The Blog of Dan

A quick update on a major change!

I didn’t expect to rebuild my life. Honestly, I didn’t expect to still  have one. The last few years dismantled me in ways I’m still finding language for. It wasn’t one crisis — it was a chain of them: selling the house, uprooting everything, caregiving around the clock, nearly losing my own life, and then losing my father. There were moments I felt like a ghost in my own story. Moments when everything familiar was stripped away. Moments when the next breath felt like the onl

I don’t talk about it much, but language has always been my first fascination. I’ve always loved language — not just the words themselves, but the way they move, the way they breathe, the way they land in the body long before the mind names them. For me, language was never just vocabulary or grammar. It was sound, rhythm, cadence… and sometimes even comfort. My first real doorway into this came through Spanish. I didn’t know it at the time — I was just a kid in junior high tr

How coming home helped me see the builders in my life—and the one in myself. I didn’t plan on writing this. It came while looking at the river one morning, remembering where I come from, and realizing something important about my family. As I took advantage of Thanksgiving to reflect on my life here and my family… something settled in me that I hadn’t named before. I come from a family of builders. Not just in the obvious ways — though, yes, the obvious ways are remarkable: h