Tag: transformation

  • Stargazer

    Stargazer

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + VSCO

    Stargazer—
    eyes lift past obstacles;
    night opens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Tetelestai (ܬܫܠܡ). John 19:30

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

  • Veil. 

    Veil. 

    entry twenty two — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Final Edit)

    Sometimes it feels like there is a different, almost literal space between seconds. A pause the world does not announce.

    There is intimacy in those spaces. Love. Beauty. A kind of quiet permission.

    There is me, and the moon, and what I remember without remembering. Something about home. Something about spirit. Something about soul.

    In those spaces, which turn into a place, then into awareness, then into something conscious without warning, I find myself again. Not arriving. Not searching. Just remembering how to be.

    It feels like standing in a doorway I have crossed a thousand times but cannot name. Familiar without history. Known without proof.

    And always, even when I wish it were not so, there she is too. 

    There are all of them. The pieces of my life that have already returned to Source, leaving me here to feel them but never hold them, to love without helping, to remember without any hope of their human realities returning.

    Home, not as a location, but as a frequency. And for a moment, I am inside it.

    catacosmosis // 2026

  • 2025

    2025

    2025 has been… peaceful.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Overlay)

    Not because it was an easy year. Personally, it has been a year of intermittent, great difficulty. The most challenging thing has been the unexpected diagnosis for my son – this, alongside compound grief that included more than death, and varying massive changes to daily life.

    It was a year of seemingly ceaselessly reorganizing, reframing, recalibrating, and managing circumstances and emotions for all of us, at different levels – while continuing to show up every day whether forward progress was visible or not.

    For me and my family, it has been a year of awesome trial and challenge. At times, a battle with doubt. Always, a falling back into and onto faith. And so, regardless, peace.

    It has obviously not been a year of peace in the way the word is usually used. Not peace because the world was quiet or gentle or healed. The world, broadly speaking, has been at war in myriad ways. Loudly. Relentlessly. At times, blatantly resisting.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Multiply)

    The world suffers only because it engages. Because it resists reality, which is that the only truth is love. And the world does not understand love, or much else, as it truly exists or is meant to behave or work.

    The world struggles only because it consents to the noise, the fear, the constant pull toward reaction, and because it values personal comfort and ego over soul.


    2025 was, cosmically, a 9 year. A year of endings. Of completion. Of letting things finish instead of dragging them forward out of habit, guilt, or fear. A year of cleaning up.

    A year of letting go. A year of allowing what was already done to actually be done. There is a strange, almost holy peace that comes with that kind of self-honesty.

    2026 rolls into a 10, or a 1 year. A reset. New beginnings. A slate wiped well and fully clean, whether we are ready for it or not. Our inner secrets and shadows brought into the light. Truths revealed that can no longer be denied, avoided, reframed, or buried.

    It is going to be a hell of a year, personally and collectively. Not because it is cruel, but because it is clarifying.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Hard Light)

    Every time I share what I see, thus expect to see going forward, simply by paying attention and quietly experiencing (as I have above), people tend to squash it. Dismiss it. Explain it away. Excuse it away. Laugh it away. That is fine. Squash this too, if you must or need to.

    But I speak only what needs to be heard, not what is comfortable:

    Do not fight it, whatever the “it” is at any given moment for you. Do not engage with the distractions. Do not take the bait.

    Do not allow society, media, or collective panic to manipulate you into believing that this manufactured “reality” is solid, fixed, or inevitable. Most of it is noise. Most of it only has power because we keep feeding it our attention and our fear.

    Peace lives on the other side of that misconception.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX FX (Aella, Screen)

    Not passive peace. Not numbness. Not spiritual bypassing or pretending everything is fine. Real peace. The kind that comes from clarity. From discernment. From choosing where your energy actually belongs.

    Choosing these readily available alternatives, through mindfulness and conscious being, through choosing God/Soul over self and ego, is the only reason such an exceedingly difficult year was not merely laced with peace, but filled with it for me.

