Hello everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind,

and make you brave. I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true,

and beautiful. So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere

comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode.

At one point, midway on our path and life, I came around and found myself now searching

through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost. My theme will be the good I found there.

Well, hello everyone and welcome back to Speaking with Joy. You're joining

me once more on the series that I have been calling the escape cast, bringing you good, true,

beautiful, and wholesome escape during this strange season that we find ourselves in. Today, I

discovered via my Patreon, where I've been been keeping count that it is my 40th

day of quarantine, which is to say my most quarantiniest day of quarantine because quarantine

literally comes from the Italian word for 40 days, which is what, which is how long they would

make ships wait in medieval Europe when they were coming in

from coast they thought might have the plague to make sure that they didn't have the plague.

So I have reached this, I would say, the middle or the end or the two-thirds point, but of course

none of us know. I've reached the 40th day of our quarantine. And I recently

picked up Dante's Comedia, which of course is his journey through hell and purgatory into heaven.

And when I read the opening passage, which I just read to you in the opening of this podcast,

I felt rather like Dante himself. I felt like waking up on the 40th day

of the quarantine that I had discovered myself midway on our path in life, coming around, finding

myself searching through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost. The whole opening to the

chapter is this kind of dreamlike confusion of threats and strange menace and a general kind of fogginess.

...