Right In Two is a literary memoir about ambition, identity, and the search for meaning, told through one man’s thirty-year encounter with Taoism.
Raised in a paper mill town in western Maine, Dana Therrien learned early to rely on discipline, intellect, and hard work. Those instincts carried him into the Army, through corporate America, and toward a life that looked increasingly successful from the outside. But success did not answer the questions he thought it would.
His search eventually led to a Taoist temple outside Boston and an apprenticeship with a Russian-born Taoist master. What began as a search for wisdom became a decades-long education in discipline, meditation, power, loyalty, and surrender. The deeper Dana went, the more difficult it became to distinguish between the teachings that were freeing him and the system that was binding him.
Moving between working-class Maine, military service, corporate ambition, family, loss, spiritual practice, and his eventual break with his teacher, Right In Two asks what happens when the things that helped us become successful are no longer enough, and what we must keep, relinquish, and reconcile to finally come home to ourselves.
Right In Two is a literary memoir about ambition, identity, and the search for meaning, told through one man’s thirty-year encounter with Taoism.
Raised in a paper mill town in western Maine, Dana Therrien learned early to rely on discipline, intellect, and hard work. Those instincts carried him into the Army, through corporate America, and toward a life that looked increasingly successful from the outside. But success did not answer the questions he thought it would.
His search eventually led to a Taoist temple outside Boston and an apprenticeship with a Russian-born Taoist master. What began as a search for wisdom became a decades-long education in discipline, meditation, power, loyalty, and surrender. The deeper Dana went, the more difficult it became to distinguish between the teachings that were freeing him and the system that was binding him.
Moving between working-class Maine, military service, corporate ambition, family, loss, spiritual practice, and his eventual break with his teacher, Right In Two asks what happens when the things that helped us become successful are no longer enough, and what we must keep, relinquish, and reconcile to finally come home to ourselves.
Some truths arrive before you’re ready to receive them. They plant themselves in you like seeds, waiting for the right season, the right soil, the right amount of suffering before they crack open and show you what they’ve always meant.
My father planted such a truth in me when I was eight years old.
We were walking through the Maine woods on the path from our camp to my grandparents’ cabin. The air smelled of pine and water, cool against my skin even in summer. Sunlight filtered through the canopy, and I could hear the lake through the trees, its presence felt rather than seen. My father’s calloused hand held mine the way it always had, warm, steady. The hand of a man who worked at the paper mill, who believed in unions and hard work and keeping your word.
Then he stopped.
The forest went still. I felt it in his hand first, the shift in weight, the sudden rootedness.
“Dana,” he said, and a heaviness in his voice made me look up. “One day you won’t walk with me anymore.”
I was confused. His hand was right there, holding mine.
“You’ll grow up,” he continued. “You’ll leave Maine and make something of yourself.”
I tightened my grip. “I promise, Dad. I’ll always walk with you.”
He smiled, quiet and knowing. “You won’t. That’s okay. But do you want to know what’s going to happen after you leave?”
“What?”
“You’ll come back home,” he said. “Back to Maine.”
At eight, I thought he was talking about geography.
My grandparents’ place sat near the edge of Long Pond, where my mother had grown up. Camps like ours dotted the shore, part of a Maine tradition that felt as timeless as the pines. The lake was our constant, connecting generations of my family, grounding us in its stillness. My father was a union man, proud of his work and the people he stood beside, steady and unassuming. He was the kind of man who said more through silence than most men say in speeches.
I was the youngest of five children. By the time I came along, my parents had softened, worn down by years of raising kids. I was indulged in ways my siblings weren’t, something they never failed to remind me of. With my blond hair and blue eyes, I was cast as “the littlest angel” one Christmas, dressed in a halo and white robes. People said, “Dana would never do that,” when trouble came up.
I leaned on that innocent persona longer than perhaps I should have.
Being the youngest also meant I was often alone with my thoughts, which suited me fine. I was quiet, introspective. I spent more time watching than speaking; I learned that silence has its own kind of knowing. Even at that young age, I paid attention to the gap between what people said and what they did, what they preached and how they lived.
And I felt something.
It happened most clearly one evening at the lake. The sun was setting, turning the water to copper. I sat on the dock, legs dangling, watching the light shift. Everything went still. Not just quiet, but still. The water, the trees, my own breath. For a moment, I wasn’t separate from any of it. There was no “me” and “the lake.” Just one thing, breathing together.
It lasted maybe ten seconds. Then a loon called, and the spell broke.
I didn’t tell anyone. How could I? But I carried it with me, that moment of connection; it became a thread I couldn’t name, but couldn’t let go of, either. It whispered that life was more mysterious than it seemed, that there was meaning beneath the surface if I could just learn to see it.
That was my spirit, the spark that would grow thin and dim, but would never quite die.
My father understood this in his way. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, his words had a way of arriving after he’d already stopped speaking. There were nights when the strength in his hand felt fragile, worn down by mill work and a weariness I didn’t yet understand. He’d come home exhausted, smelling of the mill, of chemicals and heat, and sit in his chair with a drink, not speaking. My mother would move around him, managing the household with the same efficiency she brought to everything else.
