The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (16 page)

FIVE

At eighteen years of age I arrived as a first-year student at Amherst College, (a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts), fresh-plucked from the farm in Ohio. I knew oh-so-little about life. And almost nothing about New England, into whose throbbing heart I had just been transplanted. I knew nothing about her saints and poets and mystics. I knew nothing, even, about one of her chief priests: the poet Robert Frost.

This would soon change. I discovered that the mammoth fact of Robert Frost could simply not be avoided—especially at Amherst College. Frost himself had died a few years before I arrived, and this had given wings to the legend. His name was everywhere, and the college reveled in its association with him. The new Robert Frost Library had just been completed, with its rough-hewn granite foundation, and its more delicate brick and glass stories above. The poet, everyone said, “would have approved.”

If that were not enough, several of my new friends in college had committed some portion of Frost’s canon to memory, and were apt to recite Frost’s poems at the least provocation. Imagine with me, if you will, one such new friend whom I will call Ethan—who will represent the spirit of many of my new friends who had fallen in love with, and could freely recite, Robert Frost. Occasionally these recitations were haunting—as when Ethan and I and two other friends huddled around
a campfire on a late October camping trip to Vermont. We had just spent the day hiking through woods blazing with fall color, and I was on fire with the flinty smell and feel of New England. To complete the mood, Ethan treated us to a mesmerizing recitation of “The Road Not Taken”—astonishingly enough, my first hearing of Robert Frost’s most ubiquitous poem. I will never forget it. The sweet-acrid smell of the woods, the glow-in-the-dark faces of my new friends around the fire, the intentionally slow, incantatory tone of Ethan’s voice.

When he finished there was silence, save for the crackling of the fire. And into the silence, several minutes later, Ethan “said” the poem again. (Frost famously “said” his poems, rather than “recited” them.)

I was an eighteen-year-old, and had just made the first major decision of my life: the choice of a college. Would it be Amherst, or the College of Wooster, in Ohio, or Hamilton College, in New York? Of course, I did not have the word “dharma” in my vocabulary then. But the college choice had been the biggest dharma decision of my life thus far. The poem Ethan recited that magical night—which is about what we do at crossroads—was full of hidden meaning and import for me. I secretly believed this very camping trip proved that I had chosen well. Look where I was. And who I was with: exotic new friends who recited poetry in the woods at night. Look what a turn my life had taken out of the mundanity (as I thought) of Ohio. My decision was the right one. And I was experiencing the power of choice.
Observe
, I thought: I had already taken the road less traveled.

Frost haunted me. At first entirely through Ethan. But the poet slowly became my own. From my first hearing of Frost’s words, I felt some strange kinship with him, as if his was a voice I had known somewhere long, long ago, and was just rediscovering. He evoked in me a kind of nostalgia for a past that seemed to have faded into a near dream.

Strangely, Frost describes his own process of
making poetry
in a very similar fashion—as a kind of homecoming to a lost part of himself. “For me,” he says, “
the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” In a new poem, he wrote, he “
meets himself coming home.”

By the time I returned to Ohio for Christmas vacation, I had already committed my first Frost poem to memory. I repeated it to myself over and over again as I walked the snow-swept fields of my boyhood town, as if introducing my past to my future. I loved the feel of the words in my mouth:

Some say the world will end in fire
. Oh, the sound of it! Before I left for Ohio, I “said” this poem once in Ethan’s presence, rattling it off with poorly disguised pride while on a hike across the Holyoke Range. He smiled but said nothing.

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Frost, of course, became the most lauded American poet of his century—winning no less than four Pulitzer Prizes (a record) and single-handedly remaking American poetry.

His life is, then, naturally, a treasure trove of stories about dharma. But to my mind, the most interesting story is the series of courageous early choices Frost made in support of his dharma. When one examines Frost’s life closely, it becomes clear that this man became more and more himself through a
series of small decisions that aligned him with his voice
. He had a gift, of course. But his power came into focus through his
commitment to this gift
, and through a series of decisive actions taken in support of it. Each one of these acts was, for him, like jumping off a cliff. He jumped not entirely blind—but not entirely seeing, either. And each of Frost’s leaps ignited more of his power. In retrospect, it is clear that each one of Frost’s difficult decisions helped create the perfect conditions for the full flowering of his genius. He chose relentlessly over and over again—in small ways and in large
—for his dharma
. His remarkable career was the fruit of these decisions.

Frost’s early years were spent finding out who he was. But his later years were spent increasingly
being who he was on purpose
. As he himself said, the story of his life is the story of someone becoming more and more himself. He later wrote:

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From early on, Robert Frost had an ear for “voice”—for the good story, the compelling colloquialism, the rough-hewn sound of local speech. Very often, he discovered the power of words—and their flinty patterns—while he was at work. Even as a boy, Frost loved physical work. “
I liked to try myself out in a job,” he once recalled, “helping a man load a wagon, pile firewood, rake or hoe. It was all odd jobs in those days. I liked working with characters, listening to them, their stories, the way they had to tell a story—the country was full of characters.”

Young Robbie loved hearing his mother read to him at night. He felt soothed by her voice. And his imagination was alive with the stories she read: Walter Scott’s
Tales of a Grandfather;
traditional ballads; Scottish tales. Also poetry: Ossian, Poe, Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Bryant.

Frost’s life developed an interesting rhythm: working on a farm during the day—haying, using a pitchfork, learning how to use a scythe. And studying the classics at night. He studied poetry. He read the Latin poets. He began to tinker with writing small poems, especially as a way of integrating moments of powerful feeling.

Frost himself told and retold the story of writing his first poem. The poem, later published by
The Independent
, was titled, “My Butterfly.” He was just twenty years old. “
I wrote it all in one go in the kitchen of our house on Tremont Street,” Frost said. “I locked the door and all the time I was working, Jeanie my sister tried to batter it down and get in.” And as he wrote that first poem, Frost recalls, he had a profound sense that “
something was happening. It was like cutting along a nerve.”