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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Theme · Grief
12 pieces · Clear filters
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.
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.
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.
Accumulating Inevitability
Reframes change as the quiet accumulation of conditions rather than forceful effort, until what once seemed impossible becomes the natural next movement.
Faking of the Faking
Examines the recursive loss of authenticity when imitation copies imitation and performance replaces contact with an original impulse. Form survives while lived meaning becomes progressively hollow.
Resurrecting the Lost Technology of Grief
Grief isn’t a stage you “get through.” It’s a living technology — a force that dismantles and remakes us. Here I share how grief works on the body, the spirit, and the community, and why learning its language is key to healing.
Murder of Innocence
When I was twelve, two tiny pet rats taught me the truth about cruelty. This story is one of the hardest I’ve written, but it was also a turning point in how I began to understand my father — and myself.
You call it a wasteland?
Some people see ruin. I see the raw material of rebirth. This is a spoken-word meditation on destruction and what can grow in its ashes.
The Weight
Trauma doesn’t just wound — it weighs. This is a litany of the heaviness I’ve carried, written not to collapse under it but to name it, so it can finally be set down.
The Love that Stayed
A reflection on how love can awaken us — not by lasting forever, but by showing us what in us is ready to heal. This piece traces the transformation of heartbreak into wholeness: how another person’s presence can open the heart, how loss can reveal self-worth, and how endings can become thresholds. It’s not a story of romantic success, but of inner…
Yesterday Grief, Today Mischief
Our moods can feel like prisons — grief, scarcity, rejection, emptiness. But they always pass, and when they do, something new arrives: mischief, lightness, curiosity. This piece is about honoring emotional extremes as teachers instead of fighting them.
Write it in blood if you must
Accompanies the reader through suicidal despair from the perspective of someone who survived its long recurrence. It treats surrender, truthful expression, and being witnessed as ways to remain in relationship with life when hope is unavailable.