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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Theme · Aliveness
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Leaving Hope
Treats hope as an attachment to an unrealized alternate life that keeps the present in suspension. Severing that bond permits grief for what will not happen and contact with what remains.
Invitation to Dance
Imagines growth as contact between already-whole centers rather than completion by another person. Attraction, rhythm, boundaries, and mutual responsiveness turn relationship into an invitation rather than a rescue.
Taking from Abundance
Reverses familiar ideas about generosity by examining giving driven by scarcity and taking made possible by trust, receptivity, and enoughness.
Enoughness
Locates enoughness in valuing one’s own time and existence rather than in perfection, recognition, or achievement. From that ground, choice replaces proving and satisfaction no longer depends on external permission.
Alive in a Fantasy
Examines fantasy as an orientation toward unavailable life that preserves intensity while spreading deadness through the present. What feels alive in imagination can become a way of refusing contact with what actually exists.
The Ladder of Yes, But
Maps the bargaining stages by which a survival-oriented self resists surrender, revealing how transformation can become another defense against simply living.
Violent Pleasure
Stages joy as a threatening sensation that a trauma-shaped body must learn to tolerate, exposing how even pleasure can provoke resistance when suffering feels safer.
Baseline Human
Contrasts ordinary regulation with spiritual or performative ideals, proposing stillness, presence, embodiment, and mutuality as signs of being healed enough to live.
Erotic Charge
Distinguishes erotic vitality from compulsion by holding desire together with consent, limitation, and choice. Its charged freedom comes from a yes that retains access to no, and wanting without turning want into need.
Shedding Skin
Uses an animal shedding its skin to describe identity change that cannot be forced. The old form tears only when it is ready, making transformation both organic and persistently disorienting.
Precious
Defines valuing as a quality of sustained attention: holding gently, becoming curious, protecting without grasping, and allowing delight. What is precious becomes vivid through the manner in which it is attended to.
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.