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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
The Longcut
Condenses transformation into a discipline of accepting reality, staying with pain, facing fear, and repeating what is alive without making progress the condition for participation.
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.
The Act
Challenges the distance between admiration and identity, proposing that becoming begins by enacting the qualities one recognizes in others before recognition or certainty arrives.
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.
The Body and the Void
Uses the body’s boundary as a philosophical riddle, asking whether self and other are separate entities or mutually created at the edge of perception and touch.
The Practice of Possibility
Distinguishes pursuing possibility from demanding guarantees, arguing that uncertainty builds a durable person even when the hoped-for outcome never arrives.
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.
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.
Eye of the Mountain