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 · Transformation
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Unconscious Competence
Describes practice becoming embodied enough to operate without deliberate control. By refining perception and accumulating capacity, difficult responses can become quiet, automatic, and available even under pressure.
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.
As You Are
Rejects productivity, achievement, and performance as prerequisites for existence, dignity, or acceptance. The poem offers belonging as unconditional contact with the person already here.
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.
Shut Up and Drive
Uses emergency aviation as a lesson in orientation: when fear and interpretation multiply, return attention to the immediate task of steering one’s actual life.
The Last Sacrifice
Examines the final difficulty of trauma recovery: relinquishing not only the wounded identity but the heroic healer built around it. Healing completes itself by surrendering its place at the center of life.
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.
Post Doing
Tracks the mind’s reflex to answer uncertainty with activity, then imagines identity and safety no longer dependent on productivity, explanation, or measurable progress.
The Underwhelming End of Urgency
Captures the anticlimactic shift from demanding explanations in order to feel safe to discovering safety directly. As urgency ends, excessive analysis becomes noise rather than rescue.
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…
Continue Here - The Arc of Becoming
How do you become a decent father when the one you had either wasn’t there or taught you all the wrong lessons? How do you become a steady, safe, encouraging presence for your children and community when you grew up with violence, neglect, mockery or abuse? How do you reclaim masculinity when the version you inherited wounded everyone it touched? How do…