Dear Friends ~ It has been fifteen years since that winter day in Vermont, in a small house on Skunk Hollow Road, when Nan Merrill placed a colorful bundle of Friends of Silence newsletters into my hands. The air outside was cold and hushed, but inside, something radiant was stirring.
"Here's my baby," she said.
In that moment, a current passed between us—silent, sure, unmistakable. It was as if something leapt from her heart into mine, not words or instructions, but a living transmission. My body trembled; my eyes filled. Later, when I found the courage to ask if she knew what had happened, Nan smiled gently. "Of course I do," she whispered. "I sent it."
She was not simply handing over a file or a task. She was entrusting a spirit--her dream of a gathered community listening for the voice of Silence in a noisy world. She wanted to know if we could hold it with tenderness, if we could let it grow without her.
Nan died the following year, but the flame she passed on has never gone out. It found new life here at Rolling Ridge, among the hills and forests that breathe the same stillness she loved. Over these fifteen years, her dream has rooted itself in many hands and hearts—Anne, Bella, Trish, Linda, Lindsay, Mary Ann, Kate, Joy, Katie, Todd, Bob, Billy and so many others who have carried forward her invitation to live as friends of Silence. Silence, Nan used to say, is not always our friend. She can be demanding, unpredictable, fierce. She draws us through surrender, through the ache of letting go, until all that remains is what is real and true. To stretch out one's hand toward Silence is to consent to be changed.
And yet, how could we wish it otherwise? These fifteen years have been a pilgrimage—of listening more deeply, of learning to trust the slow work of love, of holding this fragile and luminous "baby" as it grows in its own mysterious way.
When I think back to that day in Vermont, I realize now that Nan didn't just entrust her work to me. She entrusted it to all of us—to everyone who reads these words, who pauses each month to enter the quiet, who lets Silence do her transformative work within.
So today, as we mark fifteen years of tending Nan's flame, we give thanks for her life, for her vision, and for the living Silence that continues to call us onward.
May we keep listening.
May we keep walking.
May we keep the flame alive.
~ Bob
A circle of trees . . . I felt I was bringing the journey home to the ordinary dimensions of my life, rooting it in the place I lived every day.I lay back on the earth and looked up through the branches of an oak, feeling suddenly like the sun was my own heart pulsing up there with light.Wind swirled, and it seemed to me it was my own breath billowing through the branches.The crocus bulbs were buried in my tissue, the cedars growing from my body.The birds flew inside me.Stones sat along my bones . . . a jubilant, stunning loss of boundary, a deeper sense of oneness than I’d ever felt.
I knew that I was part of one vast, universal quilt; I knew that this quilt was itself, the Holy Thing, the manifestation of the Divine One.And I loved this universal quilt, every stitch, color, and fiber, with a heartbreaking love.It was one clear moment in time, like going to the Deep Ground that underlies all things and seeing, really seeing, what is and being pierced by the unbounded nature of it.