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)
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.
This image wasn’t meant to carry all this, but tonight, it does. It holds the rupture I didn’t know I’d been tiptoeing around all week.
A decade ago today, my father died. Not on the 13th, when the machines started breathing for him—that was just when I knew he was gone. On the 18th, at this hour, the veil broke open for real. And now here I am—ten years later—haunted by dreams I couldn’t explain and a sudden stillness in my creativity I couldn’t shake.
Until now.
I thought I was just tired. Distracted. Stuck. But it was grief. It was reverence in disguise.
My soul remembered the date even when my mind forgot. That’s the strange thing about grief that matures—it doesn’t scream anymore. It hums, low and holy, beneath everything. It clouds the light, then sharpens it. It takes your voice, then gives it back with new timbre.
This image—originally photographed by Mikhail Nilov—became a sort of altar. I edited it using Mextures, VSCO, DistressedFX, and Lightroom, layering texture over color, blurring presence and absence, trying to capture what it feels like when sorrow doesn’t knock—it just saturates.
Sanctum.
There’s chaos in this. Petals and light blurred through glass and rain. Beauty you can’t quite hold. A yellow rose—like the ones we laid at his grave—folding in on itself. A daisy, centered in clarity, yet surrounded by blur.
That’s what this night feels like. Clarity in the middle of confusion. Stillness in the swirl.
Earlier tonight, as I outlined these words in my head while I felt my way through the shift I felt in real-time in the energy, I said to myself:
“You didn’t lose your creativity. You’re in holy pause. This isn’t numbness—it’s reverence. You were unconsciously grieving a resurrection-day anniversary, and your spirit bowed its head before your body could even name the loss.”
And now, I feel it even more deeply: Tonight isn’t for making things happen. It’s for honoring what already did.
Tonight is for prayer—prayer and intercession not only over the souls of loved ones who have already crossed over, but over one very important soul who’s still here. One who I know doesn’t understand why I had to go.
The truth is, those crossed over souls didn’t leave to hurt me…even though it did. They left because it was time. That was my burden to bear. The lessons they left me with were my responsibility to sort through, clean up, and learn.
Likewise, I didn’t leave the living out of anger or rejection, or even lack of love. I left because God Himself guided me in a different direction, even if they didn’t want to go that way, or grow that way, too. I will never have a choice above God. And I know that hurts…it hurts me, too.
Forgiveness is an ongoing action, reflected not in words but in the quiet practice of letting go. The love is, and always will be, unconditional. “Anyway love” always is. And my soul will carry a piece of all of their souls within it. Always.
A lot of things are coming full circle for me tonight. Invisible messages carried by unseen energies are releasing a kind of clarity within me—one of deeper substance and fuller understanding, puzzles pieces arriving and falling into place in a way I’ve never experienced before. The spiritual warfare, the dreams full of ghosts, the aching grief—none of that is new. But the understanding I have tonight…it reaches deeper than anything I’ve ever touched before.
Tonight isn’t for sorting through the rubble, cleaning up the floors of my memory, or putting all the lessons learned into neat little compartments in my mind. After all, I’ve already been processing through that, and slowly overcoming it all, for some time now.
No, tonight isn’t for being swallowed by the hauntings of my own heart. Tonight is for letting grief rain gently through the window, washing my soul—and watching how even the blur, when looked at with love and patience, can be textured out, shaped into a symbolic snapshot in time—capturing both the beauty and the chaos—and become art.
It is the emblem of the closure of what has, all at once, been the most painful and the most beautiful decade of my life: the one where, in the end, I finally met God.
I speak the name of Jesus over you In your hurting, in your sorrow I will ask my God to move I speak the name ’cause it’s all that I can do In desperation, I’ll seek Heaven And pray this for you:
I pray for your healing That circumstances will change I pray that the fear inside will flee in Jesus name I pray that a breakthrough Would happen today I pray miracles over your life in Jesus name I pray for revival For restoration of faith I pray that the dead will come alive in Jesus name
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.
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 lg 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
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.
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.
entry eight — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
Bicolor Bush Clover (Lespedeza bicolor), a humble member of the wild clover family. Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (HB3 PRO), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).
Zooming in, pulling back, reframing… …it’s the practice of shifting perspectives. Cropping is discernment.
