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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
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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.
Aliveness Manifesto
Defines aliveness as honest participation in present reality rather than intensity, achievement, or the completion of healing—and calls for choosing contact again and again without a finish line.
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.
Eye of the Mountain