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.
Raised poor in a Maine mill town, shaped by military service, and disappointed by the empty promises of the corporate ladder, Dana Therrien looks for meaning in a Boston-area Taoist temple. The philosophy, discipline, and leaders there seem to offer answers to questions Therrien has been weighing his whole life.
A memoir that also serves as an introduction to Taoism, this debut work is full of heart and hard-won wisdom. Therrien lands some lovely turns of phrase (“In New England, spring has a way of lingering like November, holding summer at bay beneath its gray weight”). And once the story settles, readers will be pulling for him. Can he stand strong or will he be dragged backwards by his demons?
Many will recognize themselves in Therrien: a perfectionist and striver, he has internalized the need to win at all costs. It is clearly costing him: healthy relationships with his family, promotions at work, inner peace, perhaps his future with his girlfriend. When Therrien enters the temple, it becomes a force that shapes every aspect of his life. The temple offers nightly martial arts classes, guided meditations, and group sessions teaching tenets of an ancient Asian religion. Eventually, Therrien proves his dedication and wins access to a life-changing mentor, a tough-on-the-outside Russian immigrant who demands absolute loyalty.
For the Tao-curious, The Wisdom of Laotse is the text quoted throughout the book, and Therrien’s priest turns out to be one of the earliest adherents of Taoism in the US, Grand Master Alex Anatole.
Right in Two hits its stride around chapter 10, about halfway through the book, when Therrien begins to tell his story in a more linear style. Earlier chapters weave many timelines together, making the facts hard to follow.
But Therrien’s message is clear-eyed throughout: The point, he writes, is “not to silence the opposition but to hold it. Yin and Yang, the tension that gives motion to life itself.”
Ultimately, this story of one man’s quest to discover his inner truth and
align his life around what matters most — love, family, roots — is a satisfying and relatable read.