The Embers That Light Our Way in June
- 3 days ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Stories of Impact from Abundance
JUNE 2026
In this Issue:
A Welcome from Abundance
There is a particular kind of generosity that does not ask for anything in return. Not recognition, not outcomes, not proof. It simply says: I believe in what you are doing, and I trust you to do it well. That kind of giving is rare. And this season, Emberlight has been the recipient of it in a form that will echo for generations.
We are overjoyed to announce the establishment of the Agarwal Family Endowment, Emberlight's very first endowment fund, made possible by the extraordinary generosity of Rakesh and Dolly Agarwal, of Rug and Home, who have committed $100,000 over four years. An endowment works by holding a principal gift in perpetuity and drawing only on the interest it generates year after year. This means the Agarwals' investment does not get spent, it gets planted. It grows. And the returns it produces become a steady, reliable stream of support that Emberlight can count on regardless of what any given funding cycle brings.
The Agarwal gift is extraordinary not only because of its size, but because of the spirit in which it was given. Rakesh and Dolly have chosen to make this an unrestricted gift — a profound expression of trust-based philanthropy at its finest. Trust-based philanthropy recognizes that the people closest to the work, the staff, volunteers, and leadership of an organization, are best positioned to know where resources are needed most. An unrestricted endowment means that Emberlight can use the funds generated by the endowment to pay our dedicated team, keep our doors open, sustain our programming, and invest in the physical home itself. It is the kind of gift that doesn't just support a moment. It builds a future.
In a moment when nonprofit organizations across the country are navigating shrinking federal dollars, uncertain grant landscapes, and the particular pressures that come with doing work the world has not yet fully learned to fund, trust-based philanthropy is nothing short of a lifeline. It says: we are not here to manage you or measure you. We are here to sustain you. The Agarwal’s generosity gives Emberlight something every mission-driven organization needs and too few have — a foundation that holds, no matter what.
Their path into philanthropy is remarkable. Read more here to see what a difference this couple has made in the communities they hold dear around the world. The check presentation was captured by WLOS. You may watch the feature segment here. We receive this gift with full hearts and deep gratitude.
Holding each of you in love,
Courtney Smith & Chelsea Trinka
The Emberlight Abundance Dynamic Duo
(Because even fundraising needs a little magic.)
What Is Hospice and How Is Emberlight Different?
Fifty-two years ago this month, Florence Wald co-founded the first hospice facility in the United States, Connecticut Hospice, after stepping down as dean of Yale School of Nursing. She was convinced that something essential was missing from the way Americans approached death. The medical system was doing everything it could to keep people alive, yet very little to help people die well.
What she helped create was a different kind of answer. Not more treatment, but more presence.
That distinction remains as relevant today as it was then, and it is the same distinction that shapes what Emberlight is and what it is not.
Hospice is a specific, insurance-covered model of care for people with a life expectancy of six months or less, when the focus has shifted from cure to comfort. Hospice brings a coordinated team of nurses, social workers, chaplains, and home health aides to wherever a person is living. They manage pain, support families, and help people navigate the physical, emotional, and spiritual realities of dying. While some hospice organizations have inpatient units or hospice houses, hospice itself is not defined by a location. It is a specialized model of care that follows a person.
Skilled, compassionate professionals provide essential care and visit regularly. Nurses manage pain through medication, nurse aides assist with bathing and personal care, social workers help with system navigation, and they visit regularly. Yet, by the nature of their work, they are passing through. What hospice does not provide is 24/7 caregiving or a caring community of support. Hospice was not created to provide an enduring community of accompaniment, 95% of which falls on family members and friends. This is why dying alone is so complicated.
As he approached the end of his life, Ethan Sisser asked a simple but profound question: Does dying have to be a solitary experience blanketed in sadness and grief?
Emberlight is our answer to Ethan's question. We have found that dying can be a deeply communal and transformational experience, where the last months/weeks/days of life can become “one last glorious burst of living,” as described by one of our residents, where the whole range of human emotions are welcome.
Most of the people who come to live in the Sanctuary Suites arrive already enrolled in hospice. Their medical care continues. Their hospice team continues. What changes is everything around that care.
They wake up in a home, not an institution. Volunteers sit with them through the night—not because it is their shift, but because they have chosen to be there. They play games, receive bodywork, and listen to music. The gardens are tended just outside their windows. A gorgeous view of the Blue Ridge Mountains is the backdrop to their waking moments. Their family is on site in an Airbnb room, and taking breaks for processing by walking the labyrinth. The Lighthouse is buzzing with gatherings from Care Circles, to music events, to end-of-life education. The land itself becomes part of the circle of care.
There is no charge for any of it.
What hospice provides, Emberlight does not replace. What Emberlight provides, hospice cannot replicate. The unmet need is not clinical but relational. It is the recognition that dying does not have to mean withdrawing from the life of a community. A person can move toward the threshold surrounded, held, and accompanied.
Florence Wald understood the importance of presence more than fifty years ago. Her work helped transform the way our culture cares for the dying.
At Emberlight, we continue that legacy in our own way. We call it conscious dying—the practice of meeting death with presence, dignity, and community.
And it is made possible, every day, by this community, which includes you.
The Labyrinth at Emberlight: A Story of Land, Listening, and Ancient Technology
Jaan Ferree came to this work through decades of labyrinth training, interspiritual retreat leadership, and the ancient practice of dowsing: listening to the land itself to discover where a labyrinth wants to be. She always begins the same way: introducing herself to the land, asking permission through prayer and ceremony, and proceeding only when she receives a yes.
But the story of this labyrinth, the one on the hillside at Emberlight, begins not with Jaan, but with a dream.
