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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 · Aliveness
35 pieces · Clear filters
Time Without Pain
Time is precious.
Growing Skin
I won't prioritize potential over what's here.
The Quartet of Sovereignty
The Devout and the Profane
The Inner Core
Beneath the layers of coping,
A Wild Man
A wild man enjoys climbing a tree.
Levitating Light
Builds a constellation of qualities—from presence and groundedness through grief, play, intimacy, and service—whose accumulation sketches a life of integrated, ordinary aliveness.
Murder by the Name
Examines naming as a necessary violence that reduces living complexity, asking whether a writer can use language without mistaking categories and stories for the reality they conceal.
The “Heart” Beat
Challenges the reduction of the heart to a pump by tracing the circulatory system’s vortices, neurons, reciprocity, and distributed intelligence. Biological complexity becomes an argument for receiving and giving as simultaneous forms of participation.
Continue Here - The Arc of Becoming
Brings the arc of trauma recovery to a turn where the past remains real but no longer dictates the future. Safety arises through changed perception, participation, relational presence, and the recognition that nothing essential is missing.
Coming Alive
Defines becoming as accumulated practice rather than arrival. Repetition makes pain more precise and attention more stable until fear, uncertainty, and reality can be met with courage, rhythm, and presence.
Teachers of Discomfort
Recasts disappointment, anger, sadness, confusion, exhaustion, and joy as forms of information whose discomfort can refine boundaries, perception, and contact with reality.
Elements of Aliveness
Surveys the nonlinear practices and experiences that transformed a life organized around trauma. Across embodiment, relationship, ritual, creativity, and repeated identity deaths, grief emerges as the solvent that made every other change possible.
Eye of the Mountain