The seed of the Innermost House idea first took root in a very personal story. For twenty years, Diana Lorence and her husband searched for something she remembered from a time before remembering, a perfect unity of experience in place, time and mind. That search for recovered origins led her through more than thirty moves across America, from the Far West to the Eastern shores, at last to Europe and beyond. It concluded in a 12 x 12 foot unelectrified redwood cabin she built herself, in the solitude and silence of the woods at land’s end in California.



Innermost House is now recognized as a living experiment in philosophical simplicity, demonstrating that ideals of freedom and equality, reason and faith, self-reliance and environmental stewardship, can be made harmoniously and sustainably real. Their common reality lies rooted in the foundations of experience we all share: in dawn and dusk; in earth, water, and sky; in forest and field; in growth and decay; in life and death and love and meaning. Diana’s life in the woods reminds us we may yet regain the innocence of Unity we have lost. The sun shines on us all alike. The rain falls on us all alike. We all have an Innermost Life.