Essays, Art and Plays by Dan

In the end I want to have been the kind of person whose presence, like a good lamp in bad weather, made it easier to see.

I read to remember that my mind is not a cage but a house with many strangers moving quietly from room to room.

The stranger crying in a parked car is part of my life for one instant, and that brief unwanted membership is what makes us human.

The itch to be admired has ruined more inner lives than poverty ever could.

In the end I suspect the soul wants very little from us—only that we inhabit our days fully, bless what we can, grieve what we must, and leave some warmth in the hands we have held.

I once held an acorn in my palm and thought how strange that an entire cathedral of shade can begin as something a child might mistake for a stone.

What we call conscience is often the soul knocking from inside a locked room, asking not for holiness but for honesty.