From the moment we moved to the woods five years ago, old friends have invited us out again to stay in their houses while they are away traveling. Innermost House is made for a most intimate kind of hospitality, and I think our friends have wished to share with us some of the hospitality of their world outside.
There are times when I still love to live the onlooker’s life in a great city or a country village. In some ways I love it more than ever. All the frustration of our search for an inward Place is past now. I take my woods with me, and look on the world from the inside out.
That’s how it is that I am at this moment writing from our friend Ellen’s cottage in Carmel-By-The-Sea. My husband and I lived in Carmel nearly thirty years ago, and I have loved it always. Now for the past five years we have stayed here two or three times a year, for two or three weeks at a time. I love these visits to Ellen’s house.
Ellen has a cat, Peaches. Her littermate was lost outdoors and never found when the two were kittens. So Ellen decided to raise Peaches as a strictly indoor cat from the beginning.
Fortunately, Peaches has a reflective nature, and is happy with an indoor life. She loves to look out through the many windows into the garden beyond, but has never seemed inclined to explore the strange, mysterious world outside.
When we arrived here a few days ago, I looked at Peaches and realized that my little friend has matured to possess a thoroughly contemplative relationship to life. Now as I watched her watch the world outside, I somehow felt that a veil was waiting to be lifted.
I first telephoned Ellen to make sure it was all right, then I opened the door and I stepped aside. Slowly, slowly, Peaches moved toward the door, like a wide-eyed sleepwalker. She stopped at the threshold and stared. She stepped outside and stared. She just stared. It was all a miracle to her. The world outside was an unbelievable, inexplicable, astonishing miracle.
Now every morning I open the door for her, and each morning is the first morning again. It’s always the same. The same slow wonder. The same sleep-walking stare. She is like one of those hermit saints raised in a cave, who, upon emerging, can never get over the wonder of the world. The breeze is a wonder to her; the birds are a wonder to her; the insects are a wonder to her; Ellen’s bounty of flowering plants are a wonder to her. It’s all forever-new to her, and all a wonder.
I know how it is for Peaches. I too live in a kind of cave. I know what it is to look out on a world into which I emerge now and again, just to stare in wonder. I am forever now inside my woods, looking out as a guest on an unbelievably beautiful world.
