Sailing Home: Using Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls

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Norman Fischer has written a "classic" commentary on The Odyssey. What I mean by "classic" is that it is one of first rank as Norman Fischer makes Odysseus' journey of almost a generation ours. With heartfelt prose, Mr. Fischer shares his experience as someone deeply immersed in his Buddhist tradition to find his way home. Not preachy, through the travails of Oddysseus, Mr. Fischer offers a way to show the readers how to reconsider what it means to live a good life, to ask the right questions and give due care to those we love. I wished the book went on and on after I finished it. In graceful ways, Mr. Fischer shows us how to separate the wheat from the chaff in our lives. I wish him many more books to write which are as conversational and as learned as this book.

I just finished this book at a critical time when I was involved with major life decisions. It was helpful to me to gain understanding of what I was going through and feeling, as I travel. This book weaves new meaning into the story of Odysseus. I love how Fischer uses the Odyssey as a way to explain a new way of working with life's "twists and turns" through awareness of life, and integrates his years of zen practice into understanding deeper levels of this ancient human story. The Odyssey, Fischer says, is about coming home, for people who "have encountered twists and turns of pain and suffering, and so are ready to come home." Fisher has a delightful way of explaining how a Odysseus, a human, is at the mercy of the sea and life, and at the mercy of his own human failings, yet he goes on. He states "To respect the sea is to trust that we can welcome life's immense and unknowable currents rather than resist them. .. " This book is for seekers of all faiths, yet makes the practice and principles of zen accessible to the average person through this story. The book is broken into Parts: Setting Forth (waiting, grief, body practice, etc) and Disaster (working with disaster, pleasure and time; death, desire, the siren's call and impossible choices); and Return (revealing yourself, love's risk, and forgivenss) particularly good for those practicing meditation and particularly zen practice, but I would recommend this book to non meditators who are interested in a different way to view life's hard times, and to gain a new perspective of faith, practice on living truly, and finding love and compassion for ourselves and others by not resisting life's offerings.

I found this book to be one of the most enjoyable and life changing moments in my life. I was so engaged and intrigued by the premise and the easy way Norman Fischer was able to convey his profound understanding of the human condition. The honesty and integrity of his experiences are so wonderfully shared through the trials and tribulations from Homer's Odyssey as the ground for our personal work. It is a book that you just want to savor every word. Besides, at the end of each chapter are wonderful guided meditations.

Norm Fischer is a heartful, compassionate teacher with a great gift for expressing his and our human beingness...I've been carrying Sailing Home around with me for several weeks, cherishing the gift of his awareness and experience as a person...a person who has immersed himself in the practice of meditation, Buddhist, Judaic, Christian teachings and life itself. He is a very intelligent person who can bring even Homer's Odyssey down home in a valuable meaningful way using metaphor so that even I am understanding it. I am grateful that this book came my way.

Blessings for your journey home. Joan Fenold

I definetely recommend this book. He uses examples from Zen Buddhism, Greek mythology, Judaism, and Christianity to emphasize the kind of struggles many have to face in life and how to deal with those struggles. So he's really a very open-minded person.

Sailing Home is a beautifully written, elegant and eye-opening guide to navigating "life's perils and pitfalls". Norman Fischer provides a wise, kind, and candid interpretation of Odysseus's journey home. While this journey, as written by Homer, is laden with masculine sensibility and challenges, Fischer's guidance, infused with Buddhist wisdom and practice, makes the journey accessible to all. (Ah -- but to hear this story from Penelope's perspective!) With unflinching acceptance for the human condition, Fischer's Sailing Home allows the reader to appreciate the restless, circuitous, courageous, and perilous journey we all must make to find our way home to ourselves.

Norman Fischer uses Homer's Odyssey to offer reflections on how to live, how to meditate, how to forgive, how to die, and how to be. Although he writes from the perspective of Zen Buddhism, he also weaves in Jewish and Christian perspectives. One need not be Buddhist -- nor a scholar of Homer -- to appreciate and benefit from the insights into living and dying that Fischer offers. Moreover, his prose is straightforward and lucid, generously seasoned with stories, verses, and quotations from both sages and everyday folks. To read this book is to be entertained, educated, and uplifted.

Homer's Odyssey is a classic, and for a reason. It's message is eternal and individual. We are all Odysseus as we sail home toward the metaphorical Ithaca. Norman Fischer, the wise and brilliant Zen master, employs the rich mythology of The Odyssey as an aid to help us maneuver through the perils and pitfalls of our voyage home. Each chapter is filled with insightful anecdotes and wisdom from each of the major religions - Buddhism, Juadic,as well as Christian - which give us instruction on our own mysterious journey back home. As the "man of twists and turns", Odysseus and his wanderings are so very relevant to our own heroic journey. And Fischer is a wonderful and compassionate companion throughout this book as he deftly relates that, "The mystery (and pain!) of our lives is that we are where we need to be, but we don't know it." Yet he invites us to experience the odyssey of our unique paths when we set sail to learn the lessons of our own homeward bound spirital journey called "life."

There was an interesting piece in the New York Times by this author that piqued my interest in this book, so I ordered it. However, I'm sorry to say that I couldn't get past the first chapter. Though it would seem that the subject matter should be about selflessness, the author appears to have a hard time leaving himself out of the picture. If fact, the book seems to be about him. There certainly must be many truths that we all would like to learn (that's why we buy books like this, right?), but it also seems that those truths should be greater than any one person. The author not only puts himself square in the middle of the view, but seems also to be concerned with making sure that the reader knows how spiritual and enlightened he is -- maybe so he can sell more books. I think there is more spiritual awareness in the wry observations of life in the lyrics of most any Steely Dan tune. This author surely appeals to many, but -- watch your wallet.

