Last Wednesday afternoon, my bestie and I played hooky, sat in a dark theatre for three hours, and watched a man take twenty years to get home.
We both had these vivid memories of first meeting Odysseus in our youth, so we went in eager. And I came out with something I wasn’t expecting.
(Spoilers ahead. Although the story is about three thousand years old, so I’m not sure that counts.)
Most people watch The Odyssey and see an adventure of a man fighting monsters, trying to get back to his wife. I watched it and saw a map of consciousness. The whole time, I wasn’t thinking of what happens next, but what is this saying about how a soul moves through a life?
And about twenty minutes in I got that Odysseus isn’t trying to get home, but trying to become someone who can go home.
Home isn’t a place. It’s a frequency.
That’s why the journey takes twenty years. Yes, the Mediterranean is large, but he can’t fit back into the life he left until he’s changed enough to hold it.
And every monster along the way is an altered state.
The Sirens are the voice that says if you could just know everything, you’d finally be safe. Which is an astonishingly modern affliction with our endless podcasts, teachings, forecasts, feeds, etc. It’s kind of listening instead of living. Odysseus hears them without obeying them, and I think there’s something beautiful in that. He doesn’t plug his ears. He just doesn’t steer toward them.
The lotus eaters fascinated me. Forget the plant. It’s more about the state of anything that removes our sacred remembering. Comfort becomes anesthesia, and the soul forgets why it came. And that’s far more frightening to me than any monster.
And then there’s Circe who reallyisn’t a villain. I mean, did she turn men into pigs, or did she reveal what they already were? Some people encounter power and become more themselves. Others become instinct, consumption, possession, fear. Circe exposes consciousness, which is not unlike life itself when you think about it.
There are two moments I keep thinking about
The first is the beggar disguise.
Odysseus finally arrives home, immediately gives up his identity, and the world treats him completely differently. People reveal themselves, so he discovers what’s real by becoming invisible.
There’s deep spiritual practice in that. Meaning, every identity we cling to filters what we’re able to see. I’m talking about names, roles, titles, the story we’re known by. Take it off and suddenly you’re looking at the truth of a room instead of the reflection of yourself in it.
The second is the bow.
Everyone focuses on the physical feat. But watch what’s actually happening. Same house, same tools, same people. And nobody else can string it. Only the one who lived the journey can do the thing the journey made him capable of.
Experience changes capability. Knowledge doesn’t.
You can read about it, study it, understand it beautifully in theory. But the bow only bends for the person who went the long way around.
This week is both the arrival and the departure
The reason I’m telling you all this right now is that this week, a long chapter closes and an entirely new one opens. The compass swings. Eighteen months of one kind of work finish, and a completely different voyage begins.
At the same time, there’s a rare blessing arriving at the very heart of the light. Something that happens once every twelve years. Whatever you’ve been growing since early summer gets amplified and elevated now, met with a kind of yes.
AND there’s a Full Moon on the same day that brings pointed questions about belonging. Who are actually your people? Are you belonging somewhere or just fitting in? Whatever’s been building pressure comes out this week, one way or another.
Which is to say, this is an Ithaca week. The shore comes into view, and it’s not the end of anything. It’s the beginning of the part where you find out who you’ve become.
The belief that won’t survive this week
“Why is this taking so long?”
It’s taking exactly as long as becoming takes. 😉
Time behaves strangely in The Odyssey, and it behaves strangely in a life. Years pass, and yet certain moments stay immediate. Trauma does that. So does love. So does soul. The chronology is almost beside the point.
The journey happens according to readiness, not the calendar. Some people spend twenty years crossing the Mediterranean. Others spend twenty years inside one emotional pattern. The landscape looks different, but the journey isn’t.
So if you’ve been counting the years and feeling behind, I’d suggest you’re measuring the wrong thing. You haven’t missed anything. You’re becoming someone who can hold what’s waiting for you.
Okay, one more
Penelope, the wife.
People admire her loyalty. I admire her discernment. She doesn’t need proof, but waits until consciousness resonates. She won’t accept a man who merely looks like her husband, because she’s not waiting for the man who left. She’s waiting to recognize who came back.
And the marriage survives because both people changed, not because neither did.
We’re taught that love means staying the same for each other. But the relationships that last are the ones where two people go the long way around, separately and together, and are still able to recognize each other at the end of it.
I didn’t watch The Odyssey asking whether a scene was accurate to Homer. I watched it asking, where have I been this character? When have I lived on that island?
That’s when ancient stories stop being history and start becoming mirrors. So that’s my question for you this week, as one chapter closes and the shoreline of another comes into view.
Which island are you on right now? And what would it take to leave it?
Jonni
P.S. I didn’t include that Poseidon isn’t punishment, but the unconscious. (Water almost always is.) And you don’t conquer the unconscious. You learn its weather. Which is why the more Odysseus fights the sea, the longer he stays in it. So it’s worth asking what you’ve been fighting, and what would happen if you learned its weather instead.
P.P.S. I also read into the Cyclops. (Single vision. Brute certainty. Seeing only one reality, and we all know someone like that.) If you want the rest of that one, hit reply and I’ll send it.
