Norman Fischer is a well-known Zen teacher, lecturer, poet, and former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. In his latest book Sailing Home, he draws on Buddhist, Judaic, and Christian thought to reinterpret Odyssey’s familiar wanderings as lessons everyone can use. In this excerpt, he addresses ”leaving home” as a necessary part of returning home.
“Leaving home means setting aside all we know, all that is secure, authoritative, comfortable, and binding, and shoving off for parts unknown with no road map and no guarantee of finding your way. Though it can look like–and even in some cases can be–a form of running away, an act of cowardice, real home-leaving is courageous, requiring heart and force. To go forward you must leave everything behind, and even though the past may seem to be persistent, lodged as it is in your very bones, it is one thing to be bound up by the past, doomed to repeat it or to be held back by it endlessly, and another to use it as a spring board for a journey that goes beyond–to where, one can never know.
“So, leaving home, often literally and always metaphorially, is a necessary step along the path of the journey of return. After your long waiting, which is an inner ripening, comes expression, a wail or a scream or a poem, and then action; you climb into your boat, crew and provisions in place, and shove off into the dark sea of ports unknown.”
source: Fischer, N. (2008). Sailing home: using the wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to navigate life’s perils and pitfalls. New York: Free Press, p. 53. Norman regularly comes to the Pacific North-West to lead retreats.
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