The Innermost House

It's a little intimidating to talk about a house that lives in one's head, but what the heck --- there are no accompanying voices. Sometimes, awake at 3 a.m. with monkey mind chattering, I can enter the front door of Innermost House, think about it for a while, and go back to sleep.

Innermost House is a 12-foot-square cabin in the coastal mountains of northern California built by Michael and Diana Lorence. They lived there for seven years, but no longer do. It has no electricity, a gravity-flow water system and (in case you were wondering) a conventional septic setup. Diana cooked in the fireplace, also the only source of heat.

I came across the place more than a year ago, when the video here, created by Kristin Dirksen, was posted to the Tiny House Blog, read by thousands of us who fantasize about living a simpler life but rarely do. Tiny House Blog posts about Innermost House, including the video, are archived here.

The video created a minor sensation in tiny-house and related green, clean, living-the-simple-life circles. Friends of the Lorences have created a Web site, located here; and a Facebook page, located here, and they seem to have become minor gurus.

Poke around a little. It's Sunday morning. You're feeling pangs of ancient Christian guilt about not being in church, but insufficiently strong to propel you there. This will help.

Might I also suggest  Wallace Stephens' "Sunday Morning," also a good Sunday morning reading exercise for the full-time, part-time or aspiring heathens among us. It begins:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.