A group of women from Emberlight’s Wisdom Circle held a vision: that elders deserved a rites of passage ceremony of their own. Our culture offers little in the way of formal threshold-crossing for those who have lived long and gathered wisdom, and this community intended to change that. Sharon Mitchell, a longtime elder and fire keeper in the Emberlight community, was part of that circle. She wanted the labyrinth woven into the heart of the ceremony, a walking of the path as part of the passage itself.
Sharon and Jaan had known each other for years through their shared connection to Zoe and Will Rockingbear, indigenous wisdom keepers of the Earth Green Medicine Lodge Community. So when the time came to bring a labyrinth to the Emberlight land, Sharon knew exactly who to call. Jaan came as a consultant. She dowsed the land, and the land said yes.
What followed was remarkable. As Jaan laid out the labyrinth on the hillside with surveyor's flags and tape, the elder women from the Rites of Passage Council worked with extraordinary dedication. Rocks moved. Earth turned. Paths planted, watered, tended. The labyrinth did not appear so much as it was coaxed into being, by wisened hands and sweat and devotion, until something ancient became visible on the hillside, right where it had always wanted to be.
Today the labyrinth team is led by Sharon Mitchell and tended by a devoted group who gather at the rhythms of the natural world: the full moon, the solstices and equinoxes. Each walk is attuned to what that moment in the cycle of life is asking of us as humans on an interconnected planet.
Left, Jaan Ferree at Emberlight, right, Zoe Rockingbear and Sharon Mitchell
The full moon walks are an invitation to harvest: gratitude, blessings, the fullness of life received and acknowledged. The solstice walks bring the seasons themselves into the ritual. The summer solstice, surrounded by the deep green of WNC in full bloom, reflects the fullness of life: outward, abundant, alive. The winter solstice invites walkers to turn inward, a quiet dimming of the light, a tender walk into the coming darkness. And the equinoxes mirror the hinge points of the year: spring's emergence and fall's harvest, the eternal rhythm of letting go and beginning again.
Sharon describes the labyrinth as something far older than the hillside it now calls home. The whole of Emberlight, she says, is sacred land — but the labyrinth is like a chapel within it, open to the sky, attuned to all life, and to the ancestors who have walked this land before us, all the way back to the native peoples whose presence still lives in this earth. "By slowing down and doing a meditative walk," she says, "you naturally drop your day-to-day mental and emotional programming and drop into being more present with each step." In that stillness, she believes, something opens — what she calls, “a crack between the worlds, a place where it becomes easier to listen: to your spirit helpers, to a question you've been holding, or simply to the quiet beneath the noise of daily life.”
For Sharon, the labyrinth is also inseparable from community. There are certain life lessons, she reflects, that can only be learned alongside others — lessons that get mirrored back to you, whether you're ready for them or not. “A solo walk carries its own deep value, but a group walk brings a larger field of energy, a collective awareness that each walker can draw from even as their own journey remains sovereign.” “The labyrinth,” she says, “holds both: the intimacy of a single path and the amplifying power of walking it together.”
The community of volunteers who care for the labyrinth share that same spirit of devotion. Pramad Nehrbass, who was among those women who first dreamed this ceremony into existence and gave many hours of labor to make it real, remains an active presence on the land. Lynn Wright has quietly and faithfully documented the labyrinth's evolution through photographs as well as weed eating the paths, a living visual record of how a hillside transforms when a community commits to its care. And David Kano was part of the most recent act of tending: the installation of sunshades that make the labyrinth a place of welcome in every season, and a restoration of some of the boundaries with new rocks. These are only a few of the 22 members of the vibrant labyrinth team.
Jaan will tell you that her pattern, over decades of this work, has always been the same: come in, consult, and step away. But Emberlight was different. She stepped into this project, and she never left. “What I found here,” she says, “was community. Love. A tribe of people whose hearts resonate deeply with my own.” For someone whose life's work is helping others find their way home, Emberlight became hers.
Labyrinths are at least 4,000 years old, a spiritual technology found on every inhabited continent. "No one faith community can claim it," Jaan says. "No culture has it as its own. It belongs to all of us, without doctrine or dogma."
At its essence it is a prayer walk, a contemplative journey inward. It quiets the mind. It opens the heart. It is, as Jaan describes it, “a place to listen to what the God of your understanding may want to share with you.”
We are grateful for the vision of our women elders, for Jaan’s experience, that the land said yes, and that Sharon leads this extraordinary team. The labyrinth requires extensive maintenance and support. If you would like to donate to their team click here, or if you’d like to volunteer to come weed wack once a month, they would love the support.
On the longest day of the year, you have an opportunity to meet yourself and all you are grateful for in this season on the Emberlight labyrinth hillside.
Join the labyrinth team for the Summer Solstice Labyrinth Walk on Saturday, June 20th from 7:00 to 9:00 pm: an evening walk in the fullness of the longest day, surrounded by the deep green of WNC at the height of its glory. Come as you are. Bring what is alive in you. The path will meet you there.
Blowing the Bellows on Your Embers...
Every ember needs breath to become a flame.
Think for a moment about someone in your life who did something, perhaps quietly, perhaps without even knowing it, that created ripples you are still feeling. A word spoken at the right time. A hand extended when you needed it most. A choice they made that gave you permission to make your own. The kind of gift that doesn't diminish with time but deepens — building resilience in you that you may have since passed on to others without even realizing it.
Who is that person for you? And what has their gift meant to you?
Now turn it around.
Whose life are you standing at the edge of right now? A friend, a neighbor, a stranger, a community, where a small act of yours could become that kind of ember? Where your generosity, your presence, your belief in something larger than yourself could ripple outward in ways you may never fully see?
What is one way you could fan that flame today?
At Emberlight, we believe this is how the world changes. Not in grand gestures, but in the steady, intentional tending of one another. Your support of this work is exactly that. Thank you for being an Ember in our community.