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An Excerpt from Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls by Norman Fischer
In a story from the Jewish tradition, which is also told in the Muslim tradition, any many others, a poor tailor from the shtetl has a dream that a treasure is buried underneath a bridge leading to a castle. The Tailor packs his bags and journeys to the capital city. He approaches the bridge he saw in his dream, but there is a Cossack standing guard. For long hours the tailor stands gazing at the bridge, not knowing what to do. Finally the Cossack asks him why he has been standing there so long and the innocent and honest tailor tells him the story. The Cossack laughs uproariously. "Foolish Jew," he says, "believing the fantasies of sleep. Let me tell you the difference between you and me. I too have had a dream. I dreamt that under the stove of a Jewish tailor in the shtetl was buried a treasure. You travel all this way at such cost of time and effort chasing dreams for nothing. I, on the other hand, know a dream for a dream and don't waste m y time." The tailor promptly went home, dug under his stove, found the treasure, and lived out the rest of his days a prosperous man. We are all born with a dream. It wants to lead us on, elsewhere, in search of our heart's desire. Maybe we are practical, down-to-earth people like the Cossack. We ignore the dream and decide to live our life stuck where we are, in a world we take to be real but in fact have manufactured, without knowing we've manufactured it, paying no attention to the vastness of our lives, the uncanny weird mysteries that may be presenting themselves to us at every turn, only we are too busy and too prejudiced to notice. Or maybe we are better dreamers than this. We do follow the dream, but fail to see its true import, and so are inevitably disappointed when it doesn't pan out as we had expected So we dust ourselves off and follow the next dream that comes along and then the next and the next, always dissatisfied, always seeking something we never seem to find. Or maybe we are like the simple tailor in the story. We follow our dream, And we pay close enough attention to what happens in the process to recognize (with a little help from a Cossack!) that we are seeking has been there right under our stoves all along, only we hadn't noticed it before. So we go home and dig a little. I have seen just this sort of thing happen many times. I lived for many years in Zen centers. People would often come to visit these centers, with a great longing and envy, imagining that spiritual fulfillment was to be found inside the temple compound, a place where they could not possibly remain. They would come for a year or a week or a day, longing, even as they were there, to be there more frequently, and for longer stays. And the, if they were lucky, eventually they would realize what was obvious to me all along (though it never did any good to tell them because they would not listen): that the spiritual key they were looking for was to be found right where they were, in their work or family life, on the meditation cushion that was right in their own home, in the living room next to the easy chair. As Zen Master Dogen writes, "Why give up the seat in your own house and wander uselessly in the dust of remote lands?" The story about the tailor turns on the traditional Jewish concept of teshuvah, return. Teshuvah is the spiritual effort we must constantly make to come back to the depth and truth of our living, from which we are constantly straying simply because we are normal human beings living in a normal, distracting, human world. Fall and redemption, in other words, didn't only happen long ago to the characters in the Bible: they are happening all the time in us as well. Although the Jewish sacred calendar sets aside special times of the year for teshuvah (the High Holidays) of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashannah), the deeper sense is that teshuvah- this leaving and having to return again and again - is the constant shape of human consciousness. Return is also a fact of nature: the universe expands and contracts, the tides go out and come in, celestial bodies go around and around, the seasons begin, endure, draw to a close, come around again. The Spiritual journey, the human journey, is as natural as this. We begin at home, we leave home, we return home. Even when it looks like we're going far afield, we're always on our way back. We have what we need, and we are where we are going, the spiritual journey is a journey of return. How do we make this journey? There are no maps. The path is mysterious, dark. It leads us to the corners, the subtexts, of our lives, the in-between, unconscious, unknowable places. We think we know who we are and what our lives are about But suppose we don't. Suppose our lives are not what we think they are; suppose something else is going on, deep streams flowing underground that come to the surface only now and agai, in little springs or freshets or maybe only in telltale spots of moisture where weeds or scraggly flowers grow. And suppose that the task of our lives is not so much to shape or control our stories so that they will turn out according to our preference or preconception but rather to recognize that our stories, the visible images of our lives, are cover stories, narratives that hide within them deeper, underground narratives, that we can sense and taste now and again but never fully comprehend. This is the territory of religion and myth, the province of spiritual practice. And yes, there are traditions, protocols, studies, useful spiritual activities we can engage in. We can practice meditation, prayer, or some other form of spiritual exercise with discipline and commitment; we can study, imagine, write in a journal, make art. We can become part of a spiritual community, and we can show up to practice side by side with people of that community, helping to take responsibility for it. We can seek mentors, teachers, or spiritual directors, and we can work with them sensitively, receiving their guidance with appreciation, but never without taking responsibility for our own development. And we can follow a teaching of some sort, whether it is the religion we were brought up in and have long been familiar with, or some other religion, or combination of religions, or no religion at all but some more secular form of spiritual wisdom. Yes, we can and ought to do some of all these things. They will make a big difference. This book, in fact, is one such spiritual aid; it will help you to appreciate the shape and feeling for the journey, will give you tools and reflections to keep you company, and perhaps also steady your step as you walk forward into the darkness But no book, no practice, no community, no scripture can ensure that things will turn out as you want them to - nor, even that you can be sure, at any point, of where you are or where you are going. For the spiritual odyssey is more mysterious than any teaching, community, or mentor can explain (though there is no shortage of explanations). And because the journey takes us in the end back to the beginning, back home where we started from, it is an odd journey, a heartfelt journey, a sentimental journey, a journey of déjà vu.
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