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
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