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THE BOOK

The story of my heart is complicated. I suspect this is true for all of us. So when I found a small brown book with this title embossed in gold, I immediately picked it up and began reading the first page.

My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge. It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances. A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees the mind is enclosed in a husk.

Who was this author and when was it published? I flipped back to the title page: Richard Jefferies, 1883. England. I had never heard of him. I continued reading:

With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean—in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written—with these I prayed, as if they were the keys of an instrument…I swelled forth the notes of my soul, redoubling my own voice by their power…

Here was a writer akin to Whitman, to Emerson, to Margaret Fuller and Thoreau. I recognized my own hunger in his desire to describe the ineffable. I also recognized how words fail us when trying to write about nature and in Jefferies’ words, “the soul-life” that he was so desperate to convey.

My eyes have no fidelity on the page. They wander at will. If bored, they stop, but as I continued reading sentence after sentence, Touching the crumble of earth, the blade of grass…thinking of the sea… I was rapt, my eyes in sympathy with each florid page. Jefferies had my attention. Word after word, I kept following him while standing in a musty, used bookshop in Stonington, Maine.

Brooke was restless, ready to go, and found me in the corner with Richard Jefferies.

I showed him the book. Read him some passages. He listened and as he listened, calmed down.

“Who is this writer?” he asked. I shook my head. Brooke took the book in hand and opened the cover. “It’s seventy-five bucks,” he said. “We should find out more about him before we buy it.”

And then, we left.

I kept thinking about that small, thin book. What would propel an Englishman in the nineteenth century to write such a personal account about his soul intertwined with nature and with such longing?

Had Richard Jefferies been influenced by the Transcendentalists? Or was he more closely aligned with the British romanticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge? Or was he more philosopher or naturalist in the lineage of the great ornithologist Gilbert White? I felt like I had just located a lost relative through the genealogy of a genre, a genre that remains undefined and undervalued. Critics continue to be embarrassed by a passion for nature and a call for reflection, especially if it has to do with the body and the body politic.

Brooke and I were walking along a beach of Deer Isle, each of us content in our own thoughts. It was Labor Day weekend in Maine and unexpectedly, we had this particular beach to ourselves.

The next weekend was my birthday. We returned to the bookstore and there in the corner The Story of My Heart remained. This time, we noticed a handwritten sign, “All prices are negotiable.” Brooke asked the elderly woman hidden behind piles of books on a wooden stool, pleasant enough, if this book, in particular, might be purchased for less than the penciled price marked inside.

“Did you get it over there?” she asked, pointing to the cabinet in the corner. Neither one of us had appreciated the elaborately carved bookcase made of black walnut.

“Everything in that cabinet is sixty-six percent off,” she said.

Brooke pulled out his wallet and paid her $25.50.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

THE READING OF THE BOOK

In a long marriage such as ours, Brooke and I often wonder about the balance between what we imagine to be true and what is actually the truth. The story that Brooke and I tell ourselves about first reading The Story of My Heart is this:

After we purchased the book, we read it to each other on the rocky shore of Goose Cove on Deer Isle. It’s a favorite place of ours, a Nature Conservancy site enjoyed by many.

It was low tide, the sandy stretch of beach that links two islands was open. We found a flat ledge of pink granite and laid down together, my head on Brooke’s chest, as he read the first three chapters from beginning to end until high tide reached us and we were forced to leave.

The swish of the surf, the small oscillations of the sea acted as punctuation marks to the cries of gulls carried by the breeze. Sometimes, while Brooke was reading, I would focus on the rolling horizon, watching sailboats pass or the occasional lobsterman pulling in traps from a sea of buoys that cover the blue waters like confetti. My mind would drift and then, a beautiful or evocative sentence would call me back because of its unexpected exuberance. Or a fly would create a disturbance. Or Brooke would stumble over an odd construction of Jefferies’, slow down, and reread it.

Sometimes, we would stop mid-page to talk about a particular phrase and analyze it, either because we had felt that way, too, or we found it overwrought and overwritten, an homage to self-pity. And then, there were the moments when we sat upright and read the passage again, marveling over the power and poignancy of Richard Jefferies’ perception.

This is how I remember the romance of that day when we first read The Story of My Heart out loud, outside, together.

Here is the truth of that day as recorded in my journal:

Today, Brooke and I spent a sublime day at Goose Cove, one of our favorite trails through the hushed forest. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot on the lush spongy moss, one of the great delights of my life literally bouncing on the floor of the forest deep and rich and vibrant green dotted with white luminous mushroom. To a desert dweller, this much green, this much water is a fantasy.

Once at the beach, we found a great perch on the pink granite rocks. So in awe of the clarity of the day, the iconic beauty of the islands, pink geometric blocks floating above the blue sea, where the middle landscape of islands populated by green spruce and firs—dense against cobalt sea and sky with wisps of clouds—point upward—my heaven.

Brooke pulled out The Story of My Heart from his pack as we lay on the rocks, my head on his chest facing the horizon. He began reading Richard Jefferies out loud as the sea whispered in the background with gulls.

Eloquent, florid, effusive prose. No, make that ecstatic prose. Jefferies speaks to both of our wild hearts. He speaks of “soul-thoughts,” how the external wonder of the world ignites his inner world and you have the sense that while his outer body is very still, his inner life is on fire.

I loved the passage of him being tied to the molten core of the Earth, yet able to feel the reach of the stars. He desires his self to be this expansive, his intellect wide and in communion with the beauty that surrounds him. He wishes to write a “new book of the soul…a book drawn from the present and future, not the past. Instead of a set of ideas based on tradition, let me give the mind a new thought drawn straight from the wondrous present, direct this very hour.”

We also loved what he had to say about idleness and leisure, the import of dreaming by the sea which was exactly what we were doing: Brooke sitting against the pink wall of granite; me, flat on my back, eyes closed, arms outstretched like a cross; sun beating down, no one around but the gulls and the loons and an albino guillemot playing in the surf at low tide, visible in the light only through a different kind of motion.

Rachel Carson is reported to have had two books by her bed stand at all times: Walden and The Story of My Heart. Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House, was also a fan of Richard Jefferies. Both of these “nature writers” lived in Maine. They were friends. I wonder how and when The Story of My Heart came into their lives, and with whom did they read these electric pages, and where?

THE MAN BEHIND THE BOOK

Our interest in Richard Jefferies grew. He was born in Swindon, England, in 1848.

His family farmed. He was a free spirit and ran away from home when he was fourteen years old. When he finally returned from his adventures at sea and in Paris, he spent the rest of his life roaming close to his farm in Coates.

Jefferies wrote. He wrote voraciously, prodigiously. Putting pen to paper for Jefferies was like breathing and every bit as necessary. We learned he had written more than five hundred essays, nineteen books (including nine novels), and five more books published posthumously. He died of tuberculosis in 1887. He was survived by his wife of thirteen years, Jessie Baden.

The British literary scholar H.S. Salt wrote shortly after his death, “There are few figures more pathetic or more heroic in the annals of our literature than that of this solitary, unfortunate brave-hearted man, who with ‘three great giants’ as he recorded in his journal, ‘disease, despair, and poverty’ could yet nourish to the last an indomitable confidence in the happiness of the future race.” The Guardian recently called Jefferies, “arguably the founding father of British environmentalism,” reporting on the irony of development threats near his family farm in Coate, England, where he would “ramble, wait, and watch.”

In the winter of 2013, Brooke and I visited the Jefferies farm near the Coate Reservoir, bordered by woods animated by rooks and robins, blue-bridled tits, and squirrels, not far from the town of Swindon. The old farmhouse, now a museum, is only open once a week and less in the winter, but as luck would have it, the day we were there the six members of the Richard Jefferies Society were conducting their annual meeting and they welcomed us inside with tea and biscuits.

We wandered through the museum noting the various busts and portraits of Jefferies. His eyes in all mediums were intense and haunting. There were cases of artifacts from Ice Age spear points to hammer stones. Locks of hair, letters, a pocket watch were also on display. Natural history dioramas were plentiful from an era long gone. I was especially drawn to the snowy egrets with their gold painted feet. And up the staircase were the paintings of Kate Tryon, an artist from Naples, Maine, born in 1864, whose obsession with Richard Jefferies in the early 1900s was not unlike our own. She visited the Coate landscape with a desire to paint the places that had inspired Jefferies, pastoral settings where his poetic prose were written. A pleinair painter fell in love with a pleinair writer.

