Pico Iyer
Appearances
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Eliot once wrote about the life we have lost in living and 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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Well, that's the beauty because, again, the monks have no rules. And they really 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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Yes, I was very determined to include that sentence in the book because I realized that that's, for me, the whole point of going on retreat. Which is to say that when I first went there, I didn't realize that solitude was a gateway to compassion. You know, I'm an only child. I spend much of my time alone at my desk. I love being alone. And what's not to love about being alone in Radiant Pixar?
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
But the more times I stayed there, the more I realized, first, that I was never alone because my friends and my loved ones lived more powerfully inside me in that cell than they do when they're in the same room or when I'm driving down the freeway with a thousand things on my mind. but also that the only point of being there was to be a better friend to them.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And that's where witnessing the sense of community and the compassion that the monks exemplify really made a difference. And so I was thinking recently after writing the book that one thing I never could have guessed and that amuses me is that I'm a solitary soul. And I assumed I was never going to get married. And it was only by going to sit in the solitude of the cell that
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
that I decided to get married. At one point, I think my second year in the monastery, I was there staying in a beautiful trailer for three weeks. And I drove down to the payphone at the bottom of the hill and called my then girlfriend in Japan. And the blue-green waters were at my feet, and the slopes were flooded with orange golden poppies and lupins. It was a brilliant spring afternoon.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And she could hear the light in my voice. And finally, she said, you know, I'm never worried about losing you to another woman. I can be more and more excellent. But how can I compete with a temple?
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And that sentence went so deeply through me that a few weeks later, I did move across the world and to the tiny two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere she was sharing with her two children, now my children, and made this commitment for life. And oddly, when I think back on it – and I was slow to get married, as I say –
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
I don't think I could have made that leap towards living with other people and trying to give myself as much as possible to them had I not had that very special kind of silence and witnessed how the monks were living. Because, as you said earlier, they're not living with silence and solitude, but the opposite, with constant busyness and community.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
The self that you're listening to now is chattering. I don't think it's just chatter.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Yeah, exactly. Our talking selves are our social selves, and they're very different from our silent selves. And, of course, when I'm sitting here in Santa Barbara, part of me is in the world, and I want to have a nice conversation with Terry, and I'm concerned about my book that's just coming out, and all of that fluctuates.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
falls away and when I'm in my silent self I'm in somewhere where there's no self essentially it's some mysterious space where there's no thought of little Pico and his many concerns and there's just this wide openness to everything around me, which is always going to be more sustaining and more interesting than I am. And I found that that's one of the ways in which it's a great consolation.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
There was a time early on when I was staying in the monastery when suddenly my father was rushed into the hospital at quite an early age and died. And it was the most busy time in my life because, as you said earlier, I had to look after my mother. I had to organize a memorial and the obituaries. I had to receive the condolence calls and inform the family.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
But one day when I made sure that my mother was looked after for the day, I thought the best thing I can do is drive three and a half hours north along this winding road and just sit on a monastery bench for two hours and be reminded of everything that's not so mortal.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
The huge ocean, the tolling bells in the distance, tolling as they've been tolling for a thousand years, the cliffs behind me, even the mountain lions, this landscape that's much larger than the human, I'm not going to be here forever. This landscape is going to be enduring for a long, long time.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And when we deal with impermanence and losing people and things that we love, being reminded of what outlasts our hopes and our lives somehow was very consoling. And so it was right that just being in the presence of that much larger landscape for two hours was the best medicine I could think of when dealing with the busy time of my father's death.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And I think that part of us that listens is much deeper and more interesting than that part of us that speaks.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Such a good question, Terry. And again, I've often felt guilty about presuming upon their hospitality as somebody who doesn't share their faith and embarrassed that I haven't made a commitment. And although I never made a full-time commitment of the extraordinary kind they have... I think, as I say, watching their example was what moved me to make a commitment in the world to my wife and my kids.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And although I am a secular person, I feel that the most important thing in life is one's inner life. No good having a car if there isn't an engine. And 600 years ago, Meister Eckhart, the wise German mystic said, as long as the inner work is strong, the outer will never be puny.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
As long as you take care of the inner landscape, your relationships, your career, your understanding of yourself will take care of themselves. And so even though I am secular, I'm happy to dissolve distinctions between what is sacred and secular because I think all of us crave an inner life, wisdom, depth, intimacy.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And some people find it through their devotion to a particular divinity or a particular faith. Some of us find it in other ways. The important thing is to find it and not to get lost in the swirl of our accelerated world where we're just racing from thing to thing and never can really have access to the larger picture.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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. Are you in the house that your mother had rebuilt after it burned to the ground? I have been staying there. The house lacked all electricity.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And I think that's where fires sometimes come into the picture because they humble us like earthquakes and flash floods and typhoons and remind us how tiny we are and in some ways how powerless we are. And my Benedictine friends would say that's an act of God. That's reminding us that we are tiny mortals in the hand of a divinity.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
But even those who don't use that language would say it just reminds us that there are all these forces that are much huger than we are. And humanity is not the center of the picture or the end of the story.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
I do. I especially feel the sense that I and my neighbors are living where humans were never meant to live. And what you quickly learn in a landscape such as ours is that the landscape can't flourish without fire. It needs fire as a kind of replenishing, regenerating agent. The Californian hills couldn't survive without fire. So our question as humans is how are we going to survive with fire?
