The Story of My Heart. Richard Jefferies
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.
THE STORY OF MY HEART
by Richard Jefferies
Responses by Brooke Williams
The story of my heart commences seventeen years ago. In the glow of youth, there were times every now and then when I felt the necessity of a strong inspiration of soul-thought. 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 inclosed in a husk. When this began to form, I felt eager to escape from it, to throw off the heavy clothing, to drink deeply once more at the fresh foundations of life. An inspiration—a long deep breath of the pure air of thought—could alone give health to the heart.
There is a hill to which I used to resort at such periods. The labour of walking three miles to it, all the while gradually ascending, seemed to clear my blood of the heaviness accumulated at home. On a warm summer day the slow continued rise required continual effort, which carried away the sense of oppression. The familiar everyday scene was soon out of sight; I came to other trees, meadows, and fields; I began to breathe a new air and to have a fresher aspiration. I restrained my soul till I reached the sward of the hill; psyche, the soul that longed to be loose. I would write psyche always instead of soul to avoid meanings which have become attached to the word soul, but it is awkward to do so. Clumsy indeed are all words, the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left. I restrained psyche, my soul, till I reached and put my foot on the grass at the beginning of the green hill itself.
Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure air, a deeper desire. The very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here. By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself. There was an intrenchment on the summit, and going down into the fosse I walked round it slowly to recover breath. On the south-western side there was a spot where the outer bank had partially slipped, leaving a gap. There the view was over a broad plain, beautiful with wheat, and inclosed by a perfect amphitheatre of green hills. Through these hills there was one narrow groove, or pass, southwards, where the white clouds seemed to close in the horizon. Woods hid the scattered hamlets and farmhouses, so that I was quite alone.
I