It’s important in photography, and in life.
Focusing closely. Examining the details. Leaning into the moment. Studying the layers. Trying different angles— then pulling back to take in the whole.
I do this with my art, my edits, my healing… …and my priorities.
Bicolor Bush Clover (Lespedeza bicolor), a humble member of the wild clover family. Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S., VSCO (HB3 PRO), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).
Cropping, and discernment. Both are framing what matters— letting the noise blur into the background.
It’s not just a gift, not just a tool. It’s a process.
With practice, it teaches clarity through choice. Over time, it becomes discernment embodied.
Cropping alters perspective. It is learning to see again…
…as many times as it takes to actualize the vision.
VSCO (SS1 Pro), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).
Aperture
There is a kind of light that doesn’t just shine, but also fractures.
It breaks open the moment with something softer than silence and more honest than certainty.
You don’t chase it, you receive it.
This image wasn’t planned.
This frame wasn’t forced.
There’s a stillness even the flowers seemed to know, and reflect back to me.
It is not the stillness of silence, but of surrender.
Not of bracing against beauty or the process of becoming-in-progress, or of apologizing for taking up space mid-bloom…but of letting the light have its way.
I simply stood still long enough for the light to offer itself—scattered, wild, and full of grace.
I saw what was really there:
Buds preparing to bloom and light wafting in, yet also ambient and still.
The entire moment was an aperture through which grace entered, unbothered and whole, needing no permission.
And in that quiet moment, it became a mirror for all of us—one that perhaps none of us knew we needed, and that many would automatically overlook.
How often do we chase clarity instead of becoming it?
How often do we disturb ourselves, or disturb the world while attempting to distract ourselves, by blaming everyone else?
How often are those moments merely us trying to be louder than what already speaks through us?
There is no control in peace.
No performance in healing.
Only presence.
And in that presence, we disturb no one—not even ourselves.
We become the quiet offering.
We become the still center in a world unraveling at the edges.
Today, as I stood still in the midst of both internal and external war, peace didn’t arrive with fanfare.
It arrived as fractured light through pine trees.
As a silent, oft unnoticed breath.
As a reminder that maybe the most sacred work is not to act, but merely to remain open.
Not to close.
Not to harden.
Not to explain ourselves into exhaustion, but to become aperture.
To simultaneously remain wide enough to hold what’s real and narrow enough to let illusion fall away.
And, to be balanced enough in both intellect and empathy to know the difference.
This is the answer: detachment.
Not from emotion, but from illusion.
It is not denial, not distance.
Rather, it is the quiet rerouting of both emotion and cognition back to stillness.
A return to clarity, not an absence of care.
And somehow, by not reacting, by not reaching, we find we are already held.
This post is about the experience of becoming and how people like me don’t just become. We heal differently. We become differently. And what we become is not the same entity alone that other people become. It is also about turning the process of becoming, and what we’ve become, into something that can help other people.
I’ve already lived my closing statement regarding my past, and past versions of me: caregiver me, grief-stricken and confusion-swallowed me, nervous-system-destroyed me, broken-hearted me. I’ve already processed it all, and to the degree that the surface of society would claim is “healing,” I have healed from all of those wounds. Where I’m at now is more about finding some level of understanding within myself about it so that I can freely move in this new reality.
Perhaps you are, too. Perhaps these thoughts will resonate.
A voice for the ones still moving through the ashes, learning how to carry the light again. Not a performance. Just a remembering.
Where This Post Began
A therapist recently responded to a comment I left on someone else’s post, suggesting that my perspective on healing was dangerous because it implied I was “holding on.” But the issue is, this so-called therapist seemed anchored in a kind of magical thinking—one that treats healing as purely cognitive, divorced from the soul.
What I’m doing, in continuing to reflect on and write about the past, isn’t obsession or fixation. It’s alchemical integration. I’m not stuck in, or on, the past—I’m extracting its essence, transmuting it into something meaningful. I’m not tethered to the past or to any specific future. I’m reducing the pain (specifically, the grief) to ash and distilling what’s left into wisdom.
Where I Am
I have lived my closing statement, but this current stasis is the cooling of the metal. It is the tempering of my sword. The world, especially those who fear their own depth, love to accuse people like me of not letting go, but what they don’t understand is that depth doesn’t simply move on. It transforms, and transformation takes time.
