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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Aliveness Manifesto
Defines aliveness as honest participation in present reality rather than intensity, achievement, or the completion of healing—and calls for choosing contact again and again without a finish line.
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.
Ecstasy Now
Turns toward the inner voice of insufficiency as a lonely part needing companionship, locating ecstasy not in achievement but in ending the war with oneself.
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.