Eye of the Mountain
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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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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 Shape of Pain
Follows pain as a spiral thread connecting apparently separate wounds across time. Rather than mere alarm, pain becomes a line through the labyrinth that grief can follow back toward integration and home.
The Act
Challenges the distance between admiration and identity, proposing that becoming begins by enacting the qualities one recognizes in others before recognition or certainty arrives.
Seeing Color
Moves beyond trauma’s black-and-white perception into a fuller spectrum of ambiguity, contradiction, and relationship. Color represents the capacity to register complexity without losing orientation.
The Tragedy of My Life
Confronts the painful gap between finally seeing one’s life clearly and discovering that insight alone cannot restore what trauma, absence, and adaptation took away.
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.
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.
A Brush with Death
Recounts an early climbing partnership and a fatal encounter with risk that altered the author’s relationship to mortality, responsibility, and the mountains. Adventure’s beauty is held beside the irreversible consequences of inexperience.
The Smell of Farts
Uses a couple’s disagreement about whose farts smell worse to play with perception, unverifiable reality, and the comic authority of direct experience—especially when one participant has no sense of smell.
Language Fails
Places embodied contact beyond representation, arguing that touch can communicate a depth of recognition and repair that images and language cannot hold.
Violent Pleasure
Stages joy as a threatening sensation that a trauma-shaped body must learn to tolerate, exposing how even pleasure can provoke resistance when suffering feels safer.