But the place of power in the museum where the spirit of Richard Jefferies spoke to us was on the third floor in the attic where the curators had reconstructed his childhood bedroom. It wasn’t the mannequin of Richard as a boy (black-knickered, white-shirted, and suspendered) lying on his brass bed reading a book with his chin resting on his hand that moved us. Nor was it the rabid-looking red fox, badly mounted, with a snide grin perched on the wooden chest. What moved us was his writing desk, a simple drop-leaf piece of furniture made from pine with thin tapered legs situated in front of the window framed by blue curtains. A small chair with a wicker seat was tucked inside. The window was open. The curtains billowed. There was a vitality here I felt nowhere else.

“To be beautiful and to be calm without mental fear is the ideal of Nature,” Richard Jefferies wrote. “If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.”

Back home, we continued to reread The Story of My Heart. We became obsessed with bringing this book back into print so another generation could encounter his ideas. Ideas like the importance of being idle:

I hope succeeding generations will be able to be idle. I hope that nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time; that they may enjoy their days, and the earth, and the beauty of this beautiful world; that they may rest by the sea and dream; that they may dance and sing, and eat and drink. I will work towards that end with all my heart. If employment they must have—and the restlessness of the mind will require it… They shall not work for bread, but for their souls.

Ideas like humility and the value of Earth’s indifference:

There is nothing human in nature. The earth, though loved so dearly, would let me perish on the ground, and neither bring forth food nor water.

Ideas relevant to the discussion of a sustainable life:

I verily believe that the earth in one year produces enough food to last for thirty. Why then, have we not enough?

When Richard Jefferies says, “The circle of ideas we possess is too limited to aid us. We need ideas as far outside our circle as are outside those that were pondered by Augustus Caesar,” I believe him.

But my growing kinship with Richard Jefferies as a fellow writer of natural history and memoir paled next to my husband’s relationship with him. Day and night, Brooke was reading Jefferies. Night and day, he was quoting him. A river runs itself clear in the night. In other words, goodnight. And this: Let me be fleshly perfect. Translation: I need to go exercise. It got to the point that before leaving home, whether we were going to dinner with friends or to any public gathering, be it a party or a political hearing, Brooke had to promise me he would not bring up Richard Jefferies. Promise after promise was broken. No matter the occasion, Brooke managed to insert Jefferies into the conversation. I began to believe that Brooke and Jefferies were a ventriloquist team. I could no longer tell where Brooke’s voice ended and Jefferies’ voice began.

In the end, I gave up. I simply set a place for Jefferies at the table and let the two of them talk endlessly over breakfast, lunch, and dinner without Brooke ever moving his mouth. It was the look in his eyes. He was a thousand miles away.

But isn’t that how marriages go, we survive one another’s obsessions be it a person, place, or thing. Marriage is the accommodation of nouns. Brooke has survived my love affairs with Hieronymus Bosch, Philip II, and prairie dogs. He has traveled with me to Rwanda and returned home with a son. He has endured the re-enactment of the battle at Gettysburg and attended a Civil War ball. And early on in our marriage, he didn’t say a word when I told him I would be gone for several months studying ophiuroids in the Gulf of California, nor did he balk at our growing library focused on death and dying.

Likewise, I have learned to live with his passions: backcountry skiing, wet wool, two dogs, and dragonflies. Because of Brooke’s obsession with dragonflies, I now know how to distinguish meadowhawks from darners, darners from skimmers, and skimmers from sand dragons. And the absolute certainty that whenever we find ourselves in a landscape of stray rocks (often), Brooke will turn them into standing stones; sculptures perfectly poised on the edge of a river or lake or ocean regardless of the occasion, including wakes and weddings.

I knew the how of Brooke’s obsession with Jefferies; I had been part of it. What I didn’t know was the why.

Last fall, we returned to Maine as we do each year. Richard Jefferies traveled with us. And once again, we read The Story of My Heart out loud outside. But something had changed. This time, when Brooke read the words of Richard Jefferies he was no longer reading them with a sense of curiosity and astonishment, he was reading them alive. He was reading them passionately, lyrically, and when called for, emphatically. I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek—my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever had has satisfied my soul. He exhorted the ocean to answer Jefferies’ questions: Why then, do we not have enough? When a gull landed near us on the granite slabs of Schoodic Point, Brooke faced the gull and read, Let me be in myself myself fully. Will you believe me when I say the Herring gull nodded? With all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plane; give me a soul beyond these…The sea thinks for me as I listen and ponder; the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer.

Brooke was no longer reading the words of Richard Jefferies. He embodied them.

Give me bodily life equal in fullness to the strength of earth, and sun, and sea; give me the soul-life of my desire. Once more I went down to the sea, touched it and said, farewell. So deep was the inhalation of this life that day, that it seemed to remain in me for years. This was a real pilgrimage.

