Separating the Wheat of Life from the Chaff — some wisdom from Helen Luke’s essay, “The Odyssey”:
“Why do you speak of a winnowing fan,” said Odysseus, “when you must know very well that this is a beautiful oar with which I cleave the great waters of the wine-dark seas around us?” …

“You are right, I am not ignorant of the oar… I was not pretending by using the words ‘winnowing fan’…I ask you now only to think of the meaning of that image.”
Odysseus replied, “Why, the winnowing fan is something that creates a wind whereby the chaff is separated from the grain at the time of harvest. What has that to do with an oar?”

Teiresias responded: “Remember only what the oar has meant to you through the many years of your life, Odysseus. You have been brought, by the seer who is blind to the outer shapes but who sees the shapes of things within and their meaning in each man’s life… in order that you may finally recognize your own oar as a true winnowing fan. Do you not know that your travels, your achievements and failures, the gains and losses to which your winged ship carried you were all slowly forging for you a ‘winnowing fan’? Now that the harvest is gathered and you stand at the autumn of your life, your oar is no longer a driving force carrying you over oceans of your inner and outer worlds, but a spirit of discriminating wisdom, separating moment by moment the wheat of life from the chaff, so that you may know in both wheat and chaff their meaning and their value in the pattern of the universe.”

From the book, “Old Age – Journey into Simplicity” by Helen M. Luke