.

    Over and over again.

    And each time, what I found was not more of “me,” but less.

    Until I began to understand that the “me” I thought was the center of the story was never the point at all.

    And then, I actually… died.

    And then, I came back!

    What?

    I know. That’s what I said, too.

    And that is when the fullness of both illusion and irrelevance were clear to me, and the illusion and irrelevance… both shattered.

    Freedom.

    The Irrelevance of “Me”

    “Me” is irrelevant.

    Yet somehow, everything has always been about me.

    That’s the paradox.

    The small “me” — the conditioned self, the mask, the name, the history — means nothing. It is dust. Illusion. A temporary construction.

    But the deeper “I” — the one who moves through the dying and the awakening, the one who is aware of even that dust falling away — that “I” has always been the ground of everything.

    So in a sense, “me” does not exist.

    And in another sense, “me” is all that has ever existed.

    It was always… the I Am.

    The Misunderstanding

    This will be misunderstood.

    Mostly by anyone and everyone who reads it.

    If they even make it past the first few lines.

    Because illusion defends itself. It doesn’t like being called what it is.

    But misunderstanding doesn’t matter.

    Life takes care of itself.

    Life Happens

    Even when you are not there to see it, life still happens.

    Everything still unfolds — rivers flow, winds move, earth shifts.

    Even if you choose inaction — even if you refuse to eat, drink, or sleep — things still happen. The body dies, yes, but death itself is a happening.

    Because everything is always happening. Always in motion.

    Even in stillness, there is happening.

    And everything that happens has a result. Even nothingness produces consequence.

    Life is self-correcting. Even ungrounded, it finds its own balance.

    Sometimes that balance looks toxic. Sometimes it looks destructive. But it is always balance. Always motion. Always happening.

    Death Must Occur

    Death, then, is necessary.

    Not the physical death we fear — not suicide, not the cutting short of the body’s days.

    Though that death is really not all that bad, in my experience.

    The dying part itself is no fun.

    The death?

    Too many words — words are funny for this one; there is not a word, other than death.

    It is nothing, and everything.

    Alpha, omega.

    I am.

    Here? What must die is the illusory self.

    The self we defend, cling to, and worship without even knowing it. The self we call “me.”

    That death is the doorway.

    The Last Illusion

    And yet, even here, there is a final paradox:

    If the self is illusion, then death is illusion too.

    Which means — death cannot free us either.

    Because an illusion cannot free an illusion.

    I do not fear.

    Why is none of this terrifying to me?

    Maybe because fear only exists where there is something to lose. And what I am losing was never real in the first place.

    Maybe because I have already died a thousand small deaths, the fear has already been burnt out of me.

    Maybe because I saw it:

    That what I am cannot die.

    And maybe that — quiet, simple, unshaken — is what freedom has always been.

    ✨

    xo,

    c.

  • A Message for So-Called “Artists”

    A Message for So-Called “Artists”

    “So you think you’re an artist, but you haven’t been to art school?”

    Well, then yes. You are.

    That’s exactly the right mindset — especially if you’re building skill and intuition at the same time.

    I say this both as a person with a Master’s in Arts (which I mention only to say, “I’ve been through your system, I know how it works, and I still reject the gatekeeping!”), and as an absolutely NON-PROFESSIONAL, non-conforming artist who also rarely shares any of their actual work:

    You’re not just “playing artist,” and being recognized as one is not the point. Those people trying to convince you of anything otherwise are wrong.

    Whatever you’re creating is absolutely valid.

    Don’t let anyone — especially those offering discouraging, destructive feedback rather than genuine critique — convince you otherwise. Just because some believe the creative or applied arts diploma they hold in one hand somehow validates the brush or pencil they hold in their other, along with the harsh judgments and negative opinions they’re vomiting all over you, doesn’t make it the truth.

    Regardless of who you are or where and how you learn, when you approach art as both a learning experience and an emotionally expressive therapy, you’re doing it right — not failing. You’re not just slopping paint on paper, scribbling in a sketchbook, or gluing down collage scraps at random.

    The difference is night and day — especially with watercolor (the medium I see people abandon most) — when you’re doing things like:

    • Consciously learning the muscle memory for how each brush moves.

    • Recognizing how the spring, belly, and tip affect water control.

    • Having fewer “happy accidents” and more intentional effects

    Painting is not just the act of moving pigment across a surface. It is the deliberate conversation between your hand, your tools, and your vision. It’s problem-solving in real time, learning how water, pigment, and paper (or canvas) respond to each other, and adjusting with both skill and instinct.

    It’s as much about restraint as it is about expression, and as much about observation as creation. When you understand that, every stroke becomes intentional, even in your loosest, most playful work.

    Watercolor especially rewards this kind of discipline because it’s less forgiving than acrylic or oil. You can’t just pile on more paint to hide a mistake — in a way, you have to work in reverse.

    No medium, but especially watercolor, is as easy as “the professionals” make it look. But if you keep going, keep learning, and keep focusing on technique and purpose — no matter what the art-school elite try to tell you — the control you gain over water, pigment, and paper will make even your loose, expressive or abstract work stronger. It will be loose or abstract by choice, not necessity.

    That deep dive into technique is probably why so many of you express so often how your art process is helping you mentally and emotionally, and why many artists pick up a pen, pencil, or brush in the first place. It’s meditative — but also empowering — to know exactly what your tools can do.

    So keep learning. Keep practicing. Keep playing! Keep a balance between the fun and the serious aspects. Sure, we all appreciate skill and technique. But what is the point if it’s just a job and not a fun expressive process with purpose?

    Nobody owns art as a process — and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, they’re not talking about art. It’s still a free world, regardless of how it may seem on the surface and no matter what the uppity, judgmental types try to say.

