Miracle, all of it.

Posted on by Live & Learn

Next morning, as the fog lifts, I have the sense I often have here, of seeing the world at the moment it comes to life. I recall looking down at the twenty-five pods gathered around the bell tower and the refectory, tiny against the hillside and the huge expanse of sea beyond; they looked so frail I wished to say a prayer for them, as for a newborn in the not always easy world. So orderly, too, in their hopeful human arrangement. Like the redwoods in the valley beside them: each with roots five feet deep, but intertwined, so the health of one depends on the health of every other.

— Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, January 14, 2025). Written from his cell at New Camaldoli Hermitage in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur, California.

Notes:

  • Other highlights from early in the book:
    • ““When I go out into the world,” volunteers one of the brothers, “I feel like a sea anemone…A little creature of the sea. You know how sensitive and tender they are. If they trust where they’ve been placed, they open up. Put them in a harsh environment and they close very quickly.”
    • Where are such people in my daily life? I wonder, back in my trailer. Everywhere, comes the answer, but I can’t see or stop to hear them. I’m too caught up in my own schedule, my seeming busyness. Like someone who plays the radio all the time and claims never to hear the sea.
    • Luxury indeed to follow whim; my conscious mind can argue me out of any belief and into it again. Pure joy to inhabit a world whose dictionary has no place for “worry” or for “strife.” I recall the day I flew across the ocean after hearing that my father was in the ICU; as I stepped into the small hospital room, I realized that my bank account, my resume, my business card would none of them be of very much help at all. The only thing that could sustain him—or me—would be whatever I’d gathered in stillness.
  • Review of Pico Iyer’s new book here: Pico Iyer Made His Name Traveling. Now He Explores Inner Landscapes. (NY Times, Jan 3 2025)
  • Photo: Vladimir Miranda, Cabo Mexico.
  • Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”

28 thoughts on “Miracle, all of it.”

  2. Beautiful connections – from the land and/or the sea, there are undeniable parallels. Aren’t we all deeply rooted in some thing?

    1. The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable. And part of its beauty—what deepens and extends it—is that it belongs to all of us. Every now and then I hear a car door slam, or movement in the communal kitchen, and I’m reminded, thrillingly, that this place isn’t outside the world, but hidden at its very heart. In the solitude of my cell, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they’re in the same room, reminded in the sharpest way of why I love them; in silence, all the unmet strangers across the property come to feel like friends, joined at the root. — Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, January 14, 2025)

  3. I wish I were able to distill beauty out of the smile act of being. He is able to feel fully alive while in his ‘cell’ – a powerful paradox. Yet I think I get. When you silence all the noise, it is in that silence that one can hear the most profound sounds. I’d love to get there, but wherever I go, the energizer bunny living in my brain doesn’t allow it

  6. Always had this admiration and fondness for Pico Iyer. To the point where I see his name, and I feel stillness/peace.
    Thank you for sharing

  9. Such beautiful prose. I had noted his name down a while ago (probably your fault then, too) and must move it up the list. sigh.

  10. My mum used to go, maybe three times in her later life, to a monastery for a few days. I never quite understood that but it seemed to give her some much needed inner silence and peace. One of my nieces goes to places like that too – for weeks a time. £
    To me it‘s unimaginable, I have these tiny wheels spinning in my head at all times, although I might feel totally calm, composed and serene. I just cannot stop my brain from doing loops and bouncing. Just back from a combined music & lecture in a solemn church in Zurich. We went for the J.S. Bach music and the solo cantate, but it was a beautiful combination of deep words and joyful music. HH slept soundly 10‘ after our return and what do I do????? Reading some wp posts and having the rabbits in my grey matter chase joyfully each other…
    And those whales – – –

    1. “Just back from a combined music & lecture in a solemn church in Zurich.” This must have been a beautiful experience. And your Mum was ahead of all of us by years….

Leave a Reply