Eye of the Mountain
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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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140 pieces
Continue Here - The Arc of Becoming
Brings the arc of trauma recovery to a turn where the past remains real but no longer dictates the future. Safety arises through changed perception, participation, relational presence, and the recognition that nothing essential is missing.
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 Moments
Addresses someone physically present but psychologically living in the future. The speaker grieves their unavailable shared moment in advance, imagining a later grief that will arrive only after the relationship is gone.
Love with a No
Addresses an anxious loved one with care while refusing enmeshment, separating genuine love from worry, unsolicited help, emotional debt, and mutual self-abandonment.
Togetherness
Dissolves the isolated self into weather, matter, motion, and shared attention, imagining belonging as participation in the continuous movement of the world.
Coming Alive
Defines becoming as accumulated practice rather than arrival. Repetition makes pain more precise and attention more stable until fear, uncertainty, and reality can be met with courage, rhythm, and presence.
Teachers of Discomfort
Recasts disappointment, anger, sadness, confusion, exhaustion, and joy as forms of information whose discomfort can refine boundaries, perception, and contact with reality.
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.
Qualities of Balance
Defines balance as responsive freedom rather than rigid stability: a quiet center able to move, hold contradiction, belong, and correct without grasping or force.
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.
The Shape of Pain
Follows pain as a spiral thread connecting apparently separate wounds across time. Rather than mere alarm, pain becomes a line through the labyrinth that grief can follow back toward integration and home.
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.