She was different from him. Sharp where he was steady, restless where he was rooted. She’d taken a job at Grimaldi’s when the mill briefly laid my father off in the early seventies. The Grimaldis were first-generation Italian immigrants who treated her like family. She sold shoes, skis, and clothing, balancing the job with raising five kids. Everyone in town had an “account.” They’d buy their kids’ school clothes for the year and come in once a week to pay five dollars toward the balance. No interest. No fees. Just trust.
My mother wasn’t sentimental or overly warm, but she was curious; she valued the lessons embedded in tradition and faith. She’d sit with me, recounting Bible passages with the same matter-of-fact tone she used for everything else, as if their truths were self-evident. I wondered if she felt the same pull I did toward something greater.
We watched Kung Fu together, a TV show about a Shaolin monk wandering the American West. She loved it as much as I did. We’d sit side by side, captivated by Kwai Chang Caine and his wise old teacher, Master Po. My mother admired Caine’s quiet strength. I wanted to be him.
I’d sit cross-legged on the floor, pretending to meditate. In my mind, I wasn’t in our living room in Maine. I was wandering through distant lands, searching for a teacher like Master Po who could help me understand the mysteries of life. Someone who could show me what that moment on the dock meant, why I felt that thread connecting everything.
Of course, I thought it was fantasy. A teacher like Master Po belonged to another world, one that existed somewhere beyond my small-town life. I couldn’t imagine leaving Maine. The idea of meeting someone from a distant place, carrying ancient wisdom, seemed less like a possibility and more like a dream the universe hadn’t made room for yet.
As I grew older, life closed in. School. Religion. The expectations of adulthood. As they did, the spark I’d felt so easily began to fade, buried beneath the weight of duty and striving. The thread grew thin, almost invisible. I lost sight of what had once felt natural, as if the signal had gone out and I was left listening for something that no longer spoke my language.
And yet.
Decades later, my father’s words on that path through the woods proved prophetic in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I was eight years old. He wasn’t just talking about geography. He was describing something Laotse wrote about in the Tao Te Ching:
The myriad things take shape and rise to activity,
But I watch them fall back to their repose.
Like vegetation that luxuriantly grows,
But returns to the root from which it springs.
To return to the root is Repose;
It is called going back to one’s Destiny.
I didn’t understand it then. But my father, in his quiet way, had introduced me to the principle that would eventually bring me full circle.
Only after I’d proven I could succeed at everything that didn’t matter did the path reveal itself. A series of events I couldn’t have predicted brought me face-to-face with a Taoist grandmaster, a teacher of an ancient philosophy I’d never studied but had somehow always felt drawn to. The odds of a kid from Maine, the son of a union mill worker and a shoe store clerk, becoming the student of a sage seemed impossible.
But it happened.
This is the story of how that spark, nearly extinguished by the noise of life, was rekindled by the teachings of that grandmaster, and how, just as my father predicted, the path I walked brought me full circle.
Back to Maine. Back to the lake. Back to myself.
It's a book that rattles. It's a story that awakens. Dana Therrien's Right in Two: One Man's Journey Through Division, Discipline, and the Way of Tao is a deeply personal and moving account of Taoism, discovery, and self. Using sharp literary memoir gestures and crisp prose, Therrien delivers a captivating story that will lend its light to readers on their own spiritual journeys.
Therrien skillfully paints a full and vibrant picture of his life in this slim volume. From his childhood in Maine to his military service, from his corporate work to his study of under the mentorship of Russian Tao master, Alex, the author reveals the interwoven nature of all the experiences that ultimately lead to his transformation. It's a story of division as much as it is one of connection. It's a story of discipline as much as it is an intervention in the ways we are conditioned to accept frameworks and societal patterns as truths. And the reader feels compelled to witness and grow alongside the author. As Therrien learns, the reader learns. As the author experiences frustration, grief, acceptance, love, disillusionment, and hope, the reader empathizes and understands true human growth through the precision of Therrien's writing.
One of the dangers of writing about a spiritual journey is that the author might risk accidental pretention and arrogance. Often, memoirs of spiritual transformation take on a very literal "holier than thou" tone that readers might find tedious. But Therrien's book manages to avoid this pitfall by focusing heavily on well-constructed, powerful, and intimate storytelling. The author translates memories into richly detailed scenes and conversations into moving dialogue. Short chapters allow for a lyrical compression to each movement of the narrative. And at every turn, Therrien's voice is one of quiet, tempered humility. There is wisdom in the silences and careful reflections of the work. In a literary moment full of spiritual self-help books, collections of aphorisms, and other guidebooks, Right in Two makes a strong case for memoir as the finest genre and conduit for stories of spiritual complexity and evolution.
Therrien's writing will resonate with readers in search of their own pathways and answers. But instead of modelling how the reader might achieve their personal spiritual goals, Right in Two serves as an illustration of the uniqueness of any individual journey. A number of formal and thematic comparisons come to mind—Mary Karr, Robert M. Pirsig, Anne Lamott—but Therrien's prose is striking in its own originality and energy.
Right in Two is an inspiring memoir that will undoubtedly give its readers hope. Here is a book that proves the value of questioning what we are given and of allowing our paradigms to shift.