Pico Ayer
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
So although sometimes I've been there during storms and at very scary and uncertain times, my mind at least is quiet in a way that it isn't when I'm by myself elsewhere.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
Well, Big Sur already is the place where the calendar falls away and the outside world feels very distant. And you're on this 60-mile stretch of coastline in central California where humans feel very tiny because you're just in the presence of tall redwoods, the huge expanse of the uninterrupted ocean, the cliffs, and the sky.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And then right perched at the top of a hill there is this 900 acres of dry golden hills, pampas grass, and a cluster of little huts where the monks stay and where their 15 or so visitors stay. it's already one of the most beautiful sights on earth.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
In 1996 because I travel a lot National Geographic magazine very kindly came to me and they said we'll send you anywhere in the world on our dime to write a piece about a special place and I'm sure they were thinking I would write about Tibet or Ethiopia or Antarctica and I said the only place I can think of is Big Sur and so I just drove three and a half hours up the coast again because that is as unworldly a location as I know.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
It's both. I'm very conscious, I'm very lucky that I can summon up the time and resources to go on retreats there every season, sometimes for as long as two weeks and three weeks. And one of the things that so disarms me is that the monks ask for so little, but still there is a voluntary donation involved. So... I am keenly aware that many people in the world don't have that opportunity.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
But I do concentrate on silence because that is available to anybody. And somebody who can't go on retreat can still go on a walk, can still turn off the lights and listen to music, can still try to free herself from the clamor of the world. And in order to, just as you say, bring yourself back to a sort of deeper reality that too often we forget. I think T.S.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
Eliot once wrote about the life we have lost in living. And I think many of us are crying out to find that life, but we're in such a rush. And the world is so distracted these days. We don't know how to put our hands on it. And I loved what you said in your introduction about how this isn't about getting away from the world, but actually getting deeper into it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And in what ways do you feel like you get deeper into it when you're there? Because it's uncluttered and undistracted, and it's like having the most intimate conversation with the natural world. Again, as I'm talking to you here in Santa Barbara, my mind is too likely filled with the email I just answered, the latest CNN update, the latest notification from United Airlines.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
As soon as I go there, where there is no cell phone connection, no internet, no television, I'm freed of all that clutter. And suddenly, as if I've come awake to the beauty of the ocean, I'm suddenly fascinated by the rabbit that's standing on the splintered fence in my garden.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
I'm suddenly watching the moon rise, which I could be doing at home, but as soon as I'm tempted to do it at home, I hear the phone ring, or I think of the hundred emails I have to answer. I take walks along the road under this great overturned salt shaker of stars. And suddenly I'm noticing everything around me, which sadly I don't do enough in the rest of my life.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
Well, that's the beauty because, again, the monks have no rules. And they don't ask you to attend services, though there are five services a day. You can seek out counsel from them, which some people do. But really, they're just freeing you to do nothing at all, which is really the hardest thing in the world.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And it took me a while to realize it was only by doing nothing at all I could begin to do anything. So, the beauty of being there is that unlike every other day of my life, I have no plans. I couldn't tell you what I'm going to do the next day I'm there. I wake up and I follow instinct. Maybe I'll take a walk. Maybe I'll read a book.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
Maybe I'll just sit out in my chair in my garden and look out at the sea. And I never allow myself that kind of latitude in my day-to-day life. And so every day really lasts a thousand hours. And one of the curiosities of it is that I feel I'm on the ultimate holiday or holy day. I feel as if I'm really doing nothing at all.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And then when I return after three days, I open my suitcase and I find, my heavens, I've written 40 pages and I've read six books while as far as I was concerned, I was just doing nothing.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
What a real delight, Terry. Thank you for the show. Thank you for inviting me to be on it. And I really enjoyed talking to you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
Where are you now? I'm in Santa Barbara where happily today it's quite calm. The winds are low and we're feeling very lucky compared with our neighbors two hours to the south.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
I have been staying there. The house lacked all electricity. There was no phone that was working, but that's where I've been staying the last four nights. They turn off the power as a precaution because the winds have been very high. So although there's no fire around us, I've been living by the light of a tiny lantern these last four days.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
In the case of my mother, it's a matter of insurance policy. So when our house burnt to the ground, we received a settlement which is enough to rebuild the house that you previously had, but probably not enough to buy a new property elsewhere.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
So almost logistically, you have to go back to the place that you just left unless you want to radically leave your home, your friends, your doctor and dentist and everything behind. In the case of the monks, they are making a commitment to living far from the world, at the grace of God, at the mercy of the heavens, not knowing what will come next.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
So there it's more a conscious decision to live on the edge of the world and in the middle of the wilderness. I remember there's a great Zen monk who says a monk's duty is to live on the edge of the abyss. And that's what my Benedictine friends are doing in Big Sur.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
So it was the fact of being stripped down to nothing that made a Catholic monastery seductive to me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
