Eye of the Mountain
Read
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?
Find a way in
Browse the archive
Theme
Series
Explore by literary character
Form · Poetry
86 pieces · Clear filters
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.
Encouragement
Offers expansion as a practice of staying rather than rushing toward insight. Truth becomes available when avoidance softens and the self can tolerate direct contact with what it already knows.
Melatonin Regrettably
Interprets sleeplessness as the return of needs ignored during the productive day. Night becomes the only quiet in which an inner child can protest neglect, making insomnia a relational message rather than merely a chemical problem.
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.
Taking from Abundance
Reverses familiar ideas about generosity by examining giving driven by scarcity and taking made possible by trust, receptivity, and enoughness.