The constant progress of Culture is to a more interior life, to a deeper Home.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Home”

Seeking a Deeper Home for Human Nature

We begin with a belief in the native wholeness of the individual soul. We believe in the past as a way to inwardness, and inwardness as a way to the future. In an ever-more divided world, we trace all paths back to their source in the unnameable unity of things.

Innermost House is a Past, a Present, and a Future. In the immediate past, from 2004 to 2012, it was an unelectrified house hidden at the heart of the woods, 12 x 12 feet in size, a living link between wild nature and high culture. During the seven years of its secret existence, it served as a private meeting place for leaders, thinkers, and creators, conceived to realize the "dream too wild" of a woodland conversation founded wholly on the transcendental values of truth, beauty, goodness, and unity.

“They found no example and no companion, and their heart fainted.” In the present everywhere and always, Innermost House is a condition of mind. It is a dimension of the innermost life of every individual, occupying a landscape of Myth and Archetype, Ideal and Spirit, of first and final things, of the still small voice and the inner light. Innermost House exists to serve as an example and guide through the confusions of worldly life to the simplicity and peace that lies within us.

In the unfolding future, Innermost House is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit association that exists to carry that private experience forward on a public basis. We are dedicated to the ancient ideal of philanthropia, which seeks to kindle the fire of what is highest and deepest and best in our humanity. We develop our legacy through a paired program of inreach and outreach, reaching inward toward curated experiences of a living, transcendental culture, and outward toward communicating those experiences to the wide world.

We address the largest problems in our world today—complex threats to nature, culture and spirit—not by treating their symptoms, but by seeking out their unseen sources. There, at the origin of things, we seek our renewal. We are a worldwide unity of friends trying to do something good.

This site is a continually evolving invitation to a new stage of culture, a higher, deeper, more sustainable home for human nature. There are many avenues of access to that culture. We invite you to follow your own interests through the paths below as a place to begin. Let path lead on to path. Welcome to this journey.

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Home

To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. . .

Friends

The truth we seek is a conversation. Our living conversation with Nature and Craft, Thought and Spirit has reached over a million people in a hundred nations. All begins with. . .

Nature

We believe that the soundest foundations rest on bedrock, and that the bedrock of American wisdom lies in the mythic depths of the landscape itself. To the larger world. . .

Craft

Innermost House cultivates fine craft in the manner of American beginnings, where Wilderness and Enlightenment met as equals, and the art of less was truly more. . .

Solitude

At the foundations of modern life lies the transcendental idea of Individualism: the individual human soul as one, indivisible, and whole. We mark the beginning. . .

Thought

We believe in the ideal of the "American Scholar," in whom a knowledge of books is balanced by experience of nature and practical activity in the world. Innermost House. . .

Spirit

Our final conversation is with humanity’s explorations of the spirit. We believe that the innermost essence of our being lies in the unseen world of first and final causes. . .

Society

We are a living conversation of individuals, each one a sanctuary of solitude unto themselves, and we are an instrument of connection between persons, peoples. . .

Seeds

Building a world begins with planting a seed in the one art that precedes and unites and justifies all other arts and sciences: the art of living at home. As an entirely voluntary. . .

To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes, and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.

William Henry Channing

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The constant progress of Culture is to a more interior life, to a deeper Home.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Home”

Seeking a Deeper Home for Human Nature

We begin with a belief in the native wholeness of the individual soul. We believe in the past as a way to inwardness, and inwardness as a way to the future. In an ever-more divided world, we trace all paths back to their source in the unnameable unity of things.

We address the largest problems in our world today—complex threats to nature, culture and spirit—not by treating their symptoms, but by seeking out their unseen sources. There, at the origin of things, we seek our renewal. We are a worldwide unity of friends trying to do something good.

William Henry Channing

The constant progress of Culture is to a more interior life, to a deeper Home.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Home”