Hello and welcome back to practicing human the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscara.

And in today's episode, I'm going to talk about,

if everything is for nothing, why do anything?

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together

with the sound of the bells. So I'd like to start this episode off with a poem by Lee Young Lee.

The poem is called So Where Dust, and the Dust is pointing to the reductionistic view that perhaps were nothing more than star dust floating around in the universe and so we start

with that perspective. The poem goes like this. So we wear dust.

In the meantime, my wife and I make the bed, holding opposite edges of the sheet, we raise

it billowing, then pull it tight, measuring by eye as it falls into alignment between us.

We tug, fold, tuck, and if I'm lucky, she'll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we'll lie down and knock it up.

One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize what we love and what it takes to tend to what isn't for our having.

So often, fear has led me to abandon what I know I must relinquish in time

But for the moment I'll listen to her dream and she to mind our mutual hearing calling more and more detail

into the light of a joint and fragile keeping. I really like that last line.

Our mutual hearing calling more and more detail into the light of a joint and fragile keeping.

Fragile keeping. So, maybe you are dust, maybe we're all just dust, blowing around an endless

cosmos without order, reason, or meaning.

But you still feel pain if you fall down.

...