And we’re moving on to the first steps in our journey across the universe with the pilgrim (who’s got the same name as the poet, Dante). Problem is, we’re all headed in the wrong direction!

What happens when you set out to walk out of what’the hell in your life? If you’re not careful, you just repeat what you know. You just go the way you understand. You don’t headed anywhere new. In other words, you’re moving and stuck, all at once.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we take the first steps with Dante, our pilgrim. We’re headed to the predictable, not to the gorgeous, wide universe that is all before us.

Here’s my English translation of these lines of INFERNO, Canto 1, lines 10 - 27:

I cannot rightly say how I got there,

I was so full of sleep at the moment

When I abandoned the true way.

But when I got to the foot of a hill

Where the valley ended

That had pierced my heart with fear,

I looked high up and saw its shoulders

Bathed in the rays of that planet

That leads all of us straight along every path.

Then the fear in the lake of my heart was calmed,

The fear that had lasted all the night

That I had spent in distress.

And as someone with belabored breath

Who has gotten out of the deep and to the shore

Then looks back at the perilous water

So my mind, still fleeing,

Turned back to look once more at the pass

No one has ever left alive.