The Conversation. When I am asked to name the innermost fact of my Innermost Life, my answer is always the Conversation. The seed from which Innermost House grew and the seed I took from it, the soul out from which I am born each day and the peace into which I descend each night—all is the Conversation.
Pam and Leah, you wonder what it is we talk about all day. It is an excellent and perplexing question! In many ways it is the question at the heart of everything for me. It is perplexing because, as often as I am asked it, in all these years I have never known how to answer.
Pam your especial interest is in the relation of the Conversation to silence. Leah you ask about topics. Together you give me a beginning.
I have always felt very comfortable with silence. That, I think, does not require much explanation. Silence is my native element. Somehow that appears to communicate itself even through the images of Innermost House.
The emptiness is my part of the house. From the very start, guests and readers have remarked upon the emptiness of Innermost House. And yet it must be among the most densely furnished houses anywhere, enclosing hundreds of objects in a very small space. Still, there it is—the emptiness.
Silence and Emptiness are not quite nothing. I thought they were—I thought I was—when more than thirty years ago I set off to outdistance everything. It was my husband who first heard something in my silence, something substantial in itself, something waiting to be recognized and cultivated. He heard a question waiting to be asked, and once I got started I never stopped asking.
So what I call the Conversation always begins with a question, and the question always begins with silence. It may appear to consist in questions and answers, but to me, the Conversation is ultimately between Silence and Words. Maybe silence becomes a question only in an answering presence.
I don't know how many questions I ask in a day. Dozens anyway. The questions are like so many Silences awaiting Conversation, and I experience the Conversations in a kind of ecstasy, so that afterward I can never remember the questions. I can rarely even remember the answers!
It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean I am not trying. It is only that my experience of the presence of the Words takes up all present time for me and leaves no space at all for the future—no room for memory.
Sometimes at the farm I would emerge to greet visitors in the morning in a kind of daze. They would want to hear of my Conversations from the night before, and I could never tell them. I could not remember a word. The Conversation as I know it begins and ends in silence.
But what happens? In my married Conversation, the silence is mine. From that silence arises a question. That question invites an exploration. Our explorations suggests more questions until the whole chaos and connection of meanings is explored. When all is wrought up to a tense silence of expectation, out from that silence arises a sort of soliloquy.
I cannot speak much of the soliloquizing voice. It is my husband's voice and it is not exactly my husband. It is my answer and it is not mine. All the connections are taken up one by one in a way that is not exactly poetry or history or philosophy, or music or art or geometry, but somehow all of them at once. And from it emerges at last the essence of the whole Conversation, comprehending everything, justifying everything, forgiving everything. It is a wonder.
The Conversation is the furthest possible thing from social small talk on the one hand, and from academic discourse on the other. It is fragile and sensitive as a baby. It is impossible to forget. It is impossible to remember. It is almost impossible to believe. It is some consolation to me that our worldly and educated guests cannot describe the experience the next morning any better than I can!
You see how difficult it is to say what the Conversation is “about.” It is easier to say what it is not about. It is not about political or economic or social or really about any practical “issues” at all. It is not an expression of opinions. It certainly isn't gossipy or newsy.
It is not about theological or philosophical or scientific theories. It is not a debate and it is hardly even a discussion. It is not a teaching and it is not quite a learning. It is more like a state of being. I hope that makes some sense to somebody.
It is not about theological or philosophical or scientific theories. It is not a debate and it is hardly even a discussion. It is not a teaching and it is not quite a learning. It is more like a state of being. I hope that makes some sense to somebody.
My first thought is to say that it is about everything. Not one thing after the next but all at once. Or perhaps it would be better to say it is about all things, or perhaps even about the allness of things.
It is as if every question takes it origin in being separated from the silence. And no matter what the question appears to be “about,” it is really about separateness itself. I am stretching as far as I can reach here, but I am speaking from such long experience, and I trust in you to take it up where you are.
The question is really about separateness itself. That is where it all begins for me. That is what I cannot understand. That is what I cannot accept. The separateness.
And so the answer that emerges as the Conversation is almost never an answer to what the question appears to be about. It is only unity that can answer separateness. It is as though the only real answer to every particular question—and I have asked them all—is universality. The connectedness of all things. Unity. That is the Conversation.
I can say something at least about the nature of the questions. In our married Conversation they mostly begin with me. In company they always begin with our guests. They are the kind of questions I ask all the time because I can't help it. But for most people, they are the kind of questions asked only in darkness. They are midnight questions—no matter what time of the day or night they are asked.
My marriage is a Conversation. For more than twenty years before the house came to be, we shared the Conversation between ourselves alone. Now again it is ours alone. For our seven years at Innermost House, the Conversation was transformed. By some miracle of unsought influence, the house we built to enclose our solitary Conversation made it possible for others to enter in to its spirit. It was so small. It was so hidden. It was so insignificant that somehow visitors were able to leave themselves behind on entering it.
I cannot help being what I am. Perhaps being what I am is a misfortune. But for others it is often very, very difficult to accept being less enough in themselves to let the Conversation happen.
Somehow it did happen around the fire at Innermost House. Perhaps it was the silence. Perhaps it was the strangeness. I cannot explain it.