    I hope and pray that you find and live in peace in 2026. Your own peace, first and foremost. Because that has to come first. That is what matters before it can ever combine, ripple outward, and become something shared. Collective peace is built from individual truth, not the other way around.

    Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
    Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
    Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
    Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.
    Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
    Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
    Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
    Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

    (Matthew 5:3–10)

    One important note, since this is so often misunderstood:

    “Peacemakers” does not mean peacekeepers.

    It does not mean avoiding conflict. It does not mean keeping things comfortable, quiet, or polite. It means actively making peace. Often at cost. Often through truth. Often through disruption, reconciliation, and righteousness. 

    Peace is not the absence of tension. It is the presence of integrity.

    May you find all of it in 2026.

    xo.
    c.

    Original image, iPhone 17 Pro
  • December Sunrise

    December Sunrise

    entry nineteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + Mextures + VSCO

    There’s a softness to this kind of morning light… the kind that slips in without ceremony and still manages to uncover what the heart has tried to tuck away. The silhouettes stand like witnesses, thin and unassuming, yet somehow they hold the whole ache of the season.

    And maybe this the truest gift of December: that almost nothing blooms, yet everything speaks.

    The sky daily turns itself into a quiet oracle, whispering that even in the stripped-back places, even in the stark-cold bare and in-between, there is still beauty gathering itself at the edges, waiting to rise every morning with the sun.

  • Revelation

    Revelation

    entry eighteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX + VSCO

    The full moon always finds me in that thin place between ache and awakening. The heart softens, the past stirs, and the light insists on touching what I thought I’d hidden.

    It doesn’t shout. It simply rises. And in rising, it reveals.

    This full moon of these last few days felt like a mirror tilted by something wiser than me: clear, unguarded, almost tender in the way it offers back the truth of who I am becoming.

    Every full moon asks for release, but this one asked for understanding. It offered an opportunity for a quiet recognition of what’s been shed, what’s been carried, and what still longs to be held with gentler hands.

    Under its glow, my fractures stopped pretending to be wounds. Instead, they shined… faint, but deliberate. And grace slipped in when I wasn’t looking.

  • Lovely Dead Crap

    Lovely Dead Crap

    It’s that time again – #lovelydeadcrap season.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX

    As most of you know, I have a strong familiarity with death and its unfolding, especially in humans, and a fondness for and kinship with death and dead things, all in the most holy, positive and beautiful sense… in the way one honors the combined soul and humanity of a teacher they have come to not only respect but to understand to such a depth that they recognize in them a truly kindred spirit.

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX

    Endings speak a language I have learned well: honest, unpretentious, and oddly comforting once you understand and accept that there is no escaping them. In fall and winter, I find that endings, at least in nature, also make for the most interesting and oddly beautiful subjects. Therefore, prepare to be lovingly spammed with my perspectives and perceptions. 😌

    iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX

    Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here.

    — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

    xo…

  • 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

  • Vesper

    Vesper

    📷 iPhone 7 Plus.
    ⚒️ VSCO (06, +3) + Lightroom (watermark only).
    entry thirteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.

    There is a moment every single day when golden hour gives way to blue hour. In that moment, the world pauses between heartbeats.

    The warmth of the sun hasn’t fully left, but it’s fading, slipping behind the horizon while the cool hues of twilight begin to take hold. For a few fleeting minutes, everything softens. The light is neither day nor night; it’s an in-between realm where time seems to hold its breath.

    Shadows stretch. The air shifts. The gold turns to amber, then to lavender, then to blue, a slow dissolving of one truth into another. It’s the day’s last whisper and the night’s first sigh, a moment that belongs to no one and everyone at once.

    Most people miss it. But for those who are still and detached from the noise of the world enough to notice, it feels like standing at the seam of two worlds – the visible and the unseen – the known and the infinite, as light gently hands the sky over to darkness.

    If I were still as attached to the idea of controlled outcomes as I used to be, I’d still not know it exists… much less recognize it and be aware enough to take it’s photo as it occurs.

