Heroes and Men

The following is an excerpt from a story I'm writing:

Heroes and Men
One day, the two remaining couples were in the fields harvesting squash. The hot, back-straining work went easier with good conversation, so the friends talked. Not looking up from his picking, Gray asked, “So Joshua, who are your heroes?”
“My what?”
“Who are your heroes? Who do you look up to, who do you want to be like?”
“I don’t have any heroes, Gray.”
“What do you mean you don’t have any heroes?”
“In this day and age, how can you have any heroes?”
“Especially in this day and age, man! You’ve got to have heroes!”
“How can you think of anyone as a hero? I mean who do you look to? Athletes? I’m not ten years old anymore. Politicians? They’re all corrupt as shit. Religious leaders? I don’t trust any of the living ones, and the dead ones are all dead, ya know what I mean? So who does that leave? Maybe people in books, but they’re not real. You take fiction as the obvious starting point: the characters are made up people. They may be beautiful; they may be admirable, brave, strong, whatever, but they aren’t real. At best, they’re the human imagination creating images of all the things we wish we could be but are not. Maybe we can learn some things from them, but it would be pretending to call them heroes.
Even non-fiction is fiction. I mean, non-fiction may be based on reality or based on real people, but it’s not real. It’s edited. It’s designed to show certain things and hide others. Take Jesus for example. Who was he really? For a fleeting second, the image of Father Eli flashed through Joshua’s mind, but he continued: all we have to go on is what his friends wrote about him thirty years after his death. How much of his life was filtered, not even consciously but subconsciously by his disciples. You know how it is – our memories render events and people down to a few simple ideas or images. How badly did the disciples want someone to believe in? The Jewish people had been waiting for a messiah for six hundred years. Then Jesus came along. He was a good man, an honest man, and he spoke freely. He pulled his disciples out of meaningless, mundane lives and made them into heroes, like Robin Hood’s band of merry men. So, how badly did the disciples need Jesus to be a hero? Their very identities relied on Jesus’ deification.”
“Sounds like Jesus is your hero.”
“Are you listening to me at all? What I’m saying is that we manufacture heroes out of mere men because we need to believe in something bigger than ourselves. We need to believe that we can become something bigger than ourselves. But the truth is we can’t. Men and women are merely men and women. We’re all imperfect; we’re all corrupt in some ways. And so, to say that I have a hero is to make a hero out of someone who is no better and no worse than myself. I would rather just be myself and let everyone else be themselves, no judging, no pretending. If I have a hero, I stop being myself and I become instead a bad copy of my hero.”
“I don’t think so. I think that just the opposite is true: it’s our heroes that teach us how to become ourselves. The giants that walk among us show us what it really means to be a human being. People like Ghandi and Jesus and Buddha show us the potential that each of us has inside. Are they perfect? I don’t know, maybe. But I do know that they are more real than most people. They are more evolved, more enlightened, more fully developed, however you want to put it. They show us what we can become and how to get there.”
“So who are your heroes, Gray?”
“Gary Snyder, the Buddha.”
“Gary Snyder?”
“Yeah, Kerouac’s friend. He’s a poet and a Buddhist and an individualist. His poetry taught me about Buddhism and about the importance of living a simple life, living off of the land. You have to live with the land, in harmony with the land. You become a part of it, and it becomes a part of you. You don’t take more than you need, and the land doesn’t give you less than you need. It’s a matter of faith.”
“Alright, I can see how you can be inspired by people, and how you can learn from people, but I still think you’re ultimately barking up the wrong tree if you look for yourself in someone else’s branches. You know what I mean?”
Gray looked at the plant between his fingers: “you need a spiritual practice if you want to get anywhere.”
“Spirituality is what you experience at the core of your individual identity,” Joshua said; “my life is my spiritual practice. Everything that I do and see and touch is my spiritual practice. Pulling these weeds is a spiritual exercise. Kissing Shasta is a spiritual ecstacy. Making dinner and eating dinner, and doing the dishes afterwords, is a spiritual discipline. It’s all here,” he said pointing to his heart, “and here, and here,” pointing to his eyes and his fingers.
Gray nodded his approval. “Have you ever tried any Buddhist breathing techniques?”
“Nope. Why do you think I need that?”
“Because you think that you don’t need it.”
“I’d like to try,” Shasta cut in.
“What about you, girl? You got any heroes?”
“Yeah. I do.”
Joshua looked surprised, and he turned to her curiously.
“I guess I’m supposed to have some sort of intellectual answer. You’re all talking about religious heroes and book characters and writers, so you’ll probably be disappointed with my answer, but it’s true. My hero in Olivia Walton.”
“Who?”
“From the TV show The Waltons. She was the mom. I used to watch the re-runs when I was a kid and I was staying at my mom’s house. Mom would just leave me in my room with the TV while she and her friends smoked out, or when she would leave for a few hours to spange on the corner. I used to pretend that Olivia was my real mom because she was always so strong and loving. She was the real backbone of her family. She never asked for anything for herself. She just took care of John and all their kids. She never needed anything for herself; she just needed to love her family. When I was little, I always thought, ‘I want a mom like that,’ then when I got bigger, I started to think, ‘I want to be like that.’”
Gina smiled as she looked at Shasta and Joshua. “You two are perfect for eachother. You know, you both gave the same answer to Gray’s question.” . . .