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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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.
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.
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.
Nothing
A spare ontological meditation on being and nonbeing, testing whether emptiness is truly absence or the open condition from which experience appears.
Odonata
Takes the dragonfly’s metamorphosis from underwater nymph to airborne adult as an image of surrender so complete that an old world—and the self adapted to it—must disappear.
The Spiral Line
Uses geometry to imagine consciousness as a spiral that revisits experience without merely repeating it. The human form becomes a line through time whose changing vantage allows awareness to observe and integrate itself.
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.
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.