Podcasts that rock

I am a little addicted to listening to podcasts.  Something to do with my compulsive personality.   First, I fell in love with This American Life and This I Believe (see my Oct. ’09 post here). Then in the last year, I’ve added Planet Money, Savage Love, and RadioLab to that list of podcast.

You’ve got to check them out. I know I do whenever I have a moment in the car or in the kitchen by myself!

I get ridiculously excited when I get to listen to Planet Money.  Yay for engaging, funny, intelligent news that helps me better understand the world!

RadioLab is a little like This American Life in that they pick a theme and explore that theme through a variety of stories.  I’m going backwards in time, and am now listening to podcasts from 2009.

They did an hour-long show on “death,” and then they did a set of short shows to follow-up on that theme.  In one of them, Robert Krulwich reads an excerpt from poet and writer, Mark Doty’s 1996 memoir Heaven’s Coast (listen here).  I liked this one so much that I listened to it a few times.  And then I felt like I should share it with someone, but I wasn’t sure who.  So my solution was to write a post about it.  If you don’t listen to the whole 3 minute story, here’s an excerpt of my favorite part that I wanted to share.  In this story, Mark is witnessing his partner, Wally, during the last moments of Wally’s life.  I think I’ll have to check out more of Mark Doty’s writing.

Thanks for reading.  I found that like poetry it is best savored when read aloud.

The afternoon is so quiet and deep, it seems almost to ring and chime, a cold, struck bell. There is an inaudible roaring, a rush, beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who is now almost no surface, as if I could see into him, into that great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living so deep, and absolute, that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life, and my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality, where he is most himself, even if that self empties out, into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. God, moving on the face of the waters….