The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling by Stephen Cope Page A

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.
    I see behind each mask that wonder a kindred soul,
    O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,
    Nor the bayonet stab what you really are;
    the Soul! Yourself I see, great as any, good as the best,
    Waiting secure and content, which the bullet could never kill,
    Nor the bayonet stab O friend.
    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?
    When we reach sixty-two, as Katherine had, we are likely to interpret feelings of exhaustion and boredom as the signal to retire. But couldn’t