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.”

“Let all crutch-comforts of the lesser loves Consigned to blesséd oblivion be: All praise demanded by the high aboves, All pride-baiting conceit of luxury. The soul, inverse of the mortal body, Is starved by unlimited consumption. Not that simple pleasures, abhorred should be; Pleasure's golden rule is moderation. Feeding instead on good boredom's silence, The soul expands to fill the waiting void Until it achieves a blesséd balance Which can withstand all life-leaching tabloids. But balance won must yet be won again, It runs out each day like ink from a pen.”

— Hunter Dansin, Sonnet 2: Crutch Comforts

Well I have been writing sonnets, and my wife told me they are not half bad, so here's to being a poet. How easy it is to hold onto bitterness, and how tempting to heap scorn on perceived enemies and hopes disappointed. But the annihilater of reactionism is the truth that the only way forward is love. It is Martin Luther King Jr's “way of the strong man.” And how many that read this laugh bitterly and look at me like a doormat? Don't you think the man who most strongly feels indignation is the one most fervently acting in opposition to it? Those of us who strive to be kind, to love, to hope and live creatively are not blind. It is a fight. I am not quite sure who I am reacting to. Probably the news, this country's president, some circumstance in my own life. Well. It's not all bad. I've been writing. We are provided for. My family is beautiful.

Our country has two anthems. One the official, bloodstained tribute. One the dream we have yet to earn.

For the Star Spangled Banner still tramples on the hireling and the slave in this beautiful land where grace and blood are shed in equal measure.

Living on the edge is a cliché until it is not, and life hangs on a flexible razor cutting ice at fifty miles an hour. The razor springs from weight and swings your legs. Land the other razor and believe in it or you will lose it and yourself. But you cannot think about this, if you want to be fast. It must be ingrained by hours of sweating in cold.

You do not chase powder or resort experiences. You chase speed, a faster line: the elusive satisfaction of successful execution. Bend the razor, release, land.

The PR man in my head shouts for all my pleasure and pride, making their case, telling me not to wait.

“Be the loudest and you will make it. Do not weigh or consider. Shout often and loud, and everyone will listen.”

I dreamed I was on a stage trying to yell a tsunami down with every word dipped in fire like whistling harpoons from my mouth

Please let me be right for once like a diving falcon