Short pieces · parables · lived moments
Stories
Eleven standalone pieces. Parables, memoir fragments, lived moments turned into something you can carry. Shorter than the books. Older than the essays. Closer to the way wisdom actually travels.
The pieces here are not fiction, exactly. Most of them happened. The parables are the exception — written forms of patterns noticed across a long life. The rest are lived moments that already had the shape of a story when they occurred, if anyone had been there to catch them.
Three places to begin.
Start here · three doorways
Parable
The Clockmaker's Curse
A parable of time, sacrifice, and awakening.
The parable at the centre of The Return to Grown-Up Capitalism. A clockmaker who built better and better clocks until the thing he was measuring quietly disappeared.
Parable
The Lamp and the Oil
A man finds his grandfather's lamp. The oil, it turns out, is him.
Scroll 13 of the Scroll Series. The parable Letter Fourteen was pulled from. On tending the inner life that nobody will remind you to tend.
Memoir
The First Time I Stepped Out
The jump. Before the jump. What happened in the airplane door.
The founding moment behind The Leap. The first skydive, from the inside. Not the physics of it. The decision.
Parables · 4 pieces · the pattern wrote the story
The pieces where a pattern noticed across many years is rendered as a short tale. Not religious. Not literary flourish. The way wisdom used to travel before we invented the slide deck.
The Clockmaker's Curse
A parable of time, sacrifice, and awakening.
The parable at the centre of The Return to Grown-Up Capitalism. A clockmaker who built better and better clocks until the thing he was measuring quietly disappeared.
The Lamp and the Oil
A man finds his grandfather's lamp. The oil, it turns out, is him.
Scroll 13 of the Scroll Series. The parable Letter Fourteen was pulled from. "You were never the lamp — you were always the oil."
The Drop Zone Keys
On what you forget to bring and what you remember too late.
A short parable from the skydiving years. On preparation, trust, and the thing you cannot pack but have to carry anyway.
Earth Lost in Space
On scale, perspective, and the strange comfort of smallness.
A science-and-spiritual narrative. Written after a long night looking up at the Southern sky. Companion to the Inner Law series.
Memoir fragments · 4 pieces · lived moments, caught
The moments that already had the shape of a story when they happened. From the sub shop, the mortgage office, the drop zones, the mining camp. Material drawn from the memoir in progress, The Leap.
The First Time I Stepped Out
The jump. Before the jump. What happened in the airplane door.
The founding moment behind The Leap. The first skydive, from the inside. Not the physics of it. The decision.
The Moment Everything Changed
The exact minute. The exact weather. What was on the radio.
The prologue to The Skydiver's Guide to Life. The specific moment a long life pivoted on, told in present tense.
Nailed to the Clouds
A skydive that went wrong, held together by two words from a stranger.
Close call. The one I rarely tell. On what another person's calm can do inside your own panic.
Close Calls — Questionable Company
The night Dick G. walked out of a bar most people wouldn't have walked into.
A story from the edge. The late seventies. The company you keep. What a close call teaches you that a lecture cannot.
Narrative essays · 3 pieces · story-shaped reflection
The pieces that are shaped like stories but earn their keep as reflection. Something happened. Something was understood later. Both are in the piece.
The Biker Who Said No at the Door
A short story about a man who turned down the deal everyone else accepted.
Narrative with a life lesson underneath. On refusal, pride, and the specific kind of self-respect that costs you something in the moment and pays for a decade.
The Loss of Enemy
On what you become when the person you built yourself against disappears.
Philosophical narrative. The identity you did not realise you had until it was no longer available to you. For readers of the Inner Law essays.
The Letter to Becoming
A letter written to the person I was about to become. Years before I knew who it was.
Transformation narrative. Written as a letter to a future self and found again years later, with the honest surprise of noticing which parts came true.
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