Quoting Silence, July, 2026:
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A post throughout each week of the month, offering quotes and resources linked to one contemporary author who writes about silence and its role as a spiritual discipline. |
Different weeks of the month offer different resources, as below:
- first week: a short, image-backed quote with links to associated resources in the accompanying text
- middle weeks: a short, image-backed quote taken from a longer one by the author, found below the image
- last week: a short quote and questions to encourage reflection on all the month's quotations and images
Barbara Erakko Taylor, our author for July, is a contemplative solitary and author, writing about her engagement with silence and solitude.
You can find out more about her book, Silent Dwellers: Embracing the Solitary Life (Continuum, 1999), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
You can find out more about her book, Silent Dwellers: Embracing the Solitary Life (Continuum, 1999), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
Audio resources
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For a 5 minute audio guided meditation to use with each week's short quote, click play on the image. To pause and restart click the same place.
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An audio guided Lectio Divina for the longer quotes. Click play on the image above. Allow 10-15 minutes for this. For a text version, click the button.
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Monday 6th July, 2026
Barbara Erakko Taylor, Silent Dwellers: Embracing the Solitary Life (Continuum, 1999), 23.
Image: Ben Mathis Seibel, Germany, unsplash.com/@benseibel
To read more about Barbara Erakko Taylor's book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
Barbara Erakko Taylor is a contemporary writer and solitary whose life is not well documented. Prior to pursuing a life of solitude, she worked in fast-paced, high-pressure environments as a systems analyst. In this role she designed information systems for the White House Executive Office and several Fortune 500 companies. Beyond this, biographical details about her are scarce and sketchy. There is no public information about her childhood, other than limited comments in her books where she refers to being a solitary child who liked silent walks, daydreaming and reverie. At the time of writing this month's book, Silent Dwellers: Embracing the Solitary Life (Bloomsbury, 1999) - see here - she lived in Catonsville, Maryland.
From 2011 until March 2025 she published an online blog, 'Cottage by the Sea' and she reveals in what she says will be her final post that she is 85. See here. In the archive are lots of great quotes by other people. Her last publisher, Bloomsbury, maintains Barbara's author page in the present tense, suggesting that she is still pursuing her quiet solitude somewhere in the USA, but quite where is not known. If you dig around in her blog, you may link bits of information that lead you to conclude that she has also written Very Grateful: The Story of My Hundred-Year-Old Mother and Me (Very Grateful Press, 2015): see here.
It is known that, although Barbara Erakko Taylor intentionally seeks and embraces solitude, she does so in and amongst ordinary life, continuing to engage as a mother, former wife (her blog reveals that she was married for 54 years), charity volunteer and friend rather than withdrawing from society. Curiously, the 'Erakko' part of her name is from familial Finnish lineage and in Finnish 'erakko' literally means 'hermit' or 'recluse'.
Erakko Taylor's books are often reviewed in Roman Catholic publications and she often quotes from key RC authors, such as Cardinal John Newman and those from within Carmelite and Trappist spiritual traditions (as do many writers on spirituality, without necessarily being RC!), but there is no public information on her faith background or practice. Cardinal Newman is the primary author whose work Erakko Taylor draws on in this month's book, focusing on his concept of being 'alone with the Alone' as her foundational guiding principle.
Barbara Errako Taylor's earlier book, Silence: Making the Journey to Inner Quiet ( 1997) - see here - tells her journey of turning off the noise of life and towards silence, solitude and the simplicity of everyday tasks. Some sleuthing also reveals that she wrote several other non-fiction books under the pen name Bella Erakko: for a list, which includes another book on prayer, see here. Perhaps the most intriguing of these titles, with a tangential link to her former professional life, is The Lost Cord: A Storyteller's History of the Electric Car (Independent publishing, 2023): see here.
It hasn't been possible to find other substantive links about Barbara Erakko Taylor, or much other information. However, there is a brief article by her, 'Thoughts on Solitude', in Raven's Bread: Food for those in Solitude, Vol 3:3, August 1999, p2, here. You can also read more about her and her books on Grokipedia (see here), an AI generated encyclopaedia, created as an ideological alternative to Wikipedia by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, so all usual AI information caveats apply.