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
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.
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.
Dimensionality Reduction
Examines how trauma compresses a complex, multidimensional self into a narrow set of defensive reactions—and how embodiment restores lost range and choice.
The Eye and the Mountain
Revisits the project’s central symbol to locate the sought-after guide within the seeker. The external eye and mountain reveal a self made phantom by looking outward for recognition and direction.
Accumulating Inevitability
Reframes change as the quiet accumulation of conditions rather than forceful effort, until what once seemed impossible becomes the natural next movement.
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.