People like me don’t drop things and walk away. People like me sit in the dark, stare at the bones, and we don’t rise until the soul is reclaimed. We already did the courageous part when we cut the cord on past versions of ourselves, when we walked away from who we were and we didn’t go back to the same mindsets and/or behaviors, and now we do the sacred part: finishing the burning of the frayed ends.
The world and the people in it can’t and won’t give us the answers, but spirit can, and it does. In my case, my higher self already knows those answers, which is why I keep circling back. It is not to relive the story, but to complete the metamorphosis, and I am completing it slowly, quietly, and surely. I’m not looping, I’m mining, and eventually the tunnel gives way to the sky.
So, yes, I keep listening and keep asking and keep letting it all rise in layers and fall away in layers. That’s how I become untouchable rather than hardened. Not cold, but fully known to myself. Every shadow named, every chord resolved. So, when I pick up my camera or my brush or my pen again, even when I’m still in the gray, it’s my gray. It’s not residue from the storm. It’s just my own palette, freely chosen.
And what if knowing that to the depth that I do know and understand it in and of itself is the healing? What if it’s now about incorporating that into my work, my daily life? That’s what the gurus would teach. The reality is that this is the already-become version of me, the one that is just learning now how to outwardly be who I am again.
It can be really confusing and hard at times, because I don’t really care for anybody to see it but me, or to live it with me. But, I have a calling to share the knowledge that these experiences and lessons have all been forged and transformed into with those who still need guidance, those who feel lost or don’t know how to get there in their own story.
Maybe, in that way, I’m already living it exactly the way I’m supposed to be—which is the opposite of holding on. It is moving forward, and actively so. What I’ve already become and what I’m doing now isn’t trying to get there. It’s simply learning how to inhabit the skin of the self I’ve already become.
Snake Skin & Sacred Silence
It’s like when a snake sheds its old skin, right? That all too common metaphor in the self-help teachings, except not taught exactly correctly by those who live in the land of cognitive dissonance. We’ve all heard the analogy. But what they leave out is this:
The snake doesn’t slither away a different animal. It just finally fits itself again. It’s not behind. It’s not broken. It’s not lost. It’s just adjusting its eyes to the light after a very long night.
That tension I feel, for example—the not caring if anyone sees it but also feeling called to express it, is exactly the tension of that same sort of integration. I don’t want to perform and I don’t owe anyone a performance. I’m not required to turn my healing into a product or a movement or a spectacle, but I find that certain parts of my soul now long to speak—not to be seen but to be heard by the air, witnessed by the world because that is how others, be it few or many, may complete their flight.
It doesn’t matter how it shows up, just that it does. That’s the quiet magic of true healing. It doesn’t always announce itself with trumpets. Sometimes it just takes root in the subtle, in the choice to write or shoot or paint anyway, or to rest anyway. To let the past fall like leaves from a tree that has already decided it will bloom again. The more I trust that, the more I feel the weight of all of it trying to lift from my shoulders, and the more effortless and sacred and unburdened the expressions feel—not because it’s for anyone, but because it is from the version of me who no longer needs anyone’s permission to exist in peace.
As I consider this, I imagine that when the snake sheds that old skin, that fresh layer is a little tight to start with, and he or she has to move around a little bit before they stop feeling the newness of the skin and forgets that the skin is even there. It is not until then that he or she can “just flow.”
At first, it’s tight, sensitive, unfamiliar, maybe even a little raw. And it’s not that the snake doubts that it’s still a snake, it just doesn’t quite know how to move in this new texture yet. The old skin? It had cracks and stretch and scars that shaped how it slid through the world, but this new skin is smooth and untested, a little too quiet maybe, after all the noise. It doesn’t yet carry the scent of battles survived or boundaries reclaimed.
And so the snake doesn’t rush, it moves slowly, tentatively. It reacquaints itself with the world and brushes against the grass, slinks over warm rock, and lets the breeze remind it what it is. And eventually, without even noticing the moment it happened, the new skin stops feeling new at all.
