entry twenty one — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Final Edit)
Sometimes it feels like there is a different, almost literal space between seconds. A pause the world does not announce.
There is intimacy in those spaces. Love. Beauty. A kind of quiet permission.
There is me, and the moon, and what I remember without remembering. Something about home. Something about spirit. Something about soul.
In those spaces, which turn into a place, then into awareness, then into something conscious without warning, I find myself again. Not arriving. Not searching. Just remembering how to be.
It feels like standing in a doorway I have crossed a thousand times but cannot name. Familiar without history. Known without proof.
And always, even when I wish it were not so, there she is too.
There are all of them. The pieces of my life that have already returned to Source, leaving me here to feel them but never hold them, to love without helping, to remember without any hope of their human realities returning.
Home, not as a location, but as a frequency. And for a moment, I am inside it.
catacosmosis // 2026
iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Final Edit)iPhone 17 Pro + DistressedFX (Textures Only)iPhone 17 Pro (Original, shot with ProCamera)
entry twenty — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
Lumix GX7 + DistressedFX + VSCO
At first glance, it looks like the night sky. Stars caught in dark water, light splintered and scattered across a depth that won’t quite give itself away. But it isn’t the sky.
It’s dead things in the night, drifting on reflections. What’s beneath them still visible in places, obscured in others, the creek bed watching quietly through the murk.
This is what avoidance looks like.
We tell ourselves we are being practical. Responsible. Efficient. We say we can’t afford to stay. That we don’t have the time. That the weight would crush us if we lingered too long in the place where everything ended.
Sometimes those things are true. But truth has layers, and there is always another one underneath the one we say out loud.
I didn’t leave because I couldn’t manage it. I left because staying would have required me to face the finality of it all… and I wasn’t ready to let it be final unless I controlled the ending.
So I doubled down.
If this was the last chapter, I would slam the book shut myself. Sell the house. Let it go. Never look back. Shut myself away from it in the fullest, most tangible way that I could. And I did.
Except that isn’t how grief works. Not in real life. Not in spirit. Not in the psyche or the heart.
What we try to bury doesn’t disappear. What we try to drown learns how to breathe underwater. The things we refuse to look at don’t stop existing. They just wait.
They become shapes beneath the surface. Creek monsters tucked under rocks. Ghouls that don’t announce themselves, only shift when the light hits the water just right.
Running feels like relief at first. It masquerades as strength. As forward motion. As survival.
But it isn’t courage. It isn’t healing. And it certainly isn’t wisdom. It is postponement.
Eventually, the piper comes.
This winter has been that reckoning for me. A season of stillness I didn’t choose, where the water stopped moving long enough for everything to rise.
Regret. Guilt. Shame. The ache of what I didn’t tend to when I still had the chance.
It has been heavy.
But I am here. And I am mid-process of the exhumation.
Instead of running, I am learning (again) to release. To let what I tried to sink float to the surface. To watch it drift, or linger, or soften and break apart with time. To observe rather than flee. To witness rather than erase.
Because drowning it never made it disappear. It only darkened the water.
There is grace even here. Fractured, scattered, refracted through loss, but still light. Still honest. Still mine, in memory and in soul.
I sold my childhood home, and I regret it. Not because it is gone, but because I believed distance could undo what shaped me. It couldn’t. I didn’t forget it. I didn’t erase it. And now I face the ghost of it… even if I must do so from far, far away.
Haze blurs his profile. I grip the thin stem of hope. Current keeps moving.
I came across this photo from a camping/hiking weekend in December 2018 this morning, and it opened something in me… or awakened it.
In the photo, the woods are one giant lens flare: the late-fall sun punches clean holes in the canopy, throws every leaf into over-saturated neon, while the creek becomes a mirror so sharp you feel you could step through it into another forest.
That’s what this last year with my son has been doing to the dial inside me. Faith cranked so high it hums, reality just as loud, and me caught in the bright slash between. I used to soften one side or the other: pray the hard parts dimmer, work until the wonder felt manageable. But the creek refuses to choose between glare and reflection; it holds both, lets them ricochet until you can’t tell which side of the surface is real.