I think it's one of those things that if you think about or remember or anticipate, it's terrifying. But when you're in the middle of it, you're just acting. So I climbed up the stairs. I saw that we were encircled by flames. I literally didn't have time to pick up the passport that was two feet away.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
I just grabbed my mother's cat, raced into a car and drove down the driveway, not thinking that a car was probably the worst place to be. And I think actually having my mother's aging, panting cat in my lap for three hours as we were encircled by flames was a great help because it allowed me to concentrate on keeping the cat alive and not just to think how vulnerable I was feeling.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And I think also it was much easier for me to go through that whole experience because I'd been in the midst of the fire. My poor mother, at the end of that evening, just received a phone call from me because she was away in Florida saying, you've lost everything in the world. Your whole 60 years has been wiped out.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And of course, she felt powerless in a way that I didn't because I felt so close to losing my life that at the end of that evening, losing all my possessions wasn't the end of the world.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
Yes. And for 45 minutes, we were actually right underneath the house. So I could see the flames systematically making their way through our living room. And then moving down to my bedroom where all my childhood mementos and photos and toys were. And then going on to my office and then really reducing my next eight years of writing. My next three books were all in handwritten notes to ash.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And again, probably it was a good thing that I could witness that and to realize that it was inescapable. There's nothing I or anyone could have done to prevent the force of that fury.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
In a very practical way, it was a fire that moved me to seek out monastic retreats because I was sleeping on a friend's floor for many months as my mother and I slowly reconstructed our lives. And another friend came in and he saw me there and said, Pico, you can do better than this. And he told me about this Benedictine monastery three and a half hours up the coast.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And he said, well, if nothing else, you'll have a bed to sleep in there. You'll have a big desk. You'll have a beautiful walled private garden overlooking the Pacific Ocean, hot showers. food, all for $30 a night. And so it was the fact of being stripped down to nothing that made a Catholic monastery seductive to me, or the notion of any bed to sleep in appealing to me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
But in a deeper way, when I think back on it, I remember that as soon as a firetruck finally got to us and told me that it was safe to drive downtown, I went straight to a supermarket and I bought a toothbrush. And that toothbrush was literally the only thing I had in the world. And then I went to a friend's house to sleep on the floor.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
But before I went to sleep, I went to her computer because my job in those days was to be a columnist for Time magazine writing the back page essays. And I just had this eyewitness view on the worst fire in Californian history. So I wrote an account then and there the evening I lost everything.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And to speak specifically to your question, when the insurance company offered to replace my possessions, I realized I could live without 90% of the books and clothes and furniture that I'd accumulated. In some ways, I could live much closer to the life I'd always lived, an uncluttered life. And having lost all my notes, I realized now I'm going to have to write more.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
for memory and emotion and imagination, which are really much deeper places. So as the months unfolded, for all the sorrow and shock of that loss, I realized that maybe it was opening certain doors as well. Did you ask for everything to be replaced? No, I replaced very, very little. And my mother and I were living in a temporary apartment for three and a half years.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
So in any case, there wasn't much room. But I realized actually how little one needs to survive and that luxury is not really a matter of how much you have, but how much you don't need. And suddenly I awoke to the sense I didn't need a huge amount.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
Yes, and also I should say that my mother was 59 at the time and I was 33. And so the notion of starting again was not something she could entertain. It was as if her whole past had been wiped to the ground and there was very little to look forward to. And in my case... My past had been wiped to the ground, and my future, as I'd anticipated it, had been eliminated.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
But at 33, of course, it's much easier to start afresh. And so I was fortunate in my circumstances, and as you say, so many people are not, and my heart goes out to them.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
It is something I'd sought out, and I probably have a kind of temperamental inclination towards monasteries. Even as a little boy, if I stepped into a convent or monastery, I felt a sudden longing the way other people may feel when they see a strawberry cheesecake or whatever. It spoke to something inside me. But I think the particular beauty of this silence is that it's not an absence of noise.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
It's almost a presence, as if years of prayer and meditation, not just in this monastery, but in every convent and monastery, have created these transparent walls where suddenly the world comes to you with greater immediacy. And so the curious thing was...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
As I drove up to the monastery, as usual, I was conducting arguments in my head and fretting about deadlines and worried about my tax return and concerned about my aging mother. And I stepped into the silence and all of that fell away. It was as if little Pico and his tiny thoughts were left down on the highway. And instead, I was in the midst of this beautiful scene above a radiant coastline.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And I was in some ways released from myself, I felt, and released from my endless chatter.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
Well, as a writer, of course, I spend much of my day alone. And when I'm at my desk, the chatter is sometimes deafening. But what I experienced with the silence in the monastery was something very different. I was just thinking as I was walking down to talk to you that it's as if suddenly in the monastery I realized I wasn't the center of the world.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Learning From Silence / Comic Roy Wood Jr.
