On his 27th birthday in 1973, John Francis, a devoted environmentalist living in Inverness, was tired of arguing with people about the dangers of pollution. So he decided to be silent for a day. He liked it. One day became two, then a year. Francis didn’t talk again for 17 years. In that time, he walked with a banjo slung over his shoulder across the U.S. and South America. He painted. He worked toward a Ph.D. Then, coinciding with Earth Day on this week in 1990, he gathered his friends and family together and took a deep breath. “Well, I want to thank you for coming,” he said. There were applause and tears.

Years later, Francis tried to explain for an interviewer the hidden world that opened up to him. “Silence is not just not talking,” he said. “It’s a void. It’s a place where all things come from. All voices, all creation comes out of this silence. So when you’re standing on the edge of silence, you hear things you’ve never heard before, and you hear things in ways you’ve never heard them before. And what I would disagree with one time, I might now agree with in another way, with another understanding.”

Francis told his remarkable story in a 2008 TED talk.

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