Winter 2026

Listening for the Sacred Silence at Welcome Hill Studios

In winter, the world grows quiet.

This seasonal peace is a gift. Many of us take on an invisible roar every day—traffic, honking horns, obligations, notifications, emails, news, and societal clinks and clangs. Even when we sit down to relax, noise follows us. Winter reminds us that silence is fertile ground.

At Welcome Hill, the hushed winter feels especially alive. As external noise recedes, we begin to hear what has been waiting beneath the surface: intuition, memory, prayer, the slow wisdom of the body. Other sounds begin to emerge. Wind tickling bare trees. Critters leaving paw prints on frozen ground. Birds calling across long mornings. The essential sounds of nature flow back in.

It is essential listening; the absence of quiet has a real cost. Noise pollution disrupts our nervous systems and fragments attention. It disturbs the napping baby, the exhausted mother, the neighbor in need of rest and healing. It pulls us away from the body and from the present moment.

There’s a whole cascade of negative effects. Noise pollution is a stressor that produces demonstrable physiological, psychological, and biochemical alterations in the human body. It elevates stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, and over time, exposure can lead to cardiovascular disease, anxiety, gastrointestinal impacts, and sleep disorders.

In winter especially, constant noise can feel like a violation of the season’s wisdom. Silence restores what noise erodes. Our northeast winters offer particular medicine. Pure white snow, glistening ice, and long, dark nights ask us to go slow, wait, listen.

Without the constant pressure to do and produce, we make space for wonder. Before a poem forms, there is a pause. Before an image clarifies, there is stillness. Winter silence, accompanied by the subtle music of the natural world, tunes us to deeper frequencies. We stop doing and begin receiving.

Women who stayed at Welcome Hill in the past have left traces of this experience. Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines), creator of Sinister Wisdom, wrote in February 1987: “My last dawn in the studio before leaving for Montreal. I have lived here for one and a half years, watching the sunrise from the treehouse bedroom, writing very much, making theater, learning magic, traveling the backroads of my mind, ending one way of living and beginning another. For me, the studio has been a transformation chamber—a place that makes possible deep change and hearing inner voices. I think Ann and her friends created something so rare that it qualifies as a miracle. And I wish that it may work for all who follow, as it has worked for me.”

“This is a place to make possible the falling-in-love with oneself,” she said.

Silence connects us more deeply to the land resting around us, to our own inner landscapes, and to one another. Before the season ends, practice sacred listening. Step outside into the brisk air, cozy up to the desk to write another paragraph, paint another slow stroke, sit down in a sunny patch on a favorite chair, and listen for the world to speak in Her quiet voice. May this winter offer you silence that nourishes. May it shelter the creative seeds waiting for their time to emerge.

Resident Spotlight

L. R. Berger is a poet based in New Hampshire. Rooted in close attention to place, memory, and the inner life, her work explores the quiet intersections of landscape and lived experience.

She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN New England, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Her poetry collections include The Unexpected Aviary, winner of the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry, and her most recent collection Indebted to Wind. Berger taught creative writing for fifteen years at the University of Massachusetts Boston and for ten years at New England College.

L.R. has been a returning resident at Welcome Hill Studios for the past four years. During her stay, L.R. has engaged in a sustained and deeply productive period of work, shaped by long listening, solitude, and a practice of entering—fully—the silence that invites the poem.