The hero(ine)'s journey
It's not just about Odysseus and Luke Skywalker
The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, “Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.” And so it starts. — Joseph Campbell
In his studies of the world’s stories and myths, Joseph Campbell reminds us that the tales we humans tell ourselves should not always be taken literally. They can be understood symbolically like dreams and metaphors that represent important truths about human nature and life. We must decode them in order to understand their full meaning.
Campbell analyzes what he calls the mono-myth that appears in every culture across human history: the hero’s journey. The “hero” is often represented as a larger-than-life figure who goes on a journey filled with adventure and danger and superhuman accomplishments. But thinking in terms of muscular (usually male) warriors slaying dragons or battling evil empires distorts the true meaning of this universal mythic theme.
The hero’s journey is the story of EVERY person who, when facing life’s challenges and suffering, undergoes a transformation of the self as they strive to master an unfamiliar and difficult situation. I was reminded of this important truth while reading a wonderful novel written by an old friend.
A young woman and her hero’s journey
How would she ever know what she really felt, what she really wanted? A mystery to herself, was she doomed to go about the earth chasing chimeras her ego or her hungers invented for her? … It was as if they were all in flight and in the dark, blindly racing somewhere … You never know what you’ll see out there … You never know. — from Ashley by David Donavel
In the novel Ashley by David Donavel, the protagonist is a 22-year-old recent graduate of a small New England college where she majored in English literature. She shares an apartment with a friend in the Jamaica Plains neighborhood of Boston MA (my birthplace) and works as a teacher’s aide in a local middle school. Like many early 20-somethings, Ashley misses the structure of school with its easy friendships, course work, grades, guidance and encouragement. Within that transitional space between home and full-fledged adulthood, she had felt oriented, challenged, supported, and valued. Now she is out in the world on her own.
Ashley becomes trapped in three prisons over the course of the novel, and her struggles to free herself and secure her identity and vocation are the centerpiece of her heroic narrative
Upon her graduation and disgorgement into the mundane world of adult work and relations and independent living, Ashley struggles with her disappointment with her job, a growing sense of isolation and loneliness, and her shame at not being more defined, more successful, more “special”. She feels increasingly paralyzed as she contemplates the obvious career option of returning to school to pursue a graduate degree along with her sense that the return on such an investment (a college teaching post) would not be “worth it” in terms of the payoff of pride and salary.
But she is unable to imagine another work identity that would suit her. Like any bright creative person, she works desperately to think and imagine her way to a better career and life, only to confront the inevitable dead-ends of an ideational ego-driven approach to successful living. She feels increasingly disillusioned, confused, ashamed, and helpless.
Ashley becomes trapped in three prisons over the course of the novel, and her struggles to free herself and secure her identity and vocation are the centerpiece of her narrative. The fine details of her heroic journey, as expertly crafted by the author, brilliantly illuminate the core dynamics of the Buddhist path from illusion and enslavement to enlightenment and freedom. This is the most impressive accomplishment of David Donavel’s novel.
I. The Prison of Thought
As her best friend observes, Ashley is a highly ideational person who “lives in her head.” Hence her choice of a college major centered on words and imagination. The more she tries to think and imagine her way to a good life by looking at herself from the outside in (i.e. as an object), the more lost and confused she becomes.
The Buddhist practice of mindfulness involves shifting from a thinking/judging mode to a sensing/experiencing one. Ashley works to effect this shift by immersing herself in three sensual platforms: nature, her body, and her reading of literature. While living in urban Boston, she is fortunate to live within walking distance of the Arnold Arboretum, an expansive botanical park to which she returns again and again throughout the novel to center herself in the full sensory experience of nature. She immerses herself In the visual and auditory data of the annual lifecycle of the plant specimens of the arboretum as well as the wildlife and other human visitors. She watches the birds and deer live in action without obsession or doubt. She exposes herself to the severe New England winters as a meditative practice to focus on her body sensations of cold and pain. She explores her sexuality as another route to embodiment and centering.
