page one of The Story of My Heart got my attention, page two captivated me. Jefferies writes:
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.
Jefferies was in conversation with me as I was in conversation with Jung. Jung also used “soul” and “psyche” interchangeably. The psyche, I’ve learned, is the complete human mind—conscious as well as unconscious. What intrigues me most is Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious—that part of the psyche every human shares, that evolved as our cells evolved, through natural selection, consisting of “mnemonic deposits accruing from the experience of our ancestors.”
Randomly discovering a book I’d never heard of and reading a passage about psyche and soul—concepts I’d been struggling to understand—was for me a “meaningful coincidence,” Jung’s definition for synchronicity.
Synchronicity is, according to Ira Progroff, “at the frontal edge of life where evolution is occurring.”
As Terry and I read to each other that afternoon, the tide coming in, I couldn’t believe we’d never heard of this man. If the dead are still out there among us in different form, and if Jefferies wanted to send me a message, he could not have sent more obvious clues. I felt as if I’d found a kindred spirit. We are part of the same story.
This story is about living in this modern world, vastly different from the natural world we evolved to live in. It’s about the joy and peace and motivation we get from rediscovering that original world still alive in the remaining wild places. Jefferies writes less specifically about the natural world surrounding him, but in great detail the path his mind takes through that original world.
In Chapter I, Jefferies describes his pure experience, expecting the reader to make sense of his mystical euphoria. I would learn later how well-read Jefferies was despite being relatively uneducated. His confidence in relying on nothing outside of his own direct experience, something I need to learn.
Although separated in time by a century, Jefferies and Paul Shepard, one of my intellectual heroes, would have had a great conversation. Shepard suggests that we are made of an original, evolved core now covered by the veneer of civilization. Jefferies writes:
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. 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.
Later in Chapter I, Jefferies describes what happens to him lying on the grass on the side of a familiar hill, a three-mile walk from his house. While hearing Terry read this, I swear I heard Abraham Maslow describing a “peak experience.” His book, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences, consists of the information he got by asking over two thousand people to describe their “ecstasies, raptures…the most blissful and perfect moments of life.”
Years ago, when I first read this book, I realized much of what I felt in the wild made sense far beyond my own considerations. Although nothing in my upbringing could accommodate these feelings, Maslow helped ground me in a different kind of truth, in a “hierarchy of needs” and what it means to be human—to be fed and safe, to dream. Many of the moments Jefferies describes from the hillside correspond perfectly to the elements Maslow uses to describe a peak experience.
For example: Maslow discovered that a person having a peak experience perceives the entire universe as an integrated whole, where they belong, in which they play an integral part. Jefferies writes about feeling integrated into the entire universe, “losing thus my separateness of being came to seem like a part of the whole.”
Maslow suggests that people who have had a peak experience are no longer interested in organized religions, which are based on believing in the experience of someone else (Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha). Having a personal, primary, peak experience makes believing in a secondary experience difficult. This is a key element in Jefferies’ life. Jefferies knew something else was out there and wanted desperately to experience “the unutterable existence infinitely higher than deity.” By “deity” I think Jefferies is referring to the “God” he grew up with and was expected to believe in, a god too small and limited to fit into his personal experience. I know that feeling. I wonder if Abraham Maslow read anything by Richard Jefferies?
Each time I read Jefferies, I find more I relate to, more to justify the time and energy I’ve spent thinking about an obscure, nature-writing “mystic” who lived in England and died a century ago. I’m still searching for why Richard Jefferies matters, and what I’m supposed to do with that knowledge once I find it.
The Story of My Heart has been reissued many times since it was first published in 1883. New versions are published with new introductions by people who happened to believe that Jefferies had written something just for them. This volume is no exception. Classic works of literature need to be rediscovered and reinterpreted every age for their clues to contemporary issues. We are living in unique times—we’ve never been here before. Climate scientists tell us the next decade may be the most important in the history of our species. I believe The Story of My Heart has something to offer us, now.
As Terry read these passages, her back against boulders barely beyond the reach of high tide, a slight breeze swirled between us, scented with both pine and sea. We felt Jefferies’ use of personal pronouns split open as they became our own.
Sometimes I went to a deep, narrow valley in the hills, silent and solitary. The sky crossed from side to side, like a roof supported on two walls of green. Sparrows chirped in the wheat at the verge above, their calls falling like the twittering of swallows from the air. There was no other sound. The short grass was dried grey as it grew by the heat; the sun hung over the narrow vale as if it had been put there by hand. Burning, burning, the sun glowed on the sward at the foot of the slope where these thoughts burned into me. How many, many years, how many cycles of years, how many bundles of cycles of years, had the sun glowed down thus on that hollow? Since it was formed how long? Since it was worn and shaped, groove-like, in the flanks of the hills by mighty forces which had ebbed. Alone with the sun which glowed on the work when it was done, I saw back through space to the old time of tree-ferns, of the lizard flying through the air, the lizard-dragon wallowing in sea foam, the mountainous creatures, twice-elephantine, feeding on land; all the crooked sequence of life. The dragonfly which passed me traced a continuous descent from the fly marked on stone in those days. The immense time lifted me like a wave rolling under a boat; my mind seemed to raise itself as the swell of the cycles came; it felt strong with the power of the ages. With all that time and power I prayed: that I might have in my soul the intellectual part of it; the idea, the thought. Like a shuttle the mind shot to and fro the past and the present, in an instant.
Full to the brim of the wondrous past, I felt the wondrous present. For the day—the very moment I breathed, that second of time then in the valley, was as marvellous, as grand, as all that had gone before. Now, this moment was the wonder and the glory. Now, this moment was exceedingly wonderful. Now, this moment give me all the thought, all the idea, all the soul expressed in the cosmos around me. Give me still more, for the interminable universe, past and present,