    Keep making art. Because your kind of art — the kind that comes from soul combined with technique rather than straight line, hard rules — is what art should still be all about.

    xo,

    c.

    💜🦋

  • The Line Is Always Open

    The Line Is Always Open

    A while ago, God asked me to step away from the noise. The purpose was not just to “rest,” but to enter true solitude. It wasn’t the kind of solitude that simply quiets the mind; it was the kind that strips away the need to convince, the compulsion to rescue, and the reflex to correct every error you see in the world.

    When you live in that stillness long enough, especially when you begin to examine how deeply and how long you have been misunderstood in your own life, you finally grasp why no one was truly listening. You begin to understand:

    The time for saving people by warning them and trying to teach them by telling them, begging them, or reasoning with them has passed. Just like with a child, there comes a time when you have to let them just keep screwing up until they learn. Experience is the only teacher that can accomplish anything fruitful.

    At some point, you realize your job is and always has been to just be the example and let them hate you or blame you if they wish. The time now, and the purpose, is to show up anchored in truth, walking forward for the sake of those who are searching.

    It is time to lead without any guarantee of who will follow, even if the path takes you to meet God alone. In the end, it all comes down to free will — and on the day you stand before Him, the only life and soul you will ultimately give account for is your own.

    There is no bureaucracy at the Pearly Gates, no worldly process to pass through. Character witnesses don’t exist there. Your actions, your choices, and the truth of your heart and relationship with Source will speak for themselves to the one and only true Judge, whose authority is absolute and divine.

    After months of this solitude, returning to public spaces feels different. The peace you find in solitude makes the digital clamor almost unbearable. You realize most people are not listening, not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to. They’ve been taught to fear the very silence that would heal them.

    Still, there are always a few — maybe only two or three in a sea of millions — who are listening for a different kind of voice. And for them, we show up.

    As I dipped a toe back into social media in recent weeks, I saw exactly why Source had been directing me as it had. Then, this morning, I saw a post on Instagram that reminded me exactly why I hesitate to return.

    It was a meme “conversation” between two cats:

    Cat 1: I don’t know who I am anymore.

    Cat 2: That’s okay, everybody feels that way sometimes — the universe doesn’t have a support line or customer service to tell you how to fix the problem.

    It’s clever on the surface, but the truth is: this is false.

    Yes, everyone struggles with knowing who they are from time to time — that’s life. But somewhere along the way, society began labeling that struggle as illness, defining solitude as unhealthy withdrawal (thereby denying people access to the solution), and filtering human experience through a narrow definition of “normal” set by a handful of powerful voices.

    And the part about the universe not having a “support line”? That’s the deepest untruth of all.

    The universe — God’s creation, and the divine voice within it — is always speaking. The language is there for anyone willing to learn it. The signs are constant. I know this because I have been hated for decades for striving to be a translator.

    The problem is not absence; it is illiteracy. Most people are not listening, or even looking, because they’ve been conditioned to tune in to the wrong frequency.

    Depression is not always depression, but many times (and this was my experience) the immediate response to anything that feels unpleasant is to label it as depression and drug people to Timbuktu and back again. Honestly? That is the reason many people can’t hear and don’t care to try. Not all — but so many.

    Lost is not always lost. Not every ache in the soul is a disorder to be medicated or pathologized. Sometimes it is simply disconnection from self and Source. The remedy is stillness, quiet, and the willingness to listen, and to then face and accept the truth — the very things people are told are “unhealthy” or “unproductive.”

    Society has been trained to fear solitude and invisibility, to measure our worth in noise and visibility. And then, when society meets those who have rejected that conditioning — who have done the work through blood, sweat, and tears — it labels them as “too deep,” “too intense,” or “problematic.” Society dismisses them because the truth they carry is rarely the easy answer the world wanted to hear.

    It’s willful ignorance, fed and nurtured by systems that benefit from a distracted, disconnected people.

    Those same systems encourage shallow comforts and praise the very mechanisms keeping us miserable. And when you break free, find balance, and refuse to play the game, you’re labeled extreme or hateful — when in reality, you are simply walking in the narrow space between reality and insanity.

    This was on my mind when I saw another post, one about the pressure of social media as an artist versus as a human being.

    My response was simple:

    I used to approach social media in the same way — letting the noise, the opinions, and the unspoken “rules” decide how and when I would show up. I carried the weight of strangers’ expectations until it felt heavy enough to crush my own reasons for creating.

    And then I realized: the ones who made me feel small were not here for the same reasons I was. They were chasing validation, purpose, or attention they didn’t already have. I already had those things. I was meeting my own goals, my own standards. When I stopped caring if they “got it,” the pressure disappeared.

    It is the same in life beyond the screen. Too many people are chasing money, status, and recognition, and too few are working from genuine passion or purpose. The work done from love will feed you. The work done to please others will drain you.

    That’s why these two posts — one about “not knowing who you are” and one about the pressure of showing up as an artist — are really about the same thing.

    The sickness of our time is not that we feel lost or uncertain; it’s that we’ve lost the ability, and in some cases the willingness, to listen to the truth that’s already speaking.

    If you can hear it, you don’t need a “support line” from the universe — you’re already, and infinitely, connected to it. If you can’t hear it, no human voice will convince you until you quiet the noise long enough to try.

    So for me? I keep showing up as I feel led to, as I hear God guiding me to. I keep sharing my experiences, through my photography, my art, and my voice, softly and quietly in shared expressions meant to be examples, not to convince the unwilling, but for the few who are listening and searching for a different kind of voice.

  • Be Still and Know | The Truth Before the Peace

    Be Still and Know | The Truth Before the Peace

    Get still and be quiet.

    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.

    And that…requires stillness and quiet.

    Be still and know that I am God…

    Psalm 46:10

  • 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.