The most interesting meditative form (especially to me given my professional interest in how people build a satisfying career and professional identity) in the novel is Ashley’s increasing ability to deeply immerse herself in her beloved reading and writing about literature. In college, she had an enriched work environment that facilitated engagement as she exercised her talents with just the right levels of challenges and resources. After graduation, she tries to construct a vocational identity via a mechanistic assembly of her interests and skills (Eureka: teacher!) but feels no energy or vitality when contemplating that career path and its associated expenses of time and money. While interests and abilities are necessary factors to consider in a career plan, they are not sufficient. Many people chose a career goal (doctor, lawyer, etc.) because it “objectively” suits them, only to find that the actual practice of the job leaves them cold as it fails to fully engage them and consumes more energy than it generates.
Ashley eventually abandons her thankless job as a teacher’s aide (dedicated to the institutionally shared lie that she will enable a non-verbal autistic girl to shift from obsessive drawing to fluent writing) and her long-time vision of becoming a college professor (she realizes she wants to be a learner, not a teacher!). She decides to find work that can generate an income without draining the energy she wants to devote to reading and thinking and writing. She recreates the special learning environment of her college years in the local public library where she is increasingly able to lose/find herself in her love of words and ideas and literature. Without the pressure to produce any particular output or fit into a prescribed role or schedule, she is able to freely read and think and write in her journal, and therein experiences the effortless timeless selfless engagement called flow:
At first, the words would not come, but she pressed on and after a page and a half, it was as if her pen had taken over, as if it were leading her hand and mind and not the other way around.
This deep immersion and pleasure confirms her right-work calling as a reader and writer of literature, even as she realizes she is not suited to teach. She eventually comes to work agreeably as a bank teller and conserves her energies for her literary pursuits.
II. The Prison of Relationships
For much of the novel, Ashley keeps largely to herself both at and outside of work. She is isolated by her role as a 1:1 special needs aide and the unrelatedness of her classroom teacher. She appears to be somewhat introverted and comfortable with her own company, so her social network remains small. Her parents live in the rather rigid and brittle stasis of their older years, and while welcoming and pleasant with her, she is not able to connect with them beyond the superficial aspects of a brief visit to her childhood home. She experiences a degree of loneliness in contrast to the enriched social environment of her school years.
At the other extreme from loneliness lies the risk of over-involvement in an intimate relationship with the dangers of dependency and loss of self. This situation is particularly problematic for young women to navigate due to cultural/gender expectations for passivity and submissiveness and conflict-avoidance in the female role. Ashley largely steers clear of this dilemma as she focuses on finding and securing her emergent self.
Buddhism prescribes an antidote to both isolation and over-involvement with others at the expense of finding one’s own way: the maintenance of an optimal degree of separateness (“non-attachment”) and self-boundaries in one’s relationships. This allows for connection and intimacy without the extremes of dominance or submission. Ashley misses the enabling connection she had with her college mentor who taught, advised, coached and encouraged her, and sometimes just allowed her to hang out in his office and work. She is fortunate to find two such facilitating relationships in Boston in the characters of her female peer and apartment mate (Shannon) and an English professor (Bruce) at a local college who develops into her main love interest.
Ashley’s relationship with Shannon is central to her survival and development during the years covered by the novel. The young women share and process their sense of identity diffusion and uncertainty, their ambivalent relationship with their jobs, their desire for fun and pleasure, and their conflicts over love and dependency that can at times threaten their budding sense of self. They like and respect and care for each other, and maintain the just-right balance between intimacy and separateness. It is a relationship that protects them from both loneliness and interference, and they cycle between living their separate lives and coming back together to talk and process and grieve and play. They create a vital holding environment that enables them both to flow and grow into themselves.
Ashley’s relationship with Bruce is another mostly healthy balanced relationship that enables both partners to be themselves and become more of themselves. Due to their shared interest in writing and literature and ambivalence about the job of teaching, as well as their mutual affection and appreciation, they can play and process, and engage deeply with themselves and each other. Ashley finds she can experience flow in her relationship with Bruce as she does with her reading and writing:
By the time she finished, the laundry had been folded for a couple of minutes. But so absorbed had she been in what she was explaining that she let her small hands rest quietly on the table while she talked. As for Bruce, he attended to what she was saying for it interested him. But he attended as well to the way her earnest talk illuminated her.
