When you come into the room, I think I will study how to make humanity beautiful to you.
Innermost House is a condition of mind, a dimension of the interior life of every Individual, occupying a landscape of Myth and Archetype, Ideal and Spirit. It is the still small voice and the inner light. It is our origins remembered and destination foreseen. It is the beginning and the end of everything. The purpose of the Innermost House Foundation is to restore to individual life the native home of the Soul.
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are but small matters compared
to what lies within us.”
The seed of the Innermost House idea first took root in a very personal story. For twenty years, Diana Lorence and her husband searched for something she remembered from a time before remembering, an original unity of experience in place, time, and mind. That search for recovered origins led her through more than thirty moves across North America, from the far west to the eastern shores, at last to Europe and the edge of Asia. It concluded in a 12 x 12 foot unelectrified redwood cabin they built in the solitude and silence of the woods at land’s end in California, there to consummate a marriage between the indigenous deep woods and high cosmopolitan civilization.
“The constant progress of Culture is to a more interior life,
to a deeper Home.”
Innermost House is now recognized as a living experiment in philosophical simplicity, exploring an ethic of plain living, high thinking, and fellow feeling. It demonstrates that ideals of freedom and equality, reason and faith, self-reliance and environmental stewardship, can be made harmoniously and sustainably real. Their common reality lies rooted in the foundations of experience we all share: in dawn and dusk; in earth, water, and sky; in forest and field; in growth and decay; in life and death and love and meaning. Diana’s life in the woods reminds us we may yet regain the innocence of Oneness we have lost. The sun shines on us all alike. The rain falls on us all alike. We all have an Innermost Life.
“Will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable?"
The Innermost House Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that exists to provide a place apart, in the woods or in the world, where we each alone may find a home for wholeness. We are a volunteer society of friends addressing complex perils confronting nature, culture, and the individual soul, not by treating their symptoms, but by seeking out their unseen sources. There we take our renewal.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
“Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world;
and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you:
Build, therefore, your own world.”
Visit the World We are Building in America’s Historic Triangle
Rightly viewed, the whole soul of man is a sort of picture gallery, a grand panorama, in which all the great facts of the universe, in tracing things of time and things of eternity, are painted.
Frederick Douglass
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