We gradually got back into the groove of everyday life, but we had a rather funny objective view of it one hot July, when we decided to remain silent for a month. The Master had sent over a list of things which we could do as a service to him, from which we could choose our preference. None of them was easily done in a teeming city like New York, but we finally chose silence as being what we were best equipped to carry through. College was out and my husband away a great deal. New York was so hot that we could often write the address of an air-cooled movie theatre and land it to a cab driver, who would invariably stop in front of the designated theatre and point several times at the building, being careful to hand us back the piece of paper. He apparently thought us immigrants. It never occurred to anybody that because we did not speak, our ears still functioned. If I handed a sales clerk a note "Do you have these pajamas in size D?" he would always grab my pad and write the answer instead of nodding his head or speaking. It seemed to us that most of what we heard people talking about could just as well be left unsaid; we gradually decided people are afraid of silence. We found to our astonishment that as the month progressed we felt better and stronger; that talking uses up a great deal of energy... it had been more invigorating than a months vacation.

When we saw the Master again after a lapse of five years, we were astonished that he could reel off the names of people we had encountered and things that had happened that had caused us heartaches. It is one thing to hear of such things being possible and quite another to be faced with it as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

Since then we have returned to India and have met him elsewhere, even in this country. Our lives, among many others, have an inner peace and serenity despite the outer chaos, and we know that God is Love, and that hate has to pass away.

His name is Meher Baba, which means "Compassionate Father" He is not only the most remarkable person I have ever met, but I have seen him personally touch and "speak" to as many as 20,000 people in a day, and watched tough American businessmen and wily diplomats, as well as the lowliest of servants, come from his embrace smiling like little children whose mothers have smoothed their hurts and given them fresh courage for the next bump, with never a thought of self-consciousness; which surely should put him in the class of the most remarkable person any one could meet!

San Francisco

September, 1965