There is no great and no small / To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are; / And it cometh everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History"
Dear friends,
It is the first day of November and fifty-eight days to the end of the year. Autumn is arrived to Tidewater Virginia. The smell of wood smoke on the morning air, the low light and lengthening shadows, all stir the memory with what the Japanese call "the beautiful passingness of things."
Innermost House is a project of remembering, of re-collecting the pieces of a broken world into wholeness again. We seek to repair a lost oneness of earth and heaven in the reclaimed unity of the individual soul. Our native homeplace is the solitude of the woods. Our given work is the harvest of history. Our holiday season is one of thanksgiving.
Last week was our autumn board meeting. Our board is composed of chief executives who put brevity and to-the-pointness at a premium. Therefore our business meetings and reports never require more than two hours, and seldom that much. After that, the informal exploration of substantial subjects goes on for days, all in pursuit of "a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual." It never ends.
This past week we formally introduced our two new initiatives, the Virginia House Project and the American Wisdom Project. We explored the character of the work before us and the various audiences to which it is addressed. In order to understand those projects, it is necessary to view them in relation to our central focus on the solitary individual.
The foundations of human craft lie in the materials and forms of the natural landscape. Our work in the sphere of Nature is the restoration of health to our lands and waters by reanimating their origins in the Mythic Landscape. Our work in the sphere of Craft is the renewal of the handmade world by seeking out its Archetypal Forms as the "Innermost House." Our Virginia House Project seeks to shape one living whole of Nature and Craft together as the foundation of an individual Wisdom of Experience. We want to make the material world whole again to the individual.
As lately as the European Renaissance and the American Founding, the classical liberal arts were conceived as a path to revelation. Our work in the sphere of Thought is the restoration of wholeness to our conception of the educated individual. Our work in the sphere of Spirit is the restoration of a sense of holiness to the common events of our daily lives. Our American Wisdom Project seeks to form one living whole of Thought and Spirit in the form of a Wisdom of Knowledge. We want to make the world of thought holy again to the individual.
These renewed wholenesses--of experience and knowledge, earth and heaven, body and mind--form the right and left hemispheres of a restored individuality. Certainly our projects are absurdly modest beginnings against a mass culture of fragmentation, hapless and hopeless at once. But that work of restoration is our mission, nevertheless.
Perhaps it is a mission that can only be accomplished on a scale so modest as to admit of individual possibility. I never feel our individual solitudes so intensely as when we are in meeting together. Nor could I ever wish that we should be less solitary in the least. We are a society of solitudes gathered together the better to be alone and whole.
I am grateful to the sky that I have lived long enough to remember, to love the passingness of things. "All things fall and are built again," as the poet said. And the preserving of things and the restoring of things and the thanksgiving for things are all the work of remembering.
Yours with pleasure,
Michael
The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.
IMAGES
Salmon2: Foggy Morning, Adobe Stock 112710031
Den Belitsky: Autumn Forest Ancient Tree, Adobe Stock 125285680
AHEflin: Blue Ridge Mountains, Sunset from Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina, Adobe Stock 130951012
QUOTATIONS
”There is no great and no small. . .” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History”
”All things fall and are built again. . .” William Butler Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli”