Quote for the Day: Frost

I'll inaugurate a new label for posts today: "Quote for the Day." Often circumstances or events bring to mind some appropriate passage or other from some work tucked away in a fold of my brain or a shelf of my office. I may as well share them.

Today's was brought to mind by a conversation yesterday with a dear friend whom I left behind with so much of my life in Colorado. He had opportunity over the holiday to spend time in the woods engaged in physical labor of the sort that being voluntary makes a sort of church. As he described it, a poem by Robert Frost came to mind. The entire poem is short enough to read in a few minutes, and well worth the time, but a short quote will suffice here to get the main point across. Frost's point and my friend's--Robert's point in Robert's words:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

From "Two Tramps in Mud Time," by Robert Frost.