About Richard Jenkins
Nature, Reading,
Anthropology, Society
A life of teaching, writing, and building meaning across landscapes, stories, and the long memory of culture.
Richard Jenkins walks through life the way he walks through forests, river terraces, and megalithic fields — slowly, listening, letting the land speak first. He is a teacher, a writer, a reader of landscapes and people, someone who has learned to live with both the quiet ups and the difficult downs. His home in Saint‑Herblon sits close to the Loire, where water remembers older paths and the wind carries stories from far away.
He has spent decades teaching English — in universities, business schools, and professional training rooms — helping others find clarity in language. Teaching was never just instruction; it was a way of holding people steady, of giving shape to confusion. Even in the hard years, when fatigue pressed in or institutions felt indifferent, he kept showing up, kept explaining, kept guiding.
Reading has always been the other half of his breath. Books on anthropology, society, myth, geology, history, politics, and culture have shaped the way he sees the world. He reads landscapes the way he reads people: noticing what is said, what is unsaid, and what is carried silently beneath the surface. In difficult periods, reading became refuge; in brighter ones, it became fuel.
Writing followed him through all of it. He has written about sports, science, religion, geopolitics, and the fragile machinery of human life. He has been published by the BBC, contributed to The Junction, and carried poems through the years like small stones in a pocket. In the 1980s, he stood on the edges of the Medway Poets, reading his work aloud — a young voice trying to find its place among louder ones. Some days he felt seen; some days he didn’t. But he kept writing anyway.
There were downs: years when confidence thinned, years when work felt heavy, years when creativity dimmed under responsibility, years when society felt sharp and unkind, years when the world moved too fast for breath.
And yet there were ups: moments of clarity in the classroom, quiet triumphs in writing, deep joy in nature and ancient landscapes, the steady companionship of family, the spark of new ideas that refused to die.
Anthropology became a compass — a way of understanding how humans build meaning, how societies rise and fall, how rituals shape identity, how stories survive when structures collapse. He studied prehistoric mathematics, geomorphology, megalithic alignments, and the long memory of stones. Nature was never scenery; it was a teacher.
From these threads came Portus, a contemplative digital world built from myth, landscape, anthropology, and slow‑time storytelling. Richard designs its lore, its symbolism, its atmosphere — and engineers its backend, its logic, its heartbeat. Portus is not just a game; it is a place where his interests converge: culture, deep‑time, consciousness, society, landscape, and the quiet persistence of human imagination.
A continuing path
A life lived with curiosity and resilience.
Today, Richard is shaping idreamofthought.org into a home for teaching, writing, nature, anthropology, poetry, digital creation, and the long, winding story of a life lived with curiosity and resilience. His work continues to explore how stories, landscapes, and societies echo through time, and how even the hardest years become part of a larger, meaningful pattern.