The hardest part of the journey

It's seldom easy, but then this isn't either: a path that's not your own but here you are stumbling  deeper and deeper, further and further into the forest. With each step forward there's cheering, loud, dizzying, intoxicating like August sun. That's why you start now with a poem like this one and an understanding that your first step away isn't the first ever but an endless parade of first steps by an infinite stream of people who in their small and silent ways have proven that it's possible.

Cheers to Mary Oliver and her wise prose.

The Journey

By Mary Oliver

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 you could do— determined to save the only life you could save.