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And I loved what you said. I mean, humans are responsible for the climate crisis. But I think that's because we assume and have assumed we're larger than nature and nature is reminding us that we're not. And that it is much more powerful than we are. And that if we don't kneel before or defer to some extent to it or think anew about our responsibilities to it, we will be the victims.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Nature is going to continue long after we do. And it's our folly and our hubris to assume we can control it. The happy part of that solution is that – or the happy part of that idea is that insofar as humans are the cause of the climate crisis, we should be the solution too if it's not too late.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
But I think the climate crisis comes out of our assuming that we can have our way with the elements and the elements are reminding us again and again that we can't.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And as you say about ravaging urban landscapes, actually the fire that took down my house, this was 34 years ago, went all the way into the town of Santa Barbara, jumped the six lanes of the intercontinental freeway that stretches from Mexico almost all the way to Canada. and came very close, even back then, to wiping out the whole town. So it's not as if we haven't had warnings.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
It's as if the natural world is constantly sending us messages and we just send them to voicemail.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Well, she saw me in this infatuated state as if I'd suddenly fallen in love. And many a parent knows when their child returns starry-eyed, there could be problems on the way. But now, 34 years later... I've not converted, of course. I've learned that conversion for the monks means constant renewal. It doesn't mean just a sudden change of heart, like falling in love with somebody overnight.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
It means constantly remaking yourself and re-understanding your relation to something outside yourself. But I think the best thing of all is that... I grew up in Anglican schools. So for 15 years in England, I had chapel every morning, chapel every evening. We had to read the Lord's Prayer in Latin on Sundays or recite. We had to recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
We had to read the gospel according to Matthew in Greek in the daytime. And so when I emerged from that, I thought I've had enough of this tradition. And I was much more interested in exploring Buddhism and Sufism and things related to the other side of the world.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And although I haven't converted, I'm so grateful to my Benedictine friends for reminding me of the treasure in my backyard and all around me. So I assumed, oh, I know everything about Christianity because I grew up in the Judeo-Christian culture. And I didn't know the first thing. And so over my years there, I've been very glad to be
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
brought into the company of Meister Eckhart and the Cloud of Unknowing and Thomas Merton, all this rich, rich material, which I'd written off before because it seemed too familiar or it was too close to home. And I assumed wisdom had to lie on the other side of the earth.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
I never did. I can't be in two places at the same time. Funnily enough, I'm just completing a book about that, essentially, about the last seasons of my mother's life and all the conundrums it confronted me with. And the main one, as you say, was that in order to support her healthcare bills, which were huge, in order to keep her in her home with 24-hour care,
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
I would have to do every kind of work possible, and most of that work would take me out of the house. So how can I go and earn a living while still being in the same house and tending to my mother on an hourly basis? I never could come to a good resolution. I just had to assume that I would come up with the best bad resolution.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
My mother was so generous-hearted that it made me want to spend more and more time with her. And in fact, I and my wife would come and spend three to five months with her every summer precisely because she never put any pressure on us or never asked of us anything. She never once in the – let's see – She was alive for 26 years after my father died, and I was spending much of that time in Japan.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And she never once said, wouldn't it be better if you could be here? And because she never said that, I tried hard to be there a lot of the time. But to this day, my wife says, I can't believe that your mother was so kind and that she never tried to guilt trip you or to put any pressure on you. It's a rare blessing.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Well, I think the reason I include him a lot in this book is that I think both of them are living in the place beyond divisions. So I think one reason Leonard and I got on so well was that he appreciated that my spending all the time in the Benedictine monastery was not so different from his full-time engagement in his Zen monastery for five and a half years.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And I think one of the things that always moved me was I remember the first time I went to have lunch with him in his home in L.A. He was living in a very modest duplex in a really rough, unfashionable part of Los Angeles with his daughter. We sat down. We had lunch. And as you know, I think he was the most spellbinding, articulate writer I've ever met. And he was a wizard with words.