Ruth Small

Ruth Ann Small (nee Myrom) passed away on April 13, 2026, at the age of 78. She is mourned by her family and by the many friends and students to whom she gave so generously of her creativity, her spirit, her life. The last fifteen years of her life she gave to her third husband, Tom Small, who sees those years and that spirit as the greatest, most wonderful gift of his long life.

They first got acquainted when Ruth completed her Ph.D. at MSU and began teaching American literature in Western's English Department, where Tom had been teaching for many years. Ruth was a little shy, and Tom was pre-occupied.

About a year after the passing of both their former spouses, they began to encounter each other, unexpectedly, in a store, at a concert, on the street. It seemed as if some attraction was slowly, miraculously, drawing them together, almost against their wills, since both of them were sure they would not marry again. It was, they told each other, the intention of the universe and their wondrous good fortune that they should find each other and know that it was always somehow intended. Coincidence and unlikely accident had drawn them both to Kalamazoo and held them there.

Ruth's "spiritual friend," the mystic Yogi Raushan Nath, foretold many years ago that she would marry again after her then husband's passing, and remarked once, casually, "Don't worry if he doesn't talk much." Ruth loved to tell the story of her first sight of Tom. Soon after she arrived in Kalamazoo in 1968, she was standing in line to buy tickets at the theatre. Tom peeked out one of the theatre doors and the person with Ruth said, "That's Tom Small." It was years before she actually met Tom, but that "introduction" and brief glimpse stayed in her mind. Another portent.

Seeming chance kept bringing them together. Something more than chance slowly discovered them to each other as restless seekers after what Ruth calls, in her poems, a "sense of peace" and "harmony with nature." Both waiting, seeking. "Listen," says Ruth in one of her poems, "in the silence for the unity of all things, all time, all places." In the silence, they found love.

In their early years together, they often spoke to each other words from a poem by the Indian mystic poet Kabir: "This love between us goes back to the first humans; it cannot be annihilated. As the river gives itself into the ocean, what is inside me moves inside you."

Ruth was, for Tom, always a surprise, ever fresh and new, as if they were meeting, in joy and recognition, for the first time. Ruth brought song into their home. She brought an inward peace such as Tom had never before known. Together they recreated his long-time home on Waite Avenue as a place of peace, felt by friends and strangers alike as they approach and enter the home.

Ruth set people at ease. She was equally adept at drawing out new friends and old ones, remembering to ask after their children, finding out their joys, their hopes and their sorrows. She sent people home with food, a sense of renewal, and at peace with themselves. She gave of herself to others, even as she drew from them something vital and essential of their inward selves. She touched people's lives.

In her many journeys to India, she studied the Vedas, ancient Indian holy scriptures. She endeared herself to others and touched the spirits of the many families she lived with, worshipped and celebrated with, sang together with.

There was an outpouring of loving memories when Ruth's many friends in India learned of her passing. They speak of her as a beautiful soul, a great saint, an inspiration. The loss "for all of us is unimaginable." We are "blessed to have known her." One man who knew her only when he was a small child, wrote, "I vividly remember her loving and compassionate presence, full of life and energy."

Ruth came into this world in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on December 16, 1947, to parents Olga and Art Myrom. Her birth, she always declared, was right on the banks of the Mississippi, the Great River, in a Catholic hospital, with the assistance of six nuns, because the doctor was at a Christmas party. Growing up in the strict Lutheran community of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, she attributed her acceptance and love of all faiths to that ecumenical beginning. Being the fourth child and the third girl in a family of five children, she learned to find her own way and yet be helpful and kind.

In high school she played catcher for the softball team and played the bassoon in the all-state orchestra. She went on to study at Concordia, a Lutheran college in Moorehead, Minnesota. Between her junior and senior years, she succumbed to the wiles of a recruiter from Yellowstone, looking for cheap summer labor in the Park. She became a waitress at the lodge and enjoyed becoming immersed in the wild beauty of Yellowstone. That fall she transferred to WMU, and graduated a year later with a B.A.

Kalamazoo and WMU suited Ruth. She went on to get master's degrees in literature and in education. She married Richard Harring, a professor in the College of Education, acquiring two teenage stepsons to whom she has been a wonderful mother. The beloved Harring Family Cookbook, edited and compiled by Ruth, testifies to 35 years of joyful family life: games around the family table, cooking with Richard, stepsons Jeff and Scott, and the many cherished generations of Myroms, Harrings, and friends.

Ruth taught 3rd and 5th grade in the Portage public schools, where she was known and loved for the creativity of her classrooms, engaging her students in all aspects of the learning process. Together with her husband Richard, she published innovative materials for elementary classrooms, especially for teaching and promoting creative writing.

After earning a Ph.D. in American literature from MSU, she taught at MSU, Grand Valley University, and Western Michigan. But powerful mystical experiences she could not explain drew her into entirely different spheres of teaching and learning. Following a tip from a teaching assistant, she met the single greatest spiritual influence of her life, the Yogi Raushan Nath (known simply as Nath-ji), the last in a thousand-year lineage of Indian saints and mystics. He had come to America, to Kalamazoo, at the behest of Robert Shafer, the Asian literature professor at Western. He came because his master, Bawa-ji, had foretold he would, because here there were people he had to meet and help in this life. Ruth, it so happened, was one of them.