I can see now that I am – or prefer to be – the creek. I practice that same double exposure of my roles, but it has all blurred and blinded me in recent days. In reality, all it adds up to is the fierce mother part of me – scheduling therapies, ordering visual timers, and trying to learn an entirely new language that has no words – and the gentler, whole me. The part of me that still leaves room for hope and comfort in the impossible color of his laugh when a dragonfly lands on his sleeve.
Balance isn’t compromise; it’s letting the light stay blinding and the shadows stay knife-edged, trusting the picture only makes sense when neither is edited out.
entry eighteen — 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.
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.
entry sixteen — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
iPhone 17 Pro + VSCO + DistressedFX + Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).
Evening gathers in a bluish-purple hush, and the crunch of dirt and rock seems to echo around me. Steadily and with intention, I put one foot in front of the other.
The birds fall silent, and the wind begins its quiet work. Loosening what I’ve held too tightly. Lifting the thin, trembling pieces of me that never settled into place.
They rise like seeds learning the shape of their own release, drifting out of me in a soft unspooling. The silhouette remains. Stem, leaf, the stark line of what endures. Everything lighter unthreads itself into motion.
What once felt like a tangle becomes a brief choreography, a small mercy in the dimming light. Loss, I’m learning, is sometimes only a shifting of weight.
The wind carries the rest. The jumbled thoughts. The old ache. The unspoken sentences that kept circling my ribs. Let them scatter. Let them drift beyond reach.
What stays is quieter, but honest. A rooted shape against the fading sky, held together not by certainty, but by the simple grace of letting go.
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.
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
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.
There’s this list — never written down in one place, but always hanging over me like the hum of an old fluorescent light. It’s made of things that should be straightforward:
Back up the photos.
Untangle the art supplies.
Organize the sketchbooks.
Move the ideas from my head to a place they can breathe.
Put the words onto the pages.
Clean the brushes.
Organize the books.
Organize the ideas.
But they are never straightforward. Not for me. Not for anyone whose mind has a thousand open windows and refuses to shut them just because the world prefers tidy blinds.
Society has found a name for this: ADD. ADHD. Neurodivergence. The diagnosis may be true for some, but here’s what I believe — it’s not a flaw. It’s the original wiring of the artist, the philosopher, the restless creative soul. It’s the part of the mind that won’t collapse into the assembly-line cadence of “normal life.” And that refusal has always been a threat to the people who rely on compliance.
This is why so many people who are miserable in the 9–5 grind feel like they’re constantly drowning. They fight from one day to the next just to keep their priorities in order, forgetting things, feeling scattered, wondering why life feels like a treadmill they can’t get off. It’s not because they’re lazy or incapable — it’s because they’ve been convinced, by family, by school, by the whole machinery of society, that their purpose is something other than what their soul already knows it to be.
They’re creatives, not conformers. But they’ve spent their entire lives pouring all their energy into staying afloat in a stormy, chaotic sea they were never meant to swim in. And not only has the world’s rules kept them from living their purpose, they don’t even remember what that purpose is… and they certainly haven’t been taught how to manage or maintain reality as a creative.
The problem is, the tools that work for type A people don’t work for type B people — and vice versa. But the world, the powers that be? They don’t want any creatives to thrive. Why? Because thriving creatives don’t line their pockets, and they can’t control what they can’t contain.
By the late ’90s and early 2000s, the strategy had shifted. They started medicating us into focus, pressing Adderall into palms while preaching “Say no to drugs” in the same breath. It wasn’t just hypocrisy; it was the perfect kind of doublethink. They couldn’t get my generation — Gen X, especially — to trade curiosity for clock-punching, so they tried to sedate the wonder right out of us.
It had started long before my generation. From the ’60s onward, every decade had its rebellion, but something about our era cracked the pattern wide open. We remembered how to slip back into our creative current, to say — without apology — that the system wasn’t built for us, and we weren’t going to rewire ourselves to suit it.
