A few weeks ago I left a tweed jacket out on the porch over night. I awoke the next morning to find that the creatures of the dark had chewed a little piece the size of my hand out of the silk lining. It was all so neatly done, I could not entirely regret it. After all, most of the jacket is still mine. Or is it?
In the woods nothing is quite your own. Anything left unattended is preyed upon at the edges. All the linings of your life—your house, your clothes, your self—are constantly being tested by the woods.
Innermost House is a small house, a kind of large body. It embodies all that is necessary to the height and the depth of a whole human life—but nothing more. Few belonging belong to life in the woods.
I find life in the woods to be an experience of dispossession. To begin with you are dispossessed of most of your possessions, then over time you are dispossessed of the idea of possession—even of the idea that there are things to be possessed, or anyone to possess them!
Here I live a kind of borrowed existence, a life that, day by day, is lived to be surrendered. I love my few things—an iron pot, an earthen bowl, a favorite book, an old jacket—but the lesson of dispossession is urged upon me on all sides all day and night. There is no edge that is not tested, and the edges are tested all the time.
Thread by thread my belongings become part of other lives. But on the other hand, nothing is ever stolen in the way that a thing may be stolen in the world—borne away whole to become someone else’s.
In the woods things come together to be drawn apart again. And though what materially existed still exists in some sense, the thing that bore a name exists no longer. The thing we thought ourselves to possess is not anywhere, neither in ours nor in any other’s possession.
A week or two after the night of the tweed jacket, I found some of my lining woven into a deer mouse’s nest in a corner of the shed roof. All very workmanlike, as before, and unmistakable: Cotswold beige silk threaded into the California wilderness. Is it mine or is it hers now? Was it ever anyone’s? Once it had been a worm’s cocoon on the other side of the world. Then it was a woman’s jacket. Now it is a mouse’s cozy bedclothes.
What am I really? I only know I belong to the woods now, that I am no longer what I was, and not yet what I shall be. Night follows day. Day follows night. The woods call to me gently. I am forever going away.
