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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140 pieces
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.
Performance Won't Earn Belonging
I spent most of my life performing to belong. It wasn’t intentional manipulation. It was survival. The only strategy I had. I grew up with a lot of physical and emotional abuse in a home run by a narcissist. Authenticity was never an option. In fact, it was the most punishable offense. I learned to disconnect from myself and become hyper-attuned to…
Crossing the Desert
Describes the exposed middle of healing after survival strategies have been relinquished but no new identity or capacity has solidified. The desert measures progress precisely because there is no familiar shelter left.
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.
A Brush with Death
Recounts an early climbing partnership and a fatal encounter with risk that altered the author’s relationship to mortality, responsibility, and the mountains. Adventure’s beauty is held beside the irreversible consequences of inexperience.
The Practice of Imperfection
Uses an imperfect creative act to examine exposure, inherited judgment, and the practice of letting unfinished or flawed work be seen without turning against oneself.
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.