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 · Attention
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Venture Out
Treats the body as a map bounded by perception and asks what becomes possible off that map, where competence gives way to uncertainty, adaptability, and aliveness.
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.
Less Effort
Describes healing’s progression from deliberate regulation to embodied competence, where accumulated practice reduces inner noise and right action requires less force.
Seeing Color
Moves beyond trauma’s black-and-white perception into a fuller spectrum of ambiguity, contradiction, and relationship. Color represents the capacity to register complexity without losing orientation.
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.
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.
Past Future
Interrupts the belief that the past mechanically determines the present and future. By reversing the direction of causality, the poem asks whether present orientation can change the meaning—and therefore the effective power—of what came before.
The Slowness of the Heart
Contrasts dramatic breakthrough with the nearly invisible repetitions through which character and capacity are formed. The heart changes slowly enough that excellence appears ordinary by the time it arrives.
Collapsing Spacetime
Compresses cosmic scale—light-years, stars, deep time, and trillions of cells—into the shared immediacy of a single conscious moment. Vastness becomes intimate through attention to here and now.
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.
Continue Here - The Arc of Becoming
Healing rarely follows the dramatic narrative we expect. It is not a sudden breakthrough or a heroic transformation. Instead it unfolds gradually as our perception realigns with reality.
The Alignment Model
Human suffering arises when our perception and nervous system fall out of alignment with reality. Pain signals this misalignment but our culture encourages avoidance through performance, stimulation and distraction. These strategies reduce perception and deepen the friction between ourselves and the world.