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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Growing Skin
I won't prioritize potential over what's here.
The Quartet of Sovereignty
The Devout and the Profane
The Crushing Blow
War, occupation, exile, poverty,
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.
Love with a No
Addresses an anxious loved one with care while refusing enmeshment, separating genuine love from worry, unsolicited help, emotional debt, and mutual self-abandonment.
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.
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.
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.
Shock Collar
Condenses a history of abuse, adaptation, and recovery into a stark autobiographical inventory. The act of viewing the record without collapse demonstrates a new authority over memories that once controlled the nervous system remotely.
Leaving Hope
Treats hope as an attachment to an unrealized alternate life that keeps the present in suspension. Severing that bond permits grief for what will not happen and contact with what remains.
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…
Crossing the Desert
Describes the exposed middle of healing after survival strategies have been relinquished but no new identity or capacity has solidified. The desert measures progress precisely because there is no familiar shelter left.