Robert Frost (March 26, 1874–January 29, 1963) is perhaps one of the few poets who needs no introduction. Author of many enduring and iconic poems in American letters, he continues to enrich and ennoble our literary lives. But few of us know that behind the public persona of a celebrated poet and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, is a man whose life was laced with tragedy, entwined with loss, and twisted with grief.

His father, a newspaperman, died of tuberculosis when Frost was eleven, leaving the family destitute; his mother, whose Swedenborgian mysticism was a major influence on her son, died of cancer when Frost was twenty-six. His younger sister Jeanie had to be committed to a mental hospital in 1920, and Frost himself feared at times for his own sanity. Mental illness ran in his family. His daughter Irma was also committed to a mental hospital, and his son Carol committed suicide. Another son died of cholera at age eight, and two of his daughters also died young.

Yet despite all this pain — and more so because of all this pain — he was able to write the most memorable and life-giving poems we know today. One of them sprang to my mind after a recent loss of someone whose teachings have influenced my meditation and mindfulness practice for years. It’s titled “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and included in the collection New Hampshire. Recited here by Frost himself in his warm aged voice. Please enjoy!

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” an integral part of New Hampshire collection of poems, remains a monumental work of poetic genius. Complement with Henry David Thoreau on why he went to live in the woods, Richard Louv on the spiritual necessity of nature for the young, Deborah Underwood and Cindy Derby’s water color meditation on our inseparable link to nature.

It is true we never know the real value of something until we lose it. And it is equally true we never know how much we love someone until we lose them. When the unthinkable happens, and our hearts are aching and beating in pain, “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” will be a constant source of healing and consolation.

Written by a poet who knew loss, felt loss, and befriended loss, it encapsulates an unshakable belief in the interconnectedness of all that is. Its message of hope and renewal has helped hundreds of thousands find peace of mind.

Read the original poem below and then treat yourself to an uplifting performance of “Do Not Stand by My Grave and Weep” by One Voice Children’s Choir under the direction of Masa Fukuda and music by Robert Prizeman.

Both versions, although slightly different in tone and content, help us believe that we are never alone and our loved ones are always with us.

DO NO STAND AT MY GRAVE AND WEEP

   Do not stand
      By my grave, and weep.
   I am not there,
      I do not sleep —
I am the thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints in snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle, autumn rain.
As you awake with morning’s hush,
I am the swift, up-lifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight,
I am the day transcending night.
   Do not stand
      By my grave, and cry —
   I am not there,
      I did not die.

Now listen to the performance, one of the most touching hyms to all creation that will nurse you back to life:

Complement “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” with the art of jisei, a Japanese death poem, and then revisit spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle’s meditation on the perpetual cycles of renewal in nature.

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell,” Brian Aldiss famously wrote.

For the luckiest of us, childhood is like a field bathed in the warm rays of the sun, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The moment when things cease to astonish us, when the sun is thickly clouded over and the field seems familiar, trite, and commonplace is the moment we die inside and become adults. To be an adult yet perceive everything through the innocent eyes of a child is to practice a sacred art of resurrection, the ability to reunite with the soul of our childhood and see the world anew. This is what legendary Zen master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 – January 22, 2022) explores in one of the entries of his Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962-1966.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

Vietnam has extraordinary rainstorms. One day, I sat by the window of a friend’s home and watched a scene I could have watched forever. Across the street was a low-roofed dry goods store. Coils of rope and barbed wire, pots and pans hung from the eaves. Hundreds of items were on display — fish sauce and bean sauce, candles and peanut candy. The store was so packed and dimly lit, it was difficult to distinguish one object from another as the rainstorm darkened the street. A young boy, no more than five or six, wearing a simple pair of shorts, his skin darkened by hours of play in the sun, sat on a little stool on the front step of the store. He was eating a bowl of rice, protected by the overhang.

While rain pours off the roof making puddles in front of where the young boy sits, Thich Nhat Hanh continues to recount the mesmerizing scene:

He held his rice bowl in one hand and his chopsticks in the other, and he ate slowly, his eyes riveted on the stream of water pouring from the roof. Large drops exploded into bubbles on the surface of a puddle. Though I was across the street, I could tell that his rice was mixed with pieces of duck egg and sprinkled with fish sauce. He raised his chopsticks slowly to his mouth, savoring each small mouthful. He gazed at the rain and appeared to be utterly content, the very image of well-being. I could feel his heart beating. His lungs, stomach, liver, and all his organs were working in perfect harmony.