This was our pilgrimage.

This was the grist of our marriage—to explore, to experiment, to experience life.

This is why I remain in love with Brooke. My clear, meandering Brooke.

He was face to face with the earth, with the sun, the night; face to face with himself. There was nothing between. No wall of written tradition. No built-up system of culture—his naked mind was confronted with naked earth.

My Maine journal reads:

Brooke lies naked on rock. Sunlight squinting. Blue water. Ocher rockweed. Tide rising. Perfect day.

The world says no to this kind of living every day. We are told it is self-indulgent, naïve, a waste of time, and especially heartbreaking to me, “silly.” We are told this kind of life belongs to the privileged. But Richard Jefferies was anything but privileged. He was a poor ecstatic eccentric who could barely put food on his table, yet he was full. Every day of his young life, he was full—full of wonder, full of questions, full of empathy and concern for the state of the world he believed was intrinsically tied to the state of his soul. He cared about the working man, the laborer, the yeoman, the woman making bread, and the child who would eat it. And he wrote voraciously about the virtues of country living. When Richard Jefferies wrote, It is sweet on awaking in the early morn to listen to the small bird singing in the tree, he acknowledged this spring rite belongs to everyone. This is what we have forgotten. Earth gives of itself freely and asks nothing of us in return—save the return of our bodies, dust to dust.

But we have become so insular, so busy, and obsessed with a capitalistic work ethic to fuel our mindless consumption, we forego the blessing of birdsong. In the process of becoming civilized, we have become inhuman.

We believe we are exceptional. Richard Jefferies tells us, Genius is nature.

THE BODY

The Story of My Heart is a spiritual autobiography written by a man who lived to be thirty-eight years old, plagued with illness. He was familiar with suffering. No doubt the “dark night of the soul” that Joseph Campbell addresses in The Hero With A Thousand Faces was familiar terrain for Richard Jefferies.

The wheat is beautiful, but the human life is labour.

Both Brooke and I met Jefferies after crossing the thresholds of our own night sea journeys. Brooke lives with chronic heart disease. I have a yearly brain scan for a cavernous hemangioma. Neither ailment nor predicament has limited our lives, but it has highlighted how we wish to live, choosing to be present with the time at hand, rather than plummeting into fear about the time we may lose. No one is guaranteed a future. One approaches sixty with an awareness that time is finite as far as our bodies are concerned. Perhaps this acceptance of death is what fuels the urgency one feels when reading Richard Jefferies. It also may be what allows a reader to suffer through his struggles on the page.

“My strength is not enough to fulfill my desire,” he writes.

If I had the strength of the ocean, and of the earth, the burning vigour of the sun implanted in my limbs…never have I had enough of it. I wearied long before I was satisfied…the thirst was still there.

Richard Jefferies was a man who suffered physical limitations. He was not a man who suffered limitations of the spirit. He became a harsh critic with little patience for the dull of heart, the robotic, the listless mind who falls asleep through apathy.

The complacency with which the mass of people go about their daily task, absolutely indifferent to all other considerations, is appalling in its concentrated stolidity. They do not intend wrong—they intend rightly: in truth, they work against the entire human race…If the whole of the dead in a hillside cemetery were called up alive from their tombs, and walked forth down into the valley, it would not rouse the mass of people…

Richard Jefferies was a champion of rigorous inquiry, a lover of beauty, and an advocate for natural and social justice. He was an advocate for the poor, a friend of farmers’ rights in the rise of Britain’s urbanization. “Never, never rest contended,” he said.

And through his writings, it becomes clear, he never did.

Jefferies’ belief in physical exertion gave him the psychic energy necessary to live a more examined life. He pushed himself every day. Walking was at the crux of his healing. Every day, he walked the same worn path in the woods around his home and found something new, day by day, season by season. He delighted in the reliability of what he saw by covering the same territory year by year. “How nothing changes,” yet “everything changes.” Little escaped his attention. “A fullness of physical life causes a deeper desire of soul-life,” he said.

I believe it to be a sacred duty, incumbent on every one, man and woman, to add to and encourage their physical life, by exercise and in every manner…Each one of us should do some little part for the physical good of the race—health, strength, vigour.

