We do have the power to create our own environment — and our environment, in turn, shapes us.

Dreaming together, drawing together, building together, we connect what lies within our hearts to what surrounds it. A certain spirituality, emotion, and mood is always present, like an undercurrent. We hear this and understand what is required, even if it is for a need not known. We know what house will be both diagnosis and cure.

Home is inside us – the place where we find everything that is true. We live now in the physical world, but our task is to walk in awareness of this inner place – to make manifest, in this world, evidence of another. In the land of brick and mortar we should always strive and struggle toward the likeness of our deepest understandings. We should seek that place that helps us to remember, or at least not to forget so quickly, the fleeting glimpses of truth that comes to us from within. The vulnerable beauty of this world fades to reveal its invulnerable source. I choose life, knowing it will perish. I choose love, knowing it may not last. This is why I love stone and steel and wood and thatch. Together, they are a marriage of the permanent and the perishable. There is a tender realism in their choice.

For many of us, the quest for home carries us through exhaustive search and compromise. Those who are highly attuned rarely succeed in bending the soul of a house they did not build to their will. A heart that is developed craves evidence of itself and the subtleties it has discovered. I dreamed of walking in the beauty and reality of my own mind. I had no place I recognized. This, in a nutshell, is why we build. When we finally find sanctuary in a physical edifice that mirrors our soul, it is ground gained and won – a flag on the moon of the heart.