The Only Life You Can Save

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 whole pried

with its stiff fingers

at the ver 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 that you could save. 

"The pain of loss, grief, and despair is not essential for transformation. It is possible to step into a new life in more graceful ways. But for most of us, and certainly for me, pan and loss usually prepare the way. The moment itself may seem effortless, but a lifetime of suffering may have preceded it. A new life requires a death of some kind; otherwise it is nothing new, but rather a shuffling of the same deck."

"Yet the true journey of your life requires a kind of madness. After all, from the standpoint of your old life, you may be throwing everything away for nothing. You do not even know what you are headed toward. Yet the first step can only ever be taken in darkness. You cannot know where it will take you. You cannot plan for this sort of journey because the entire undertaking relies on the unreasonableness of faith. Faith is unreasonable because it rests on no tangible evidence. It is beyond even belief. Th person of faith does not expect everything to turn out the way they want it to; they do not expect some higher power to pick them up when they fall. Their faith is beyond belief and even beyond hope. It is a faith that comes from gnosis - the knowing that has no need of information."

"You cannot know where that voice will take you, but in being willing "to save the only life you could save," you are affirming one of the deepest and most sobering truth of all: no one else can ever walk your journey for you. You alone can respond to your call."

- ten poems to change your life, Roger Housden, p. 14, 18, 20, Harmony books