The tragic element in this novel occurs when Ashley and Bruce crash into the territory of infidelity and sexual jealousy that ruptures their shared safety and comfort and trust. They break apart and Ashley experiences both deep grief as well as an awareness of how a close love relationship can compromise and interfere with her own development. She and Shannon experience this ambivalence about female-male relations simultaneously in real time, and use their own safe relationship as a space to process these complicated dynamics until they both achieve sufficient clarity and perspective.
III. The Prison of Self
Ashley is preoccupied with the (narcissistic) goal of being “special” in both her own and others’ eyes and estimation. She felt recognized and appreciated by her parents and by her teachers and suffers the loss of these important facilitating figures as do many twenty-somethings during their early career years (hence the vital importance of mentors).
Adolescence is a time of intense I-Me-Mine, and this self-preoccupation continues well into the twenties as the work of self-discovery and identity consolidation continues. A stable differentiated self is required for both productive work and healthy intimacy, the dual projects of early adulthood. But too much self and not enough consideration of and concern for others and their interests can sink both ventures.
In the course of her relationship with Bruce, Ashley acts in a way that causes a rupture in their connection. She does nothing criminal or immoral or particularly unreasonable, but she knew it could do harm to a trusting relationship and it did. This ushers in a period of productive guilt for Ashley, and scrutiny of her tendency to be quite smug, callous, and devaluing of others in her search for a sense of specialness and superiority. Losing Bruce and her own self-respect is the low point in her journey, and she turns suffering into insight through hard reckoning and Shannon’s tough love and understanding. She is able to bravely heal the rift she created and arguably return that important relationship to a steady footing.
Buddhism prescribes the practice of compassion and kindness toward others as an antidote to the human tendency toward selfishness and cruelty. As Ashley shifts her attention from how others disrespect and mistreat her to how she is fully capable of acting that way herself, her shame and guilt soften her more ruthless impulses. She recognizes that others are largely unknowable and mysterious, and are doing their best with the battles they are in, just as she is. She escapes the trap of self-absorption and embraces other characters (both real and fictional) more gently and appreciatively.
Enlightenment
When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. — Joseph Campbell
Ashley experiences her growth from a state of fragile self-absorption to one of more flexible interconnectedness and exploration as an awe-inspiring expansion and enriching of her self and life. Her persistent and courageous investment in real-life experimentation and risk-taking and meaning-making enlarge and transform her. As she attains the Buddhist ideals of Awareness, Separateness and Kindness, Ashley feels more substantial and lighter and freer, and the author beautifully captures that process of expansion and discovery:
She was both frightened and humbled. But she also felt that perhaps she’d reached a bottom, a hard place upon which she could, at last, learn to stand. She thought she saw herself honestly for the first time in her adult life. (snip)
(H)er writing revealed that she had more questions than opinions, which unsettled her for she had felt since her last year at (college) that she had acquired an almost unshakeable understanding of (her favorite writer) and those who surrounded him. She left school with the conviction that her reading added to an edifice built upon a firm foundation, that anything more she might learn would be akin to adding a cupola or windows, some architectural embellishment. But now she wondered about the whole design. This new uncertainty mirrored other changes and she bowed her head in acquiescence. (snip)
This new state, this still quietness within her which felt like constant listening, had supplanted her cherished pyramidal feeling. She didn’t miss it. It had been, she saw, a brand of her smugness, more of that sneering superiority that she did not know she felt until she lost it. And with the pyramidal feeling went her academic ambition. Like the superiority, this was held in her in such a secret way that she only saw it when it retreated.
And she, too, was part of that, this play of the gods, this continual boil, this random procession of appearance and decay. There was no penetrating any of it. There was no getting underneath it all, no visiting “God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom.” And if that were so, the best and only course was to ride it out like the bubble she, everyone, was.
With literary grace and deep insights into human nature, David Donavel has crafted a heroic odyssey and characters from whom the reader can gain a fuller appreciation for both the deep suffering and soaring promise of life.