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.