    This is the product – nay, the gift – of mindfulness. 🧘

    Detachment is not that you own nothing.
    Detachment is that nothing owns you.
    —Bhagavad Gita 2.47

    catacosmosis // 2025

  • Babel, Babylon, and Beyond | The Same Old Serpent

    Babel, Babylon, and Beyond | The Same Old Serpent

    Fall is already upon us. Nature seems to have gotten ahead of itself in recent weeks and the world around me, from my backyard to the vast wilderness, has already begun to experience the cycles of death and decay that the fall season brings to prepare us to enter a season of rest.

    I’ve found myself meditating on this as I’ve observed the process and explored the details of it with my camera lately. Here are some of the fruits of these meditations — especially the ones I experienced while studying this little corner of my backyard that has been unseasonably filled with the tiniest but cutest mushrooms.

    We so often use falling leaves as the symbol of letting go in autumn — but mushrooms tell another side of the story. They are decay in action, the hidden transformation beneath the surface, breaking down what once was so that life can be nourished again. They remind me that endings are not passive; they are active processes of renewal, just as necessary as the more obvious metaphors we tend to notice.

    What follows in this post may not feel “light and pretty,” but the deeper work is still life-giving. Much of it was born from reviewing and processing my recently captured mushroom images — small, humble, not glamorous, yet quietly essential. These considerations and introspections, though they may seem less than inviting, have at their core offered me encouragement.


    When you strip away the politics, money, and power structures, what you’re left with is a spiritual war. That’s the root of it all.

    The “deep state,” the “new world order,” whatever names we slap on it in the 3D — those are just costumes. The real battle is what Paul described in Ephesians 6:

    “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world, and spiritual wickedness in high places.”

    In short, demonic and low-level forces that have always tried to mimic, distort, and overthrow the authority of God.

    From Babel to Babylon to Rome to today, it’s the same rebellion recycled. Every empire that tries to erase God ends up becoming a shadow play of Babel — the same arrogance, the same lust for control, and the same inevitable collapse. The schemes shift form — empire, propaganda, deception, perversion — but the spirit behind them hasn’t changed.

    It’s the same old serpent trying to counterfeit creation and place itself on the throne. But here’s the thing you need to remember, if you are of the light:

    Humans can choose to align with that darkness or resist it. That’s why it looks like whole institutions, movements, or leaders are “possessed” by this agenda. But the truth is, they’re vessels. Some willingly, some blindly. And even when people align with darkness, they are never the true source of its power — and they are never beyond God’s reach if they repent of and rebuke the darkness.

    The vessels may change, but the spirit behind them is the same counterfeit. It’s not their power. It’s borrowed power, and because the Devil is a trickster and a liar, it cannot outlast the sovereignty of Source truth.

    That’s why, in the light of evil tragedy, the instinct to pray “God bless and protect” is attacked and pushed down so brazenly by some, and depended upon and held on to so tightly by others. The only way for the dark to win is to try to sniff out the light.

    The only shield that stands against the dark, though, isn’t more politics, more anger, or more fleshly fight — it’s divine covering. That’s why light beings, from Buddha to Jesus, called us salt and light — because no matter how deep the night gets, even the smallest flame cannot be overcome.

    Light exposes. Truth cuts through lies. And no empire, no “order,” no demonic hierarchy driving human ego has ever been able to out-rule the Source of the Universe: Love.

    The darkness may rage, but it has already lost. Its decay is inevitable. Our task is not to fear its noise, but to keep carrying the light that cannot be extinguished.

    if you are only just beginning to see the reality of this battle and sense that light, do not be afraid of how small it may seem in you. Even the faintest flicker is enough to drive back the dark. Nurture it. Walk with it. Let it steady your steps.

    The path may feel unfamiliar, but you are not walking it alone. Every spark joins the greater flame, and together we rise.

    Keep going — the light you carry is already proof that the darkness has not won.

    xo,

    c.