Being married to a man whose physical life is intrinsically tied to his spiritual life, I understand Jefferies’ obsession with “the exaltation of the body, mind, and soul.” I have watched Brooke and my own obsessions of the body change over time. I don’t remember the exact day Brooke quit skiing “the steep and deep” of the Wasatch Mountains, but I do remember how the letting go of snow was met by the companionship of a dog named Rio. The physical exertion of winter was not so much replaced by a Basenji, more wild than domestic, but explored through their daily walks, call them saunterings, in the redrock desert that seduced them farther into the canyons.

My own physical relationship to the land has largely been following Brooke. He was so strong, so focused, so driven, that I often lagged behind—I was distracted by birds, by plants, by tracks. But an unexpected gift emerged. I had the illusion I was walking in the woods or the desert or the beach alone. My life has been a protected solitude.

THE BODY OF THE WHITE HORSE

If Richard Jefferies is known by some as “a nature mystic,” he comes by it through proximity. Avebury’s circles of standing stones is not far from his family farm. The healing waters of Bath are near. And the white chalk horses of Oxfordshire are marked on the hills of the countryside of his home ground. The Uffington Horse, in particular, inspired him.

This sculptured White Horse is of a gigantic size and is represented at full gallop. It may be seen fourteen or fifteen miles off, it being formed by cutting away the turf down to the white chalk… Immediately beneath the figure of the horse is a conical mound, or barrow, known as the Dragon’s mound; from a tradition that here St. George slew the dragon, whose blood was of so poisonous a nature that nothing has since grown upon its summit, which is bare, exposing the chalk.

Brooke and I visited the Uffington Horse. We had seen photographic images of the stylized animal linked to the Bronze Age (1000 – 700 BC), but nothing could have prepared us for what we encountered.

The day was overcast and gray, threatening rain. We kept walking upward across the dry grasses of the steep, yet undulating slope of White Horse Hill, looking over our shoulders frequently at the dramatic valley below. It is a rippled landscape, part of the Ridgeway Escarpment. Legend has it that inside the furrows left by the Ice Age is where the White Horse feeds at night.

We kept walking with the belief that at some point, we would be able to see the White Horse in its entirety, “at full gallop” across the hill, as Jefferies describes.

But this was our surprise: It cannot be seen all at once, only as a white line stretching across the hill for over one hundred meters like a river of light.

To see the White Horse of Uffington, you must walk it into being. You see the horse with your feet.

Brooke walked ahead, down the horse’s back, all the way to its tail, until he dropped out of sight, to find the flanks and legs. I stood close to the White Horse’s eye, never on it so not to obscure its vision. It was a solid chalked circle, white, framed by bold rectangular lines that defined its face. With fog now swirling around me, two lines like an inverted “V” emerged from the face like breath.

I found the White Horse’s ears and walked them from tip to tip, descending and ascending through a white chalked “U.” I whispered my questions to the White Horse trusting she could hear: Whose hands etched you into being to celebrate you in white? Were you carved on a small stone first, imagined in a dream? Who believed in you? And where do you run now when the dreams have disappeared? And then, I sauntered down her neck, across her back until I joined Brooke at the white-lined underbelly of the equine image and together we could see the gate of her long, elegant legs stretching across the tawny hillside in winter.

The deep trenches dug into the hillside, then filled with crushed native chalk, were cared for and regularly cleaned—by hand. Locals told us that until the nineteenth century, the White Chalk Horse of Uffington was scoured every seven years through a ritualistic fair held on the hillside so the horse could remain visible. This vigilance to keep the White Horse alive continues. Without this kind of care, the Uffington Horse would be obscured.

I think about the care of a marriage, what surfaces in love to be shared and cherished; and what remains hidden, personal and private, from abuse or neglect or survival.

“Remain. Be content. Go round and round and round in one barren path,” writes Richard Jefferies.

Patterns emerge through relationships—horse or human. The art of the Uffington Horse is the art of marriage: mind married to imagination; a vision married to a practice; the engagement and execution of belief made whole for the eyes to behold and the heart to ponder.

For the rest of the afternoon in brisk weather, Brooke and I walked the outline of the Uffington Horse. The White Horse made of chalk is the outline of a marriage: when you are inside it, you can’t see the beauty of the overall design. It is only from an aerial perspective that you can see its alchemical power.

The White Horse gallops.

THE HEART

The story of my heart is the story of trusting it. Finding that small gold-embossed book in a dusty corner in a bookshop in Maine has become part of this story, the ongoing story of my marriage to Brooke Spencer Williams, son of Rosemary Brandley and Rex Winder Williams, Jr., son of Rex Winder Williams, Sr. and Helen Spencer, daughter of John Daniel Spencer who was married to a woman called Clicky, who was the daughter of Brigham Young. Ours is a genealogy of a people in a place rooted by a spiritual calling.