This is an utterly disappointing and frustrating book. I got this book thinking it was primarily about The Odyssey without realizing that it's actually intended to be a book about Buddhism. Unfortunately it fails to be either. First of all, Fischer's efforts to interpret the Odyssey as a metaphor for Buddhism is ill-fitting. The Odyssey is a product of a Western, Greek culture with very different cultural preoccupations and morals from traditional Buddhism. Volumes of books have been written about what the Odyssey meant to the civilization that gave birth to it, and there are nearly 3000 years of commentary on its "spiritual meaning" to draw on. Fischer completely ignores all of this work and gives very stilted reinterpretations to everything. It's as if someone took the Sears Catalog and tried to interpret it as a self-help manual.

Being disappointed that the book told me nothing new or even insightful about the Odyssey, I then tried and failed to appreciate the book as a Buddhist text. Fischer gives the impression that Buddhism is a method for emotionally fragile, psychologically scarred individuals to seek deep emotional connection to their pain and to have intense, emotional relationships with other people. Call this "Emo Buddhism" if you like, but it's a very far cry from the fundamental Buddhist teachings of non-attachment, withdrawal from the world, and disengagement from self that Gautama taught. Indeed, the basic message of the book seems profoundly anti-Buddhist.

Avoid this book like the plague.

I find this book to be an absolute jewel of wisdom. Norman Fischer never disappoints, and in this book he is perhaps at his finest. In simplifying the story of the Odyssey and comparing it to our own spiritual journey, he has made it meaningful to me for the first time in my life. In high school, I thought it was a boring GUY book about battles and monsters. Fischer deftly untangles the threads of this convoluted story to reveal the human struggles that are common to us all. The way we sometimes fall asleep when we most need to be awake to what is happening in our lives. The way pride, or lust, or greed, can lure us away from our true journey, sometimes for years at a time. The reassuring message that in spite of all our travails, we ARE going home, we are always going home. The warning that even "going home" is still going to be fraught with much struggle before we finally find peace.

Every chapter ends with a brief meditation suggestion. It has been a very useful way to incorporate the teachings of that chapter and to explore how its truths might be manifest in my own life.

This is one of the best "guide" books I have ever read for the spiritual journey. I plan to read this book again and again.

In "Taking Our Places," Fischer writes in an anecdotal format--he is trying to get to know a small group of male teen-agers, about accepting
responsibility as a step in becoming and adult human being, capable of compassion for others. This means giving up the blaming self, the one that says mom or dad is at fault for your problems. It also means you stop identifying with someone you reject and about forgiving yourself, e.g. becoming independent and alone.

In "Sailing Home," Norman Fischer uses a Greek author's story about "trying to make it home again" as a springboard and parallel for achieving the same result with his beautiful teachings. Home is where the heart is, and where you grow up, and accept your mortality, and help others.

Everything Fischer writes is incredibly understandable. He is not Zen preachy and I find his writing even more compelling than that of Pema Chodron, a real surprise to me.

Just finished reading this after reading and very much enjoying Norman Fischer's "Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up" which is a more enjoyable read. Norman is a man who upon reading D.T Suzuki in college, as many of us did, has dedicated his life to successfully completing the journey begun by that writer of translating the intrigues of Zen Buddhism to a Westerm idom. All noble tasks take their toll. In this volume we have the reflections of the weary Zen Master, lamenting, much in the way F. Scott Fitzgerald did when placing Jay Gatsby on his dock observing the green light on the end of Daisy's dock that the green orgiastic recedes year by year before us. That orgaistic future can be spirtual as well as hedonistic. Don't lose heart Norman. Your life work has been meaningful and more courageous than many of us who kept our slim volumes of Suzuki but only intermittently turned to them for help.

THE ODYSSEY has been around a long time, since at least 800 BC. Each generation finds its own meaning in the tale of Odysseus, the lost sailor whose ten years of peregrinations throughout the Mediterranean world are the basis of this classic. In the 1920s, James Joyce reinterpreted the tale as ULYSSES, the travails of Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin. In the 1980s, Steely Dan wrote HOME AT LAST, a brief but poignant tone poem that grasped Homer's meaning beautifully. And now, Norman Joketsu Fischer gives us SAILING HOME. in which THE ODYSSEY becomes the ultimate spiritual journey through the hearts and minds of his readers.

A prior reviewer, who admits he never got past the introduction, criticizes SAILING HOME as Fischer's homage to himself, but the reviewer is mistaken---hopefully, he's opened the covers again and gotten beyond the first chapter. SAILING HOME is an homage to the human condition. Influenced by Zen, but not a book about Zen, and influenced by psychology, but not a deconstruction of the mind, Fischer's book is a prose poem in which the adventures of the Greek hero become a parable reflecting our own evolution as feeling human beings.

This is a minor classic. VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

This book is simply a must-have: combining western cultural roots -the famous Oddessey- with eastern wisdom. There is a lot of soul in this one. Truly a book for life, one that you will keep reading through all of the storms and tides of your life. I highly recommend it.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This book is an interesting approach to applying ancient wisdom to modern life.