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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Prolog
Introduces the lifelong spiral of terror at the center of the memoir, then marks the story’s turn from decoding and surviving trauma toward the possibility of an ordinary life.
Performance Won't Earn Belonging
I spent most of my life performing to belong. It wasn’t intentional manipulation. It was survival. The only strategy I had. I grew up with a lot of physical and emotional abuse in a home run by a narcissist. Authenticity was never an option. In fact, it was the most punishable offense. I learned to disconnect from myself and become hyper-attuned to…
The Practice of Being Seen
Traces the movement from performing specialness to tolerating accurate visibility. Being seen becomes a reciprocal practice of dropping spectacle, remaining present, and allowing ordinary reality to carry intimacy.
Enoughness
Locates enoughness in valuing one’s own time and existence rather than in perfection, recognition, or achievement. From that ground, choice replaces proving and satisfaction no longer depends on external permission.
The Last Sacrifice
Examines the final difficulty of trauma recovery: relinquishing not only the wounded identity but the heroic healer built around it. Healing completes itself by surrendering its place at the center of life.
Post Doing
Tracks the mind’s reflex to answer uncertainty with activity, then imagines identity and safety no longer dependent on productivity, explanation, or measurable progress.
Performance Culture and its Discontents
Performance culture is a social system in which worth is conditional on output . Not character. Not presence. Not contribution to life. Output. Quietly and persistently it asks over and over: what are you producing right now and how does it compare?
Stuck in an Inhale
Uses the held breath as an image of a survival identity that no longer needs to be maintained, inviting the body to exhale and let an obsolete self end.
Fragile Shoots
Asks the reader to protect the first fragile signs of renewed desire and play, especially when emerging aliveness still feels awkward, impractical, or easy to crush.
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.
A Pariddle of Feral
Inside us live we have a hierarchy of creatures. This myth-poem is about captivity, ferality, and the parts of us that carry our souls to freedom.