The boomer generation fell for it enough to punch the clock and hold the grind in both hands. But my generation? The ones who were school-aged in the ’80s and especially high school/college aged in the ’90s, raised as latchkey kids, left to our own devices? We had just enough space to keep our own ideas and double down on our self-expression. We rejected the rhetoric outright, but we still had the foundational work ethic, the grit, the stubborn drive to show up.
Unfortunately, that refusal was met with more control, more noise. By 2012, the hum had become a low, constant pressure. By 2016, the unexpected and unorthodox split the air like lightning, and nothing went back to sleep after that. By 2020 — and certainly by 2022 — largely thanks to Covid (which I will forever believe was a purposeful attempt to tighten the reins of control), the result wasn’t the obedience they hoped for. It was the opposite. People were waking up in numbers that mattered.
And here we are. And here I am.
Sitting with a computer that holds hundreds of gigabytes of uncataloged photographs, each one a memory or a moment, all of them waiting for me to find them a home, if not on someone’s wall then in beautiful posts they can enjoy on their computer screens. Art supplies scattered in a way that makes them impossible to ignore and yet impossible to start sorting. Projects that live half in the physical world and half in my head, where they multiply faster than any app or planner could contain.
Digital tools have not tamed the chaos — they’ve only given it better hiding places. They’ve bred a new kind of loathing, a quieter form of procrastination and lethargy, one that makes the struggles of pre-technology life feel almost romantic in hindsight — like a fairy tale we didn’t know we were living, a beautiful dream we only learned to miss once it was gone.
This morning, I pulled a book from my shelf. It’s been there since Ralph died:
How to Be an Explorer of the World — Portable Art Life Museum.
I haven’t opened it yet. The title alone feels like someone has tossed me a rope, and I’m still deciding whether to pull. Even without turning a page, I intuitively, automatically know — as every creative does — what waits for me inside. The “Art” in the title has been struck through and replaced with “Life” for a reason: because that’s what it truly is. A reminder that we’re not here to live as curators of someone else’s museum, dusting off exhibits we never chose. We’re here to explore — to step into new rooms, to rearrange them until they make sense to us, to claim the space as our own.
And yet, here’s the truth I keep circling: maintenance is the perpetual loop where I always seem to get stuck.
Not the dreaming, not the making, but the keeping. The tending. The part where you have to hold the door open for what you’ve already made so it doesn’t fall apart while you’re off chasing the next thing. Somewhere in the tug-of-war between vision and upkeep, I drop threads. And when enough threads fall, the rest of my life starts tangling with them — homeschooling, daily meals, the way the pantry and the jumble of household chores scribbled on random scraps of paper looks like a metaphor for my brain.
This is the quiet battle no one talks about: how to keep creating without losing the things you’ve already created. How to tend your work without caging your mind. How to make room for the next idea without letting the last one turn to dust.
For people like us, maintenance is never just maintenance. It’s a negotiation between the world’s idea of order and the wild way our minds are built to move. And maybe the truth is that we aren’t the ones in need of repair.
Maybe the wiring was never the problem. Maybe it’s the world that’s broken.
And what does all of this lead to? Yet another idea tossed onto the pile: maybe I should explore it in an in-depth series of articles here.
Ha.
For now, though, here’s a brief gallery of shots of my favorite tree — the oldest in my state, and one I’ve found myself referencing often lately. A couple are completely blown out. One feels especially dull to me. But while they may seem ordinary, even boring, to the casual observer, my passion for this incredible 400+ year-old short-leaf pine runs deeper than any skill or lens could ever capture.
And that’s exactly the point — this tree is the living embodiment of what I’ve been trying to say above. The uncreative soul may never understand the pull, the quiet reverence, or the way beauty lives in the details that can’t be measured or monetized. But to those who do understand, no explanation is needed.
I hope you enjoy these images as much as I enjoyed the process of shooting and processing them.
catacosmosis 