And so began Ruth's participation in deep meditation, her many trips to India to be with Nath-ji, his family, his followers, especially during their annual gatherings in a small village near the Himalayan foothills, to celebrate the Mahasamadhi (ultimate leaving of the body) of Nath-ji's master. And Nath-ji stayed at Richard and Ruth's home whenever he came to America. So began Ruth's initiation into the Vedas, the ancient philosophies of India, through Nath-ji's books and his insights. Nath-ji possessed the power of seeing into people, knowing what they need, and drawing it from them, gently. That power answered the same power in Ruth, to draw out the creative spirit and answer the need of other people.

In 1989, in India, Ruth published a volume of her poetry, "Voice of the Voiceless." These poems, growing out of her mystic experiences, center on a quiet seeking, questioning, waiting, listening in the silence for the voice of the silence, the whispered voice of the voiceless One. Ruth sought, in her poems and in her life, to flow with the Great River of time into the Great Ocean beyond time.

After Nath-ji took Mahasamadhi in 1991, Richard and Ruth continued travel to India. But since Nath-ji had foretold that Ruth would find yet another spiritual guide, Ruth kept close watch on every holy man from India who passed through their home, which had become the center for such visitors. Ruth was ever the gracious host, but all the possible candidates were found wanting.

Then came the Swami Bodhananda Saraswati, and Ruth, who had been avoiding him as another probable impostor, heard him teach. Here was a true scholar of the Vedas, the one who could explain the powerful mystical experiences she had.

Together, the Swami told her, they would found an ashram, in Kalamazoo, for the study of Vedanta. And so they did. Ruth found the land northwest of town, 32 acres of wooded land that Ruth loved. She planned the building and guided its construction. The Sambodh Center for Human Excellence owes its being to Ruth's creative spirit, her administrative care, her love of the land, and her love for the people and spiritual heritage of India. As Nath-ji told her, she belongs to India perhaps even more than she belongs to America.

Ruth continued to travel to India every year, continuing her studies of the Vedas with the Swami, traveling with him, learning Sanskrit. She also, together with teachers from both India and the U.S., established at the ashram a School of Ayurveda, the ancient Indian "science of life," a system of natural, herbal medicine based on the Vedas. One of the faculty members, who also served as Dean of Students, writes of her "unwavering commitment to the students." Her leadership, he continues, "helped shape not only a school, but a community rooted in wisdom, compassion, and higher purpose." And she remained the guiding spirit for the weekly meditations established originally by Nath-ji.

Tom came into Ruth's life while she was still the Director of Sambodh. Together, they developed programs for the ashram. Both of them taught, with Tom specializing in the teachings of Gandhi and the practice of nonviolent resistance, Satyagraha. Ruth taught holy scriptures such as the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Ruth and Tom married one another in 2012 under the care of Kalamazoo Friends Meeting, speaking their vows to each other from worshipful silence. Tom is a Quaker and has been very active with Quaker Earthcare Witness, the Quaker international environmental organization. They traveled to many QEW meetings in the Midwest and East. Ruth loved Quaker silent worship and worshipful Quaker process in all matters.

Together, they traveled often. Twice to the Galapagos, to marvel at all the wondrous creatures: the marine iguanas; Darwin's finches; the boobies and their slow blue-footed mating dance. In Ecuador, Ruth and Tom embraced each other across the equator. Every year they traveled to Canada, for Shakespearean theatre at Stratford. They delighted in the rich variety of music that Kalamazoo provides. Ruth loved the piano music of Schubert, especially his impromptus.

In music, in theatre, in life, Ruth sought beauty, and truth. It was not just spiritual truth that Ruth sought; she wanted to grasp the truth of the universe itself, the wonder of it. One of the last books she read was astrophysicist Alan Lightman's The Shape of Wonder. Ruth pursued the secrets of this universe that had brought her and Tom together. For her, wonder did indeed have a shape and a purpose.

But the true purpose of wonder is Love. Her favorite book during these last years was Miracle of Love, stories about the Indian holy man Neem Karoli Baba. She bought multiple copies for many of her friends. The friends are miracles. The large family she wove together over her lifetime is a miracle. The Love that Ruth and Tom shared is a miracle. A miraculous, wondrous Voice of the Voiceless.

Ruth is survived by her husband Tom, her two stepsons, Scott Harring of Swansea, Illinois, and Jeffrey Harring, of Ellicott City, Maryland. And by two of her sisters, Joan Myrom Jurkovic, of Shoreview, Minnesota, and Linda Lawrence, of Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as her many nieces and nephews, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. All of them she dearly loved.

Memorial services will be at Kalamazoo Friends Meeting, 508 Denner, at 2 p.m. on Saturday, June 20, 2026, followed by interment in the Quaker section of Mountain Home Cemetery in Kalamazoo, just across the road from Friends Meeting house.

Ruth especially admired the spiritually led earthcare of Quakers and Native Americans. Donations in Ruth's honor may be offered to Quaker Earthcare Witness (quakerearthcare.org) or Cultural Survival, devoted to restoring the lands and cultures of Native Americans and indigenous peoples worldwide (culturalsurvival.org).