“Go higher than a god, deeper than prayer, and open a new day,” writes Richard Jefferies. We left the calling of our people and found our calling in place. The words of Richard Jefferies appeared as a cairn standing in the desert. We followed him along an unexpected path of rocky coastlines and white horses chalked into the English countryside and back home again to a renewed marriage of two minds embodied in wonder and that has made all the difference.

In discovering Richard Jefferies for ourselves, we discovered a fellow traveler of the wild, the beautiful, and the gentile. We found a soul mate in our search for a soul-life. In this new edition of The Story of My Heart, Brooke follows each of Jefferies’ chapters with his own commentary, sometimes in agreement with the writer and sometimes not—consider it part of our ongoing conversation. We hope this book will matter to a new generation of Jeffries readers, if for no other reason than to rediscover what it feels like to fall back in love with the world.

Recently, I read Alan Lightman’s opinion piece in The New York Times, “Our Lonely Home in Nature.” He writes, “Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those are human constructions. Such utter and complete mind-lessness is hard for us to accept. We feel such a strong connection in nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity…Nature can survive far more than what we can do to it and is totally oblivious to whether homo sapiens live or die in the next hundred years. Our concern should be about protecting ourselves—because we have only ourselves to protect.”

What strikes me about Alan Lightman’s declaration is its arrogance. Are we really the only species that deserves our care? By “protecting ourselves only,” we don’t have to feel, much less see, the unprecedented harm we are rendering to the planet. We proclaim our narcissistic nature void of empathy.

I choose to see Earth as a self-sustaining, self-correcting organism that responds to life, interconnected and interrelated. We are part of this mosaic of life. I do believe in the sentience of other species and I believe in the reciprocity of our relations beyond our own kind. I have experienced it repeatedly, whether it is a Galapagos fur seal blowing bubbles in front of me as we are swimming underwater and I blow bubbles back to him in a gesture of play—or when I call forth chickadees on a summer morning and find myself surrounded by birdsong. As the religious scholar Mary Evelyn Tucker says, “We belong here.”

If we follow the logic of Lightman as I understand it, by abandoning the notion of reciprocity and acting as though “we have only ourselves to protect” we are agreeing to live selfishly, mindlessly, greedily at a terrible cost to the rest of our fellow inhabitants of the Earth Community. We adopt a solipsistic existence over a compassionate one.

Can’t we acknowledge the glorious indifference of the natural world, and still engage in a recipriocal relationship with other beings? Part of being human is our capacity to hold seemingly opposing views in our mind at once. The Earth is wise with paradox.

Nature was not purposeless for Richard Jefferies, nor was his relationship with the Earth one-sided. It was reciprocal and alive and at the same time, he respected the Earth’s sovereignty. “Nothing is consistent that is human,” wrote Richard Jefferies.

If we are to survive as a species, we must also exercise a commitment toward the survival of other species, as well. Empathy becomes our story.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asks. “The mystery and the possibilities are not in the roots of the grass, nor is the depth of things in the sea; they are in my existence, in my soul.” Jefferies goes on to say, “For want of words, I write soul, but I think it is beyond soul.”

Could it be that the mind of the Earth is the cosmic mind as we witness the stellar eyes of galaxies burning down from the heavens? Our bodies and the bodies of stars are made from elemental fire. Each of us is married to the ongoing spiral of life. We live and we die and continue through the blades of grass that cover our graves.

Here a beautiful star shines clearly; here a constellation is hidden by a branch; a universe by a leaf.

The Story of My Heart written by Richard Jefferies reads like a prayer. By prayer I do not mean a request for anything preferred to a deity; I mean intense soul-emotion, intense aspiration. Isn’t this what we house in our hearts, the emotions of our aspirations rising and falling like a flickering flame? I have never recognized my heart as a prayer chamber, until now.

Richard Jefferies felt the word deeply and dared to confront the Mysteries. He was relentless in his quest to name the ineffable. He was a lover of beauty. This is what we forget. Beauty is what opens our eyes to love. Love ignites passion and passion is what propels us toward the future wrought with risk and uncertainty. He was a man who lived with his eyes wide open.

“I lived in looking,” Richard Jefferies said.

May we not avert our gaze.