And the sort of me part disappeared and the world part became very strong. And Thomas Merton, the great Trappist monk who lived with silence for 27 years, wrote, when your mind is completely silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real. And I think that's what I found.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
One day, some years ago, I looked around the small, temporary apartment I was sharing with my mother and saw no cause for hope. A wildfire had burnt our house to the ground and reduced every last thing inside it to ash. Every photo, every memento and childhood keepsake, all the handwritten notes that were the basis for my next three books, everything was gone. MUSIC PLAYS
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I needed to look after my mother as her only child, but I also needed to support my Japanese girlfriend and her two small children across the sea. I couldn't work out how to be in two places at the same time. A friend suggested I go to a Benedictine retreat house four hours up the California coast.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
If nothing else, he said, I'd have my own desk there and a private walled garden with dazzling ocean views, all for just $30 a night. What more did I have to lose, I thought? My future had disappeared overnight, and so had my past. On the long drive up, as ever, I heard myself fretting over deadlines, worried about leaving my mother behind, carrying on an argument with a faraway friend.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Then I turned onto a one-lane road that snaked up to the top of a mountain. I got out of my car 1,200 feet above the Pacific Ocean and stepped into a simple cell. Suddenly, in ways I couldn't explain, all the debates and anxieties that had been slicing me up 15 minutes earlier fell away. The sun burned on the water far below. A rabbit was standing on the splintered fence in my garden.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I stepped outside and was welcomed by a vast expanse of brush and blue for as far as I could see. I came inside again and began scribbling at the desk, recording everything around me. When I stood up, I had covered three pages, though barely twenty minutes had passed. I walked into the communal kitchen and brought back an apple and some salad.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I sat in a rocking chair, munching, and then, hours later, after darkness fell, I walked out into a great tumble of stars. Although I was alone in my silent cell, I didn't feel alone. The people I loved felt closer to me than when they were in the same room.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I took a long walk at daybreak along the monastery road, past benches here and there looking out to sea, and a smile from a stranger went through me as no sentence ever could. Often I just sat in a chair and did what is usually hardest for me, nothing at all. The monks who opened their doors, even to non-Christians like myself, made no demands on any visitor.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
They were ready to offer counsel if needed, but otherwise they were just working around the clock to ensure that all of us felt at home. When I stepped into the monastery bookstore on my second day, an elderly brother asked how I was doing. I love it, I said. He looked relieved. Clearly, silence wasn't always a blessing.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Of course, it was liberation to be away from every distraction, but mostly I felt liberated from little Pico and all his chatter. I was freed of my social self and back in a silent self where I had no need of words or ideas. A lens cap had come off and now I could be filled by the world in all its wild immediacy. In the days that followed, I simply read books or wrote letters to friends.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I took the same walk again and again. Every morning when I awoke, I had no designs upon the day. I let the moment decide whether I'd pick up a postcard or just look out to sea. Over the next few months and years, I started going back. For two weeks, for three weeks, sometimes when the 15 retreat rooms were full, staying with the monks in their enclosure.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Occasionally, I went there when I was jet-lagged, and even the silence couldn't help me then. Sometimes I arrived just as the radiance of the Big Sur coastline was shattered by torrential storms. All night I sat in my little trailer on the hill, unable to see another light or sign of human habitation. The wilderness felt merciless and terrifying.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
But even when doubts or shadows arose, I realized I'd much rather confront them in this quiet sanctuary than when I was caught up in rush hour traffic or the cacophony of cable news.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
When my father was suddenly raced into the hospital, the only thing I could think to do was drive four hours one morning just to sit on a bench along the monastery road for two hours and then drive the four hours back. Isn't it selfish to leave your loved ones behind so you can go and restore yourself, a kind friend asked me.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Not if it's the only way I can learn to be a little less selfish, was my reply. when my daughter at 13 was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, I knew that sitting in silence above the blue-green waters for three days was the best way I could find the clarity and calm I would need as soon as I stepped back into her hospital ward.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I couldn't make Sachi's sickness go away, but I could try to protect her from my own useless worries and resentments. Spending time in silence put a frame around my agitated thoughts and disclosed something real that stretched beyond and behind them. To come upon a place that exists outside the realm of constant change makes change a little bit less scary.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
In all my seven decades, I've never seen so many so close to despair as they are right now. A world is fractured. Wars are breaking out on every side. Wildfires, like the one that rewrote my life, tear through every hill. In those circumstances, the simple journey into silence allows me to step out of the moment and into something more expansive.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Not everyone I know can afford to go on retreat, but some liberation is always at hand if only you can sit quietly away from your devices, seek out a temple or church, just take a walk. Years ago, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton observed, when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
It's hard to get tired of the birdsong above the wooden shed or the sun rising above that distant hill. So often it's my mind that makes my problems. It cuts the world up into you and me and complicates the simple. After more than a hundred trips into wide-awake silence, I give thanks every time I come back to a reality far bigger than myself.