Leslie Garrett

A barn teardown revealed a piece of the Island’s history. But … which history, exactly?
The summer of 2019 was barely in the rear-view mirror when the backhoe arrived to take down the barn on Nevin and Stina Sayre’s property in Vineyard Haven. The barn had been well loved by generations of Sayres, starting with Nevin’s parents, who bought the oceanfront property in 1950. The elder Sayre, Nevin’s father Francis Jr., poured a concrete floor inside the perimeter and added a bathroom but little e...

More schools are bringing meditation to their classrooms. Writer Leslie Garrett spoke to teachers and mindfulness leaders about how it supports students, teachers, and their wider communities.
By Leslie Garrett
May 2, 2024
Kids and Teens
It was my daughter’s ninth birthday party and I’d lost track of the birthday girl. A group of fourth graders were in the kitchen attempting homemade pasta, the dogs were sniffing around for dropped bits of dough, and one of the party guests was loudly trying ...

How watching ‘Jaws’ at our local drive-in gave us a taste of the Vineyard summer we missed.
August 20, 2021
I spent the summer of 1975 the same way I had spent every summer of my 11 years — at my family’s cottage on Lake Huron, with neither phone nor television. We did, however, have a newspaper, where my father worked and that my brother woke up early to toss onto other cottagers’ doorsteps so they could read it with their morning coffee. So it was in the pages of the London Free Press that ...

When we’re in “hot states” like excitement, anger, or stress, our behavior can surprise even ourselves. Here’s what’s happening in the brain in these moments, and how we can aim for a bit more self-compassion.
My friend shared the story in hushed tones during a late-night run. Her friend had discovered that her husband was cheating and that he’d taken the other woman to a hotel room in another town. My friend’s friend got into her vehicle, drove three hours to this town, then staked out the h...

Some of us chatter to ourselves all day long while others’ inner lives take the form of pictures or, like Einstein, abstract visual concepts. But as mindfulness urges us to pay more attention, it’s worth asking: What can our interior life teach us?
November 3, 2022
Focus
“Know thyself,” was the advice inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The Tao Te Ching insisted that knowing others is intelligence, while knowing oneself is true wisdom. “To thine own self be true,” Shakespeare urged.
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Most of the time, we don’t pay attention to our breath at all. Experts share how our outbreath is key to allowing the body to let go of stress.
August 18, 2022
Focus
It feels, especially lately, that the world is releasing a emotional sigh. A COVID-weary, climate-anxious, war-distressed sigh.
But a sigh is really just an out-breath, an exhale, the companion to breathing in. “When we inhale, it’s a very active process,” says Dr. Ni-Cheng Liang, a pulmonary physician, podcast host, and mindfuln...

Caroline Brooks expects noise at her home in Toronto. But after the drive and boat ride to her in-laws’ place on Lake Rosseau, Ont., she wants to hear little more than wind in the pines and the gentle lap of waves against rock. Caroline, a musician, craves quiet. But quiet at the lake, she says, is hard to find.
As I sit in my cottage on Lake Huron—writing this story on quiet and the value in preserving it where we’ve, historically, sought it—I take note of the sounds around me. Yes, there ar...

Why we love modern windows
Maximizes all cottage views (not just the lake); more energy efficient; long-term cost savings; little to no maintenance; noise reduction; better, natural ventilation
For a lot of us, a cottage’s roof and walls exist to protect us from the elements. The windows, however, are the whole point—why spend time at the lake if you can’t spend your days staring at it?
But if it’s been a while, say 30 years or so, since you last looked at your windows rather than through the...

When Lisette Williams was a teenager, the last thing she wanted to do on summer mornings was join her mother, Caroline Hunter, for a swim in the chilly waters of the Atlantic Ocean. But a few years later, when Lisette finally tagged along, she realized she had been missing much more than an invigorating dip. Caroline is a longtime member of the Polar Bears, a historically Black swim and social club that has been gathering on Inkwell Beach, on the northeast tip of Martha’s Vineyard, for more t...

Carbon is the chemical backbone of all life on Earth. But when we release too much into our atmosphere it threatens life on our planet. So how do we solve the problem of carbon?
Is there any word more associated with our climate crisis than carbon? And rightly so. It has been made clear to us since NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen testified before congress on June 23, 1988 that our burning of fossil fuels, producing largely CO2, was creating a “greenhouse effect,” leading the New York Times to...

Is it the low-carbon answer to keeping our lights on?
We can thank nuclear fusion for the sun and the stars, and here on earth, nuclear fission gives us a zero-carbon energy source. But nuclear’s magic can be dark — there are radioactive waste, weapons, and accidents. Despite those risks, does our urgent need to reduce carbon make nuclear energy our best bet right now?
In late March 2020, while Eastern Massachusetts — indeed the world — began tracking COVID numbers and fearing trips to the gr...

In the days following the death of my mother almost 14 years ago, I was desperate for words to describe the chasm that had opened beneath me. So when a friend who’d recently lost her own mother insisted I read C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, I got the book immediately and opened to the first words of the first chapter: “No one ever told me that grief feels so like fear.”
If you’re familiar with the five stages of grief as famously characterised by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, you’ll know that among t...

I opened the front door to a rubber arm. Not just a rubber arm, of course. It was held by an animal behaviorist who’d come to our door in search of the “aggressive dog” for which she had been called. But it was the arm that came through the door first. Polar the “aggressive dog” looked curiously at it, then peeked around the door to see who was holding this odd thing.
It wasn’t the reaction anticipated by the animal behaviorist I’d called the week earlier in a panic because Polar had bitten a...

Parry Sound is the site of an innovative project that aims to examine the amount of microfibres—microscopic clothes fibres—we’re flushing into our waterways. And the short albeit preliminary answer seems to be…too much.
“We’re actually seeing more concentration of microfibres and microplastics in the Great Lakes than we are seeing even in the ocean,” says Brooke Harrison, project coordinator with Georgian Bay Forever, which is funding and supporting this study along with other scientific rese...