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Writing about breaking into reality.
Essays, memoir and poetry on attention, grief, belonging and aliveness. What does it take to live beyond survival and projection? How do we move towards participation and thriving?

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The Crushing Blow
War, occupation, exile, poverty,
Elements of Aliveness
Surveys the nonlinear practices and experiences that transformed a life organized around trauma. Across embodiment, relationship, ritual, creativity, and repeated identity deaths, grief emerges as the solvent that made every other change possible.
The Practice of Imperfection
Uses an imperfect creative act to examine exposure, inherited judgment, and the practice of letting unfinished or flawed work be seen without turning against oneself.
Seeing and Believing
Uses tightly closed eyes as an image of defensive certainty: refusing light protects inherited belief from corrective experience. The poem asks what it costs to preserve a worldview by excluding what could change it.
Rites of Initiation
Reads a life not as gradual progress but as a sequence of thresholds that ended one identity and made another possible. The piece gathers embodied, relational, and spiritual rites of passage into an autobiography of discontinuous becoming.
Melatonin Regrettably
Interprets sleeplessness as the return of needs ignored during the productive day. Night becomes the only quiet in which an inner child can protest neglect, making insomnia a relational message rather than merely a chemical problem.
Transparent and Legible
Explores the vulnerability of becoming readable to oneself and others after a life organized around concealment, shame, and protective opacity.
Continue Here - The Arc of Becoming
How do you become a decent father when the one you had either wasn’t there or taught you all the wrong lessons? How do you become a steady, safe, encouraging presence for your children and community when you grew up with violence, neglect, mockery or abuse? How do you reclaim masculinity when the version you inherited wounded everyone it touched? How do…
Stuck in an Inhale
Uses the held breath as an image of a survival identity that no longer needs to be maintained, inviting the body to exhale and let an obsolete self end.
Tip of the Spear
Imagines a child standing at the leading edge of an ancestral formation, supported by parents and generations behind him. The poem reframes individual courage as the visible point of a much larger inheritance.
Adolescence, the Test of Love
Frames adolescence as love’s test: whether a parent can tolerate a child’s separation, defiance, and independent identity without withdrawing connection.
The Role of a Mother
Defines mothering as the capacity to remain present with pain without abandoning, fixing, or becoming overwhelmed by it—and considers how that capacity is internalized.
Eye of the Mountain