Transcendental Dad
The Protector: Our search for connection leads to a rocky memorial
My daughter has found a lucky rock. READ MORE
Articles by Dan Szczesny
Point of View
A peripheral creature: Mindfulness, the broken cat and unconditional love
How were we to know that Jade would become our true test of mindfulness, a workshop in patience and an example of the self as a wholly contained entity existing outside the reciprocity of connection. In other words, loving Jade, for my daughter, has become unrequited, and we’ve all had to learn to live with that. READ MORE
News
On Memorial Day: The Heroics of Staying Alive
Maybe it’s just that I’m far less interested in the waving flags and speeches than I am in the stories. Maybe I’d rather put a microphone on the lapel of some of these folks while they are still alive than to salute their gravestone after they have passed. Maybe we should ask “How do you feel?” instead of “How did you fight?” READ MORE
Point of View
Tree of Long Life: We make one last visit to the oldest sugar maple
We were on a pilgrimage, a sacred quest, seeking last-minute grace and connection on a day of rebirth. In less than 24 hours, a 250-year-old sugar maple – a creature born before America had presidents and the oldest known of its kind in our country – would come down. READ MORE
Point of View
Ballad of the Spine Pig: A Porcupine Offers a Lesson in Immortality
We came upon a dead porcupine recently… freshly dead most likely, the poor fellow well preserved but still soft, his brown and tan quills swaying in the forest wind. READ MORE
Culture
Blowin’ in the Martian Wind: On capturing a tiny slice of red stardust
Still, wind on Mars is neither an angry backyard bug nor a path toward her being an astronaut. What I hope it is though is the beginning of knowledge, of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “happy talent.” READ MORE
Point of View
Lazy Brain Days: Sometimes success is measured by letting go
The answer is not to work harder no matter what, not to push through despite your emotional and physical exhaustion. Rather, we’ve attempted to turn to our Lazy Brain in an effort to set new expectations, to create an environment appropriate to the time in which we live. READ MORE
Point of View
The Madeleine Effect: A warm kitchen, a hungry child and the mystery of food memory
Something powerful can happen in these moments, especially now in a new year. In particular, coming off a challenging time, our catalog of memories in these days of isolation is what we have available to build upon. And now, as it was then, the potency of food memory is available through small, personal moments; a warm kitchen in a small town, as the snow falls outside our window, eating simple food with people you love and who love you back. READ MORE
Point of View
Step boldly: It’s time to welcome in a new year and make it yours
Twenty-twenty comes screaming to an end, a confusing, raging inferno of a year. This was a year that will be talked about only in hushed whispers by future generations. This was a year of forced mindfulness, where each day, sometimes each hour, appeared to signal some new cosmic shift – like being blindfolded, without a seatbelt, on a roller coaster. READ MORE
365 Days of Mountain Mischief
Little makes a big contribution
In 1869, a prominent Manchester lawyer by the name of William Little – a well read man with an office right on Elm Street and a deep interest in meteorology – found himself in the position of being able to make a deep and historic contribution to Mount Washington history. Though he didn’t know it at the time. READ MORE
