Posts by Dan Szczesny
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.