My life has always been a mystery to me. I am accustomed to the world in which I find myself again, but somehow it continues to take me completely by surprise.
Your words took me by surprise today. I confess, sometime I am a little mystified by all this learnedness! I have read and reread your comments, and even followed Dewey's link to the book about mysticism. The title intrigues me—Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People.
If there were ever to be a book about Innermost House, I would like it to introduce people to how practical mystery can be when walled around with a little house for normal people.
Everything about Innermost House is made to be practical, though it may not appear so from the outside. We built and furnished it out of so many years of trial and error that it was bound to be practical at last. And you would be amazed at how practical it can make you to live in the woods in the winter cold in an unelectrified twelve-foot square house!
For simple practicality I can think of almost nothing I would change in the next Innermost House. Perhaps I would build a little bath house beside it with wood-fired hot water. I don't think I would add anything else. I wouldn't remove anything. I wouldn't make the house any larger.
Even the beauty of the house—for it is beautiful to me—is practical in an everyday way. In many ways that is the most practical element of all. Perhaps nothing changed my life so much in our move to Innermost House as being surrounded all day and night by what I find beautiful.
Still, for all our experience in preparing for it, we didn't know it was Innermost House we were preparing for. So when it finally did take shape it took us by surprise. The surprise deepened over time into mystery.
Perhaps the greatest mystery is how Innermost House grew out of the seed of the Conversation. I still feel that strongly, but I cannot explain it. I cannot perhaps because the Conversation is too near within me, and the house too near around me. That relation remains as strange and indescribable as a dream.
I love dictionaries and encyclopaedias. They are so solid and useful. We had reference books of all kinds at Innermost House, and I was forever looking things up. Our books are in storage now, but I looked up the word mystery on the internet.
- mystery (1)
- early 14c., in a theological sense, "religious truth via divine revelation, hidden spiritual significance, mystical truth,"from Anglo-Fr. *misterie, O.Fr. mistere "secret, mystery, hidden meaning" (Mod.Fr. mystère), from L. mysterium "secret rite, secret worship;
- I do not think of the mystery of Innermost House in a theological sense, though perhaps some of our more learned guests did. It was certainly secret in the sense of being hidden. But it did not conceal any secret rites or worship. All it concealed were two chairs, a fire, some books, some food and drink, a man and a woman and their married conversation.
- a secret thing," from Gk. mysterion (usually in pl. mysteria) "secret rite or doctrine," from mystes "one who has been initiated," from myein "to close, shut" (see mute (adj.)); perhaps referring to the lips (in secrecy) or to the eyes (only initiates were allowed to see the sacred rites).
- To close the eyes. To close the lips. Yes. Darkness and silence are inseparable from the experience of life in the woods, and at Innermost House that woodland presence is intensified. But our guests are not held to any kind of secrecy. There isn't anything about the Conversation they can remember to repeat anyway!
- I sometimes think that the uniqueness of Innermost House is distracting. We searched over half the world looking for it, so I know it is an exception to the prevailing way of life. Still, what I found at last in the woods was only the normal-ness I went looking for, a way of life that feels simply and wholly normal to me.
- normal (adj.)
- c.1500, "typical, common;" 1640s, "standing at a right angle," from L.L. normalis "in conformity with rule, normal," from L. normalis "made according to a carpenter's square," from norma "rule, pattern," lit. "carpenter's square" (see norm). Meaning "conforming to common standards, usual" is from 1828, but probably older than the record.
- That definition satisfies me. Innermost House shares a common nature with other houses where individuals have sought an inward life. Rooms and houses of its essential confirmation are found east and west, from ancient and medieval to renaissance and near-modern times.
- It is so true to its type that those who are meant for it seem to fall into the most perfect familiarity with its size and shape in the course of their first visit. It gathers all things into a living order; it is reasonable and square in a proper carpenter's kind of way. It is the pattern of a foursquare house.
Perhaps what is normal to me is more a matter of what is normal over whole epochs of human time. Dark and light, night and day, cold and warmth, love and loss, life and death. Innermost House is where the ordinary rules of the inward life really do apply.
I don't know if I am a mystic. Perhaps we all are inside. I don't know if the Conversation is a mystic experience. If it is, then I have shared it with a world of visiting mystics! To me it is all blessedly normal.
Innermost House is a Practical Mystery: a Little House for Normal People.
Innermost House is a Practical Mystery: a Little House for Normal People.