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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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.
The Path of Fear
Contrasts a life organized around fear with one oriented by love, arguing that greater perception enlarges reality and loosens pain’s authority.
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.
Unreplicable
Pushes through the fear of being only an echo of existing voices toward the recognition that lived embodiment makes every expression singular. Influence does not erase originality when experience reorganizes what is inherited.
Transparent and Legible
Explores the vulnerability of becoming readable to oneself and others after a life organized around concealment, shame, and protective opacity.
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.
Reducing the Noise
Applies the Weber–Fechner law to perception, nervous-system regulation, and daily life. As background stimulation decreases, subtler signals become legible, allowing sensitivity and choice to replace the need for ever-greater intensity.
Don’t Stop, Just Notice
This is a post about addiction but before you roll your eyes hear this: I’m not here to lecture you that addiction is bad and that you should willfully stop. Most of the time, that’s brutally hard and even when you’re successful it comes back, often with vengeance, or in another shape. Honestly, I’m not sure that modern life is even survivable without…
Against Coffee
Uses coffee as the first case study in socially rewarded self-disconnection. The essay questions whether borrowed stimulation conceals exhaustion, overrides bodily information, and helps performance culture feel natural.