Eye of the Mountain
Read
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?
Find a way in
Browse the archive
Theme
Series
Explore by literary character
Theme · Trauma
38 pieces · Clear filters
The Crushing Blow
War, occupation, exile, poverty,
The Inner Core
Beneath the layers of coping,
Piercing the Stone
The Gentlest of Violence
Boundless Compassion
Traces adult reaching and self-separation back to childhood failures of presence and attunement. It tests compassion at the point where another person cannot receive care without retaliating, asking how love can remain boundless while behavior meets a limit.
Prolog
Introduces the lifelong spiral of terror at the center of the memoir, then marks the story’s turn from decoding and surviving trauma toward the possibility of an ordinary life.
The Endless Reaching
Refuses to reduce persistent longing for unavailable people to pathology. After examining attachment, disappointment, and fantasy, the essay asks whether reaching can remain an expression of love without becoming a demand for return.
Natural Intelligence
Uses biological invasion, germination, metamorphosis, and flight to describe transformation triggered by disruptive contact. Pain and fear become signals that an emerging form of life has exceeded the nervous system’s old boundaries.
Less Effort
Describes healing’s progression from deliberate regulation to embodied competence, where accumulated practice reduces inner noise and right action requires less force.
Continue Here - The Arc of Becoming
Develops capacity as the practical bridge between trauma insight and participation in life. Presence, graded contact, and repetition rebuild a nervous system until balance and choice require less protective tension.
Shock Collar
Condenses a history of abuse, adaptation, and recovery into a stark autobiographical inventory. The act of viewing the record without collapse demonstrates a new authority over memories that once controlled the nervous system remotely.
The Tragedy of My Life
Confronts the painful gap between finally seeing one’s life clearly and discovering that insight alone cannot restore what trauma, absence, and adaptation took away.
Worshiping Absence
Shows how trauma orients attention toward unavailable people, missing care, and imagined completion. The worship of absence preserves the original wound while making available life difficult to notice or receive.