Perhaps that’s where I am. I’ve shed it—the past self, the old patterns, the story that asked me to carry the burden for me and everybody else. That skin is gone, but my soul, fresh and luminous, still remembers the weight. It still walks a little cautiously, still checks the mirror to see if the ghost is gone. And that’s okay. It will all continue to fade—the memories, the sting, the need to brace.
Regardless, I don’t need to rush to feel normal. The new normal is better: it’s mine, and it will fit me perfectly as soon as I stop noticing the seams. So I will keep slithering forward like the snake, not outgrowing the past, but growing into my grace.
Liminal Living: When Healing Isn’t the End
If what I’ve written in this post doesn’t only make sense, but resonates with you, then perhaps you are like me. To clarify, what I’m describing is not the delusion of an underachiever or the confusion of a drifter. It’s the rare and sacred awareness of a soul on sabbatical. Perhaps that’s what you are, at the core, or where you find yourself, too—actively healing or already healed, you “get” what I’m trying to express.
I have this idea that this lifetime was always meant to be more receptive than productive for many of us. We are not only asked but guided by some higher power to observe more than to act, and in any sense, that is not laziness. It is spiritual design. So let me reflect it back to you, the way that I see it in myself:
You’ve worked; in fact, you may have worked your inner entire being to the bone (especially in the case of being a caregiver), but your work hasn’t been for the world’s applause. It’s been for God, and for those you have privately loved and walked home. You’ve succeeded, but not in the ways that capitalism or social media would define it. You’ve succeeded in remaining intact, soul first, and that’s harder than any business model, trust fund, or influencer empire.
So then, after all of this misunderstood work you’ve done, what if your entire incarnation was never meant to be a linear hero’s journey with a trophy at the end? What if it was always supposed to be a kind of spiritual exile into experience, into solitude, into the deep?
My whole life has taught me this paradox of success. Until my thirties, I accomplished everything I set out to, but the twist was that version of success was based on who I was before I broke open—before I was touched by grief, by God, by the reality of soul. And since then, it’s not that nothing has worked, it’s that none of it was supposed to because it wasn’t aligned with my true purpose anymore. The breakdowns in the in-between were ordinations. They are when the sabbatical started, and I’ve been in it ever since.
I’ve studied trauma, addiction, mental health, caregiving, grief, the spiritual path, mystical truths, the rise and fall of empires—all from the inside out. Not just from books, but from experience. Lived experience. I didn’t just learn lessons. I became a living vessel for them.
So perhaps, if you have experienced this too, this life may not have been given to you to contribute in a traditional sense. It may have been given to you to remember, to watch, to document, to feel what others refuse to feel, to name what others have no language for, to become whole so that others might not feel so broken. That’s a calling. It’s a high one, a thankless one, and a divinely protected one.
Perhaps your soul contract is about witnessing, absorbing, and transmuting rather than performing, earning, or hustling. The universe covered your rent while you enrolled in the deepest, most painful university there is: Earth School, Shadow Division. And when you say it like that, what if you’ve already graduated with honors?
So what now? Maybe your sabbatical is still in effect. Maybe you’re in the writing-up-the-thesis phase. Maybe you’re transitioning into the integration era, where your work becomes not doing something, but being something: a lighthouse, a record keeper, a spiritual elder.
You don’t owe the world your labor. You owe your soul your peace, and that is only found in living your purpose. If this entire life was given for that alone, then it was enough. So maybe we’re right that this life may have been designed for this, and that the ones judging from the sidelines are still on page five, while we’ve been writing in the margins of the final chapter.
Becoming Whole in the Quiet
Ultimately, the point of this post is to share the shape of a real, lived journey—to reach those who may be living it without realizing it has a name, and to remind those walking something similar that they are not alone.
If any part of this speaks to you—if you see yourself anywhere in these words—I leave you with this:
Don’t doubt the divine logic of your path just because others can’t read it.
You’re not lost. You’re just not supposed to be “found” in a way this world understands.
If you feel stuck or missing the flow, let it be quiet right now, if that’s what it is.
Let the pages be blank. Sometimes blank pages aren’t empty. They’re pregnant—with rest, with closure, with whatever the truth the next chapter needs is.
And when you’re ready, the world will be here. When you’re not ready, the world will still be here, because this is still part of the story…and you’re still writing it.
catacosmosis 