The Story of my Heart – By Richard Jefferies – a delightful book about a mystic’s struggle in the days of the 1880s to explain his spirituality, closeness to the universe and pierce through the chimera of religion and science.

This is an extraordinarily beautiful piece of writing. Richard was a free thinking man who thought deeply about the universe around him and desperately wanted to break free of the shackles of pre-existing thought that he believed prevented us from understanding life, the universe and everything. He saw the medieval religious thoughts as fettering the mind and science as failing to capture the spirit. He believed that a man could lie amid nature and allow his mind and ‘soul’ to experience the celestial magnificence and understand the universe as a mystical force beyond mere religion and god

He believed the lives we were living with its work and distraction was empty folly.

He experienced mystical connections to the world around him, the meadows, trees, rocks and sea and felt the energy of the sun and stars trill through him. He believed all religious concepts of deities and afterlives were fanciful and had no basis. He preferred to keep all possibility. He saw science as mechanical and reductionary and the awesome glory of the universe an infinite hum of mystical energy beyond anything a mere deity could understand.

Richard believed that beyond all of our circle of knowledge were layers of deeper understanding and we should strive to break free of our concepts and reach out to the greater truths.

He revelled in his connections with nature and felt its glow fill him with ecstasy.

The book is small but almost like a poem to the wonders of nature, life, the universe and the energy that flows through and connects us all through all time to infinity.

While I did not fully agree with all Richard suggested I was transfixed by the vision he portrayed and empathised with the feelings he was describing. I too have lain in the long grass and flowers of a meadow surrounded with the chirp and rustle of insects, the song of birds and the hazy hum of an English summer day, looked up at the blue sky, felt the warmth of the sun bathe me and fallen into the infinity beyond.

No one has described the majesty of that connection and exultation as well as Richard.

He did not live to be forty years old but this book is testament to a life well used.