Ihope you all enjoyed a beautiful, happy Thanksgiving holiday, as I did, thinking of you.
I took the weekend to read back through our four months of conversation together. It was such a grateful time for me to revisit your many kind words. Thank you all.
It will soon be a year since the night I left Innermost House for the last time. I chose to leave that secret world in order to share it more openly. Yet looking back over my own words, I see how far I have failed to share the truth of the Innermost Life.
My last posts attempted to recount a Thanksgiving week, but I failed even to touch the essence of it at all. I do not mean the facts are wrong. But the feeling is missing, the difference.
For as different as Innermost House appears to be from other houses, the life of it is immeasurably more different within. It is the within-ness I find so incommunicable.
Through our seven years in the woods I observed a curious phenomenon among visitors. It was as if the essential character of a person would rise to the surface of their life as soon as they entered the house, almost upon the instant.
Sometimes the revelation of that essence was sought and welcome, sometimes it was not. I would watch religious people surge in their faith, poetical people break into verse, delicate people burst into tears.
Then I would see skeptical people become watchful in their suspicion, and proud people grow stiff in their resistance.
I did not say a word. Innermost House only needed to be seen and people would speak from their innerness. Then they would know. And I would know.
In a way I think the photographs say what I cannot. It is the first impression that tells. If I could, I would find a way of sharing Innermost House over and over again for the first time only, for that is the truth of how we lived in the woods.
I sometimes feel my words dull that first impression. I fail to leave you and the house alone. For it is not I who can make the difference. It is the house. I don't know how, but I have seen it happen. It is the house that awakens a person's inner life, whatever their inner life may be.
I no longer think there will be another Innermost House. It does not seem intended to happen. I don't know of course. I am still listening, waiting to know.
I need to find a way to share the house without me in the way. Perhaps pictures alone are best, or pictures along with a very few words.
I would like articles to be published everywhere, first time after first time, and gathered together here. And there is the picture book I began before I knew I would leave.
Thank you all for seeing yourselves in Innermost House. I am feeling my way still, as I have always. I am feeling for new beginnings we can share together, seeking out quiet ways to illuminate the house in our hearts.