For I say there is no other thing that is worse than the sea is for breaking a man, even though he may a very strong one.

Death is just the birth of yet another odyssey.

And when long years and seasons wheeling brought around that point of time ordained for him to make his passage homeward, trials and dangers, even so, attended him even in Ithaca, near those he loved.

In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree. (pg. 123, The Body and the Earth).

Many of us begin this art with little to no understanding of what we are getting ourselves into. Then, maybe a year or a black belt later, we realize this odyssey we have embarked upon and rest happily in knowing we have chosen a noble struggle.I think we owe most of our successes to our initial ignorance. When we begin, we cannot see the obstacles ahead, and so we march on optimistically. In hindsight, when we look back and connect the dots, we see just how green we were at the start, and it was only our ignorance that upheld us from the crushing despair of the task at hand.

He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.

You cruel, hard-hearted gods!” I flung the goblet in his direction. Hermes barely had time to dart out of its way before it hit the wall and shattered to small pieces. “You’re all the same! Hsst! Jealous! Vindictive! That’s what you are! You allow yourselves to take pleasure with any mortal you wish. Let a goddess do the same. Let a goddess choose a mortal for her lover, and you set off in a fury of revenge against her as if her actions are an affront to you. And all the while, you male gods allow yourselves all kinds of liberties you deny to us females.

Renunciation isn't a moral imperative or a form of self-denial. It's simply cooperation with the way things are: for moments do pass away, one after the other. Resisting this natural unfolding doesn't change it; resistance only makes it painful. So we renounce our resistance, our noncooperation, our stubborn refusal to enter life as it is. We renounce our fantasy of a beautiful past and an exciting future we can cherish and hold on to. Life just isn't like this. Life, time, is letting go, moment after moment. Life and time redeem themselves constantly, heal themselves constantly, only we don't know this, and much as we long to be healed and redeemed, we refuse to recognize this truth. This is why the sirens' songs are so attractive and so deadly. They propose a world of indulgence and wishful thinking, an unreal world that is seductive and destructive. (142).

But they could neither of them persuade me, for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it.

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?