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 Miscara, 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 pried 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 life's work to notice the many voices around us shouting their bad advice, as she puts it, or just advice.

But what can make it bad advice is that it's not ours there are ideas judgments projections stories that people are telling us we need to take on and it can be so loud so

noisy suffocating, really.

And I think there is a big journey, if not the biggest journey, to be able to notice all of that

...