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And he would talk about literature and the great religious traditions of the world and politics and his time in Cuba. And it was captivating. But when lunch was concluded, he picked up two folding chairs and he took them out to his front lawn, which is very small, looking out on this quiet residential street in front of a small bed of flowers.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And he sat down and he invited me to sit down next to him. And I sat down next to him. Nothing. More nothing. More nothing. Nothing said. So finally I thought, oh, this is a gentle hint. So I said to him, oh, you must be busy. I should let you go. And he looked at me beseechingly and he said, please, don't go.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And what touched me so much was that the most eloquent master of words I had ever met realized that the best thing he could share with a visitor was silence. And I gather many people who had come to his house, he invited just to sit with him in silence. And indeed, the name that he received, his monastic name from his wise Japanese friend, Jikan, means the silence between two thoughts.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And so it was very humbling to see a man who tasted all the pleasures of the world, who could be doing anything he wanted at the age of 61, putting himself through this back-breaking monastic discipline. But it was also very humbling to see this beautifully articulate person so ready to share no words at all.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
To me, it's the great luxury and indulgence. And I share a lot of silence with my wife. And my wife and I have been together 37 years. Her English is quite limited. My Japanese is more limited. We've never had communications problems before. But we have learned how to share silence.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And I think anybody listening to this knows that the time they share with a loved one often is silent, and that can be the richest, deepest time. I think as a writer whose life depends on words, it's shown me how inadequate words are. It's made me distrust words and made me see how we can use words as weapons and shields and defenses.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And so I most trust, as I was saying before, the person who lives... on the far side of words. I'm more trustworthy when I'm saying nothing at all than when I'm speaking. And I think Leonard felt that. And I think that's one reason that he became such a connoisseur of silence.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
He said at one point, maybe several points to interviewers, that he had a facility for charming people and for golden words. And that's why he wanted to leave words behind and leave charm behind.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
How interesting. I was about to choose the same one, but now I will choose You Got Me Singing, the unexpectedly cheerful, bright, and reviving song he wrote in late old age.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Oh, it's an important one. And it even incites his Hallelujah song. Yes. Oh, if you don't know it, I'm even happier I chose it because it's very bright and jaunty. Yeah, it's going to make everyone happy. And maybe that's what they need right now.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
I think it's one of those things that if you think about it, or remember or anticipate is 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. I just grabbed my mother's cat.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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 everywhere. 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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And I was in some ways released from myself, I felt, and released from my endless chatter.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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.
Fresh Air
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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
How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
Yes. So this is the Camaldolese congregation, which is a thousand years old. It's the most contemplative community within the Benedictine and within the Catholic Church. And it's actually been given dispensation with the Vatican to engage with every other faith tradition, you know, in the spirit of Vatican II, which said, Nothing that is true or holy in any tradition is alien to us.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And so I think one of the blessings of arriving there was to rid myself of all my stereotypes or preconceptions about monks. For the first, to begin with... They open their hearts and they open their doors to people like myself, who's not a Christian. And I think many of the people who stay there probably have no religion. And secondly, they're eager to learn from everybody.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
So the recent prior would go and give talks at the Zen monastery over the hills. And the Kamaldalis actually maintain a Catholic Hindu ashram in southern India, where their priest is. dresses in a dhoti and sleeps on the floor and eats with his hands. And in that ashram, their motto is, we are here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And so really they're about dissolving divisions and reminding us of what we have in common rather than what splits us apart. And Many years after hearing that wonderful motto, I found it's actually from the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh. So these Benedictine monks are actually happy to take their wisdom from a contemporary Vietnamese Buddhist.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
And so I just drove three and a half hours up the coast again because that is as unworldly a location as I know.
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How Losing Everything In A Wildfire Led Pico Iyer To Seek Silence
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... I am keenly aware that many people in the world don't have that opportunity.