My Odyssey: Same story. Different century

Hello Kindred Spirit!

UCLA, Spring 1983

I sat in one of UCLA's large lecture halls. I chose the middle section instead of the front, my heart beating and my hands sweating. We were getting our final exam results that day.

I had fairly recently changed my major for the last time to Classical Civilizations—the eleventh change since starting college in 1979.

Truth be told, I had scanned the course catalog, lined up the courses I had taken, and looked at every major I might be able to qualify for. I loved learning: math, science, writing, research. I'd toyed with becoming an optometrist, going into cybernetics, diving into ethnic arts, English literature, philosophy, or journalism, among others. I took the appropriate classes along the way. I struggled to settle on one idea, but I also wanted to graduate.

Classical Civilizations (the study of Greek and Roman history and literature without having to be fluent in Greek and Latin), it turned out, was the one. I knew it was unlikely to lead directly to a coveted job after graduation, but its rigor compelled me. So did the fact that many of the courses I'd already taken would count toward it. It was also one of the few undergrad degrees that required a thesis. I knew it would teach me how to think and investigate all of life. That seemed like what a college education should do.

The teacher began calling people to the front and handing them back their Essay Exam "Blue Books." I stayed seated, waiting for my name to be called. At last, she had handed them all out—except mine. Inside, I panicked. What was going on? Was my test lost? Did I fail?

The teacher then said, "I held one test back because I wanted to acknowledge this student personally."

She called my name.

As I walked to the front of the class, she said, "I have never given out an A+. Yours is the first."

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

I floated back to my seat on Cloud 9. A+!! The teacher said she's never given an A+ before. Mine was the first.

I didn't know it then, but something was quietly locking into place underneath the pride. It wasn't just that I'd done good work. A new identity was forming: I am a person who does perfect work.

It would take some serious unraveling—a lifetime of investigating underlying truth, a marriage nearly undone, years of grief I didn't know I was carrying, ten years of sitting in silence on retreat—before I could recognize that sentence for what it actually was: a thought I had mistaken for truth, conditioning me to believe I had to be perfect.

Not truth.

A grip.

But Back to That 1983 Essay…

It was on Homer’s Odyssey. I wrote about the underlying theme of mortality vs. immortality and the importance of eating for mortals—a grumbling belly differentiates one from a God.

I wrote in particular about Xenia, or hospitality, which is a critical theme in the Odyssey. Xenia is the sacred obligation of ancient Greek culture: feed, bathe, seat your guest—even a stranger—before engaging in discussion. It stands for something larger: treating the vulnerable and displaced carries moral weight.

In the Odyssey, we see all kinds of variations: hosts who poison guests, guests who steal, hosts who tempt guests with food that makes them forget. Each scene considers what makes a good host: not only that you feed them, but what you feed them.

Forty-Three Years Later

This summer, 2026, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey came out. Shortly after seeing it, I spent a week in silent retreat. And here I am, 43 years after writing that essay, still turning the Odyssey over in my mind, finding new layers.

The A+ I received for that essay has remained, in my mind, a defining moment of achieving "perfection." But now, all these years later, I can see a deeper lesson underneath the hospitality theme—one I've only gained from my own odyssey, especially the last decade of deep introspection on silent retreat. I understand now that the deeper lesson, for me, has something to do with being exiled from our true home—and what it takes to make an arduous return to spiritual unity.

Ironically, I’ve come to see that it hinges on identification. What am I identified with? What have I mistaken for who I am? For me, one of those things I have had to let go of is that leaning toward perfectionism.

But before I could let go of it, I had to see it clearly. And I didn't really see it—not up close, not in real time—until I started sitting still enough to watch my own mind reach.

Grasping at the Table

One of the easiest places to first catch your own mind grasping is at a meal. On silent retreat, when there is no conversation to hide behind, nothing to do but eat, you can watch the mind lean toward the next bite before you've swallowed the first. Reaching for a preference. Wanting more of what it liked, less of what it didn't.

Not hunger, exactly.

Grasping.

Calypso's island, in the movie, is that same grasping, just larger—a comfortable place of forgetfulness, where the mind perpetually reaches for the good thing it thinks it wants, the comfortable thing, and holds on to it without diving deeper.

Odysseus's whole journey, I now think, isn't really about getting home to Ithaca. It's about loosening one's grip on whatever island he's currently landed on—even a good one.

Because perhaps home was never simply a place to arrive at. It's not found by grasping at all, but by loosening the identities we cling to—not king or straight-A student, not warrior or achiever, but something with no need to declare itself.

Two Truths

I've spent the last ten years torn between two truths: there is no fixed self, and we still have to build a livable world together.

And this is where Xenia comes back for me—not just as an ancient Greek social code I wrote about at twenty-one, but as the same instruction in a different key: bring strangers to common ground, feed, bathe, and shelter them, then engage in discussion.

And I see now that hospitality becomes easier when there is less self to defend. When there is less insistence on where I end and someone else begins, there is simply more room for the stranger. Hospitality, as I have come to think, is never really just about food anyway. It's about what happens when we stop defending the boundaries of who we think we are.

Odysseus wandered the wine-dark sea for ten years. I wandered on the cushion, in silence, ten to twenty days at a stretch, for over ten years—my own odyssey. His journey stripped away king, warrior, husband—down to a lost soul, down to a beggar, before he could return home. Mine has stripped away straight-A student, achiever, down to something with no name at all.

Just this. Just now.

What's left when we strip the self all the way down? Past every role. Past even a good and comfortable life.

How far down are we willing to go?

Maybe this far down: there is simply less standing guard at the door.

Funny, isn't it, that I called this "My" Odyssey—when the whole point turned out to be that there's no fixed "my" to defend.

Good News

Floop 2.0 is just a couple of weeks from launching — great news for bringing Write Now Mind back online.
I've started recording the audiobook version of Naked in the Now!
On the retreat I just returned from, I felt the pull toward my next book: Naked Along the Way — musings and insights gleaned from silent retreat.