When your art becomes a dragging burden, That chore perpetually unfinished. Then you know that there is no turning back. Then you know that you have, for once, become What you have always strived to grow to be: Writer Husband Poet Father Artist Brother Scholar Friend.

— For Once, Become

There will never be a safe or easy time to practice art. If anyone reads or listens to my art in the future they will only have the shallowest context. There is no way to diminish the very real suffering of the world and our time, nor can I find any loophole in my conscience that allows me to ignore it, but I also cannot allow it to stop me from creating. And so far as it feels like an insensitive heresy to say, there are generations of writers and artists who did not stop their art in periods of even more intense suffering. Many of them never saw profit or praise while they were living. We cannot choose the times into which we are born, “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”