Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're

getting a little better at life. I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's

episode we're going to be talking about the journey of life. More to come on that

in a moment, first let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so in this episode I'm going to share a poem by Mary Oliver, and it's

called The Journey. I invite you to relax into just listening, see how the

poem lands for you, and see if you can listen with all the senses embodied

listening. One day you finally knew what you had to do and began, though the

voices around you kept shouting their bad advice, though the whole house began

to tremble, and you felt the old tug at your ankles, mend my life, each voice

cried, but you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind

cried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy

was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of

fallen branches and stones, but little by little, as you left their voices

behind. The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a

new voice which you slowly recognized as your own that kept you company, as you

strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing that

you could do, determined to save the only life you could save. This is called The

Journey by Mary Oliver. I don't exactly know why she named it The Journey.

But there's something about that title that I can feel deeply in its relationship

to the poem. The Journey as a title feels big. It's not the journey of anything

in particular, it's just The Journey, and that's how this feels to me. It feels like a

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