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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Alignment Model
Human suffering arises when our perception and nervous system fall out of alignment with reality. Pain signals this misalignment but our culture encourages avoidance through performance, stimulation and distraction. These strategies reduce perception and deepen the friction between ourselves and the world.
Unreplicable
Pushes through the fear of being only an echo of existing voices toward the recognition that lived embodiment makes every expression singular. Influence does not erase originality when experience reorganizes what is inherited.
Transparent and Legible
Explores the vulnerability of becoming readable to oneself and others after a life organized around concealment, shame, and protective opacity.
Reducing the Noise
Applies the Weber–Fechner law to perception, nervous-system regulation, and daily life. As background stimulation decreases, subtler signals become legible, allowing sensitivity and choice to replace the need for ever-greater intensity.
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?
Don’t Stop, Just Notice
This is a post about addiction but before you roll your eyes hear this: I’m not here to lecture you that addiction is bad and that you should willfully stop. Most of the time, that’s brutally hard and even when you’re successful it comes back, often with vengeance, or in another shape. Honestly, I’m not sure that modern life is even survivable without…