Astonished at the boy’s tranquility, peace, and all-embracing joy of being, Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

I looked at him as one might admire a perfect jewel, a flower, or a sunrise. Truth and paradise revealed themselves to me. I was completely absorbed by his image. He seemed to be a divine being, a young god embodying the bliss of well-being with every glance of his eyes and every bite of rice he took. He was completely free of worry or anxiety. He had no thought of being poor. He did not compare his simple black shorts to the fancy clothes of other children. He did not feel sad because he had no shoes. He did not mind that he sat on a hard stool rather than a cushioned chair. He felt no longing. He was completely at peace in the moment. Just by watching him, the same well-being flooded my body.

As the boy’s mother calls him back to refill his rice bowl, Thich Nhat Hanh concludes with a touching thought:

How can you enter paradise unless you become like a little child? You can’t see reality with eyes that discriminate or base all their understanding on concepts. As I write these lines, I long to return to the innocence of childhood.

As I read these lines, I know Thich Nhat Hanh did return, he did enter paradise, when on January 22, 2022 at the age of 95 he had transitioned out of his old and frail body to become a child that is forever free. Complement a soul-nourishing read that is Fragrant Palm Leaves, with Thich Nhat Hanh on the value of opposite forces in our lives and then revisit his teaching on how to live in the now.

The story goes that when a thief broke into a little hut at the foot of a mountain, the wise Zen master Ryokan, very much undisturbed by the intruder, welcomed him with open arms and said, “You have come a long way to visit me and you should not return empty-handed.” And then, in a compassionate and non-judgmental way, he added, “Please take my clothes as a gift.” And so he gave up the only thing he ever possessed in his life.

Two thousand and five hundred years ago, the Buddha defined the desire to possess or craving (tanha in Pali) as the Second Noble Truth of his all-embracing teaching and the source of all human folly.

Whatever relationships we may have with our personal possessions, the awareness that they are so essential to our modern way of life, so much the bone and marrow of our self, makes Ryokan’s gesture touchingly relatable; that he chose to give up the last thing he owned in so generous a way is a testament to his enlightened state of being. What is most thought-provoking about this Zen story, however, is not the gesture itself but the last thing Ryokan said after the thief had left his little hut. As he sat naked watching out the window at the night sky, he mused, “Poor fellow, I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon.”

Given how famous this Zen koan is among spiritual seekers, it is rather odd that we rarely consider it from the viewpoint of the ordinary, unenlightened, and desire-bound mind of the thief. There, a narrative-driven glimpse into what might have happened — the untold story of a minor character who heard Ryokan’s last words — can teach us the most profound lesson about the blind pursuit of something that each of us already has in the core of being.

Such an uncommon poem-turned-Zen-story-sequel is what Fannie Stearns Davis envisions in her marvelous “Moon Folly” included in the collection Myself and I. The role of the moon thief is played by a young boy by the name Samuel Chelpka who recites the poem in the TEDx video below. The video is almost ten years old and the young boy is not so young anymore, but it doesn’t take away one bit from the adorable performance we witness before our eyes. Please enjoy!

MOON FOLLY FROM THE SONGS OF CONN THE FOOL
by Fannie Stearns Davis

I will go up the mountain after the Moon:
She is caught in a dead fir-tree.
Like a great pale apple of silver and pearl,
Like a great pale apple is she.

I will leap and will catch her with quick cold hands
And carry her home in my sack.
I will set her down safe on the oaken bench
That stands at the chimney-back.

And then I will sit by the fire all night,
And sit by the fire all day.
I will gnaw at the Moon to my heart’s delight
Till I gnaw her slowly away.

And while I grow mad with the Moon’s cold taste
The World will beat at my door,
Crying “Come out!” and crying “Make haste,
And give us the Moon once more!”

But I shall not answer them ever at all.
I shall laugh, as I count and hide
The great black beautiful Seeds of the Moon
In a flower-pot deep and wide.

Then I shall lie down and go fast asleep,
Drunken with flame and aswoon.
But the seeds will sprout and the seeds will leap,
The subtle swift seeds of the Moon.

And some day, all of the World that cries
And beats at my door shall see
A thousand moon-leaves spring from thatch
On a wonderful white Moon-tree!

Then each shall have Moons to his heart’s desire:
Apples of silver and pearl;
Apples of orange and copper fire
Setting his five wits aswirl!

And then they will thank me, who mock me now,
“Wanting the Moon is he,” —
Oh, I’m off to the mountain after the Moon,
Ere she falls from the dead fir-tree!

Can you do better than this little fella? Before you undertake this Herculean task and go up on stage to recite “Moon Folly” from Myself and I, practice by beating the adult recitations of these poems: Mary Oliver’s “Percy,” Billy Collins’ “The Lanyard” and “Dharma,” Emily Dickinson’s “I Dwell in Possibility,” Pablo Neruda’s “I Like for You to Be Still,” Gregory Orr’s “This is What Was Bequeathed Us,” and Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.”