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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 · Transformation
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Devotion to Attention
At so many points in my healing,
A Wild Man
A wild man enjoys climbing a tree.
Beneath the Skin
Beneath the skin there are no words.
The Student Becomes the Teacher
I'll make your treasures richer.
The Author in Authority
I'm your reflection
Piercing the Stone
The Gentlest of Violence
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.
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.
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.
The Moments
Addresses someone physically present but psychologically living in the future. The speaker grieves their unavailable shared moment in advance, imagining a later grief that will arrive only after the relationship is gone.
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.
Eye of the Mountain