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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 · Attention
40 pieces · Clear filters
Devotion to Attention
At so many points in my healing,
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.
Boundless Compassion
Traces adult reaching and self-separation back to childhood failures of presence and attunement. It tests compassion at the point where another person cannot receive care without retaliating, asking how love can remain boundless while behavior meets a limit.
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.
Togetherness
Dissolves the isolated self into weather, matter, motion, and shared attention, imagining belonging as participation in the continuous movement of the world.
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.
Qualities of Balance
Defines balance as responsive freedom rather than rigid stability: a quiet center able to move, hold contradiction, belong, and correct without grasping or force.
The Endless Reaching
Refuses to reduce persistent longing for unavailable people to pathology. After examining attachment, disappointment, and fantasy, the essay asks whether reaching can remain an expression of love without becoming a demand for return.
The Longcut
Condenses transformation into a discipline of accepting reality, staying with pain, facing fear, and repeating what is alive without making progress the condition for participation.
Eye of the Mountain