The people behind the book.

Jared WholeHEART is a teacher, writer, and the founder of Blue Mist Mountain, a sanctuary, school, and press rooted in western North Carolina near Kituwah, ancestral Cherokee land.

He works in chaos theory, systems theory, global patterns, and human relations - four ways of studying the same thing, which is how order arises, holds, and comes apart. He holds a doctorate in human ecology and systems theory, a master’s in couples and family therapy, and a master’s in international business.

His life has run along tracks that most people keep separate. He taught psychology, business, and communication at the university level, then founded and led a national group of companies working in wellness, education, training, and publishing, and has spent years consulting for businesses across many industries. Alongside all of it, for twenty-two years, he has worked with individuals, couples, groups, and organizations in transformation, and mentored the practitioners who serve them.

The two tracks turn out to be one. Systems behave the same way whether they are companies, families, bodies, or watersheds, and the work of coherence is the same work at every scale.

He writes and teaches from the conviction that the sacred is located here, in soil, breath, gravity, and muscle, and that the recovery of our relationship with matter is the work of this era.

What Matters is his first collection of essays. A second volume, applying this ground to family, love, work, and ecology, is underway.

He loves blueberries, waterfalls, hot springs, and life.

Elisabeth Haviland James is an Emmy and Peabody Award winning documentary filmmaker and the founder of Thornapple Films. She came to What Matters as an outside editor and creative partner, helping to shape this book from early drafts to spoken word.

She believes deeply in stories that ask people to look closer at their own lives, and at the reach that one life can have, on family, on community, on the world, which is precisely what Jared’s book does.