The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (14 page)

Could our friend Katherine find the same flexibility within herself? In recent months, I had seen Katherine’s paralysis begin to break up. She had started to sniff around—thinking more actively about what might be next for her. Once she started to really pay attention to her dilemma, she realized that her Plan B—teaching English literature part-time, gardening, and caring for her cats—did not really light her up at all. Much as she might try to spice it up in her own mind, Plan B felt wan, empty, and a little pathetic. It did not have the hallmarks of dharma.

Then, after almost two years of active listening and waiting—her version of Whitman’s slough of despond in New York City—Katherine got a whiff of something new, something vividly alive. She called me, excited.

Out of the blue, Katherine had been asked to be the editor of a small and now-struggling journal of nature writing. It had once aimed to be one of the premier journals of great nature writing, and aspired to feature the blossoming Thoreaus and Burroughs of the times. But the journal had fallen on hard times. Katherine had been on their board for six years. (It was one thing that had really lit her up in the previous three years.) And then, quite without warning, an opening: The forty-five-year-old editor had left the journal smack in the middle of the recession. In difficult straits as they were, the journal couldn’t pay much. But they needed Katherine’s steady and already-trusted hand at the wheel. They had no reason to think she was available. They asked anyway.

Here it was. The intersection of The Gift and The Times. This new work would use Katherine’s gifts for writing and editing. Her love of organic gardening. Her devotion to nature. Her concern about the future of the planet. And it cooked them all together into an entirely new stew that Katherine found thrilling. It was small. And it was very, very large.

6

Walt Whitman passionately adopted the garb of Soldier’s Missionary. He began to develop a routine—the essential infrastructure of any profession. He started, as he said, by “
fortifying myself with previous rest, the bath, clean clothes, a good meal, and as cheerful an appearance as possible.” Before he sallied forth, he prepared a grab bag of treats, including candy, fruit, writing supplies, tobacco, socks, cookies, underwear. He would then set forth to the hospital wards and sessions of “visiting” that might last anywhere from two hours to four or five hours. He embraced his work with everything he had. “Behold,” he had written earlier in
Leaves of Grass
(as if foreshadowing his work in the hospitals), “
I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself.”

There is no episode of Whitman’s nursing career more moving than his involvement with a young fifer named Erastus Haskell, who contracted typhoid fever while serving with the 141st New York. Whitman describes him as “
a silent dark-skinn’d Spanish-looking youth, with large very dark blue eyes …”

Doctors had pronounced Haskell’s case all but hopeless, and Whitman sat with him as much as he could during his final weeks. “
Many nights I sat by in the hospital till far in the night—The lights would be put out—yet I would sit there silently, hours, late, perhaps fanning him—he always liked to have me sit there, but never cared to talk—I shall never forget those nights, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and wounded lying around in their cots, just visible in the darkness and this dear young man close at hand lying on what proved to be his death bed—I do not know his past life, but what I do know, and what I saw of him, he was a noble boy.”

In a letter to Haskell’s parents after the young man’s death, Whitman reveals some of the deepest sources of his call:

Whitman gave his boys the gift of acknowledging the nobility of their sacrifice. He faced death with them.

7

By the fall of 1863, Whitman had begun to feel the strain of death and loss. He was increasingly distracted and emotional, and he wrote at length to his mother about his “heart-sickness.” Whitman had taken on the suffering of the times. He began to write poetry again as a way of coming to terms with this suffering. Now, his experience in the war spilled forth in a swell of words: newspaper articles, essays, poems.

Whitman would later collect his war poems into a volume entitled
Drum-Taps
. He wanted, he said, “
to express in a poem … the pending action of this
Time and Land we swim in
, with all their large conflicting fluctuations of despair and hope, the shiftings, masses, and the whirl and deafening din … the unprecedented anguish of wounded and suffering.”

Through his writing, Whitman attempts to see into the soul of the soldier. He finds their souls to be immortal.

Whitman gave no indication in his journal that he had studied the Bhagavad Gita. But in his poetry he declared over and over again the very same truth that Krishna taught to Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra: “
Our bodies are known to end, but the embodied self is enduring, indestructible, and immeasurable … 
Weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, waters do not wet it … 
it is enduring, all-pervasive, fixed, immovable, and timeless.”

Like the ancient Seer, Whitman had seen through the mask of death. He became the witness—the gray-bearded Seer—for his generation, and for the world. He was a witness to the nobility of spirit that emerged in the center of cataclysm, of massacre, of war. Walt Whitman, Soldier’s Missionary, became the Krishna of the times—seeing the madness, speaking it, grieving wildly for the loss of precious life and innocence. He took on the task—a devouring task—of understanding the meaning of the war.

By the end of the war, Whitman the poet seemed to be everywhere. He was at the front lines of the battle. He was in the hospital tents. He was there when the Grand Review happened at the end of the war—the great parade in Washington, D.C. that marched out the whole tattered lot of generals and enlisted men and wounded men and congressmen and secretaries of war. Whitman was there—Seer-like—near the platform that held all the dignitaries, and saw and described the actors—President Johnson (Lincoln had been assassinated just weeks before), the generals, the secretary of war. But he would always say that the rank and file were the ones who most drew his love, attention, and admiration.

8

Katherine’s friends were not thrilled with her anticipated reinvention of herself. They had imagined another future for her. They had assumed that she would be joining them for bridge, luncheons, and garden club. They had not imagined her going to work at a faltering magazine, meeting deadlines, carrying what seemed to them a great new burden. They pushed against it.

“It’s true,” Katherine admitted to me in a moment of doubt. “The job is not perfect.” The work, after all, was tedious at times. Crazy hours. The future of the journal was entirely unknown. God knows it would probably always be shaky financially. Why on earth would she trade in a comfortable position in the big brick buildings of the school for an ancient farmhouse whose unpainted outbuildings were crumbling? This was a job for a much younger person.

Her friends were alarmed. “It will use you up, Katherine.”

But this carping was enough to push her to the other side of her ambivalence (ambivalence, it turns out, is an unavoidable companion in the search for a new dharma): “Well, what if it does?” she countered. “What else do I have to be used up by? My cats?”

We in twenty-first-century America have strange dreams and fantasies about retirement. We imagine a life of leisure. The Golden Years. But what is this leisure in the service of?