Tag: Pico Iyer

Miracle, all of it.

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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.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Camus’s wisdom arose from never forgetting the power of sunlight. He grew up in poverty, he often writes, in the industrial coastal town of Oran, in Algeria, but in another sense he was always rich; he and everyone around him had light and water and sunshine at their doorsteps. He was born with blessings that his friends in the gray classrooms of the Sorbonne envied. “Even my revolts,” he confesses, recalling his boyhood, “were brilliant with sunshine.” His upbringing likewise instructed him in honoring the invisible. “I lived on almost nothing,” he writes at one point, “but also in a kind of rapture.” He clings “like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.”

I look around me—the wonky room, the squeaky terrace, the wide blue grandeur in the distance—and think: No house to maintain, no phones to answer. No noise to block out, no traffic to navigate. I can bring every part of myself to every moment.

— 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:
    • “Success might be another word for peace and peace, at heart, for freedom from ceaseless striving.”
      “And contemplation, I come to see, does not in any case mean closing your eyes so much as opening them, to the glory of everything around you. Coming to your senses, by getting out of your head.“
    • “I’ve never wanted to be part of any group of believers. The globe is too wide, too various, to assume one knows it all.”
    • So why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy…Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
  • Review of Pico Iyer’s new book here: Pico Iyer Made His Name Traveling. Now He Explores Inner Landscapes. (NY Times, Jan 3 2025)
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Sunday Morning

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Yes, and I think we all know that sensation. We have more and more time-saving devices but less and less time, it seems to us. When I was a boy, the sense of luxury had to do with a lot of space, maybe having a big house or a huge car. Now I think luxury has to do with having a lot of time. The ultimate luxury now might be just a blank space in the calendar. And interestingly enough, that’s what we crave, I think, so many of us.

When I moved from New York City to rural Japan — after my year in Kyoto, I essentially moved to a two-room apartment, which is where I still live with my wife and, formerly, our two kids. We don’t have a car or a bicycle or a T.V. I can understand. It’s very simple, but it feels very luxurious. One reason is that when I wake up, it seems as if the whole day stretches in front of me like an enormous meadow, which is never a sensation I had when I was in go-go New York City. I can spend five hours at my desk. And then I can take a walk. And then I can spend one hour reading a book where, as I read, I can feel myself getting deeper and more attentive and more nuanced. It’s like a wonderful conversation.

Then I have a chance to take another walk around the neighborhood and take care of my emails and keep my bosses at bay and then go and play ping pong and then spend the evening with my wife. It seems as if the day has a thousand hours, and that’s exactly what I tend not to experience or feel when I’m — for example, today in Los Angeles — moving from place to place. I suppose it’s a trade-off. I gave up financial security, and I gave up the excitements of the big city. But I thought it was worth it in order to have two things, freedom and time. The biggest luxury I enjoy when I’m in Japan is, as soon as I arrive there, I take off my watch, and I feel I never need to put it on again. I can soon begin to tell the time by how the light is slanting off our walls at sunrise and when the darkness falls — and I suppose back to a more essential human life.

~ Pico Iyer, The Urgency of Slowing Down. An Interview with Krista Tippett (Onbeing, November, 2018)

Sunday Morning

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Upon arriving in the huge, landlocked country of Mongolia—more than seven times larger than Great Britain—you may be taken aback by the runaway developments in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. Ever since some of the world’s largest gold and copper deposits were discovered, some within 70 miles of the city, Mongolia’s economy has taken off like a rocket…But then you hear that more than half of the 1.4 million people in the capital still live in settlements dominated by gers (a traditional style of yurt, like a domed felt tent), sometimes in shockingly simple conditions…

As soon as I ventured out of the city and began bumping across the level, otherworldly steppes of Mongolia, in fact, I realized that nothing I’d seen in 40 years of traveling across Asia could compare with its great, heart-clearing stillness. Within 30 minutes of the hyper-malls, herders will welcome you into their gers to share a feast of marmots, roasted sheep and freshly boiled goats’ heads, much as they might have done in the time of Genghis Khan, the warrior who masterminded the Mongol Empire in the 13th century. If the horsemen who rode all the way to Europe to extend that empire were to return to their ancestral spaces next week, they’d feel right at home.

Part of the special beauty of rural Mongolia is that it redefines everything you thought you knew. A road, I realized as soon as I was jouncing past Bronze Age burial mounds, is a red-dirt scratch across the void; a sight is a jeep the size of an ant, inching across the horizon. A town in the steppes could pass for a subway station almost anywhere else; once, after hours of nothingness, I stopped at a ger camp to find that it also served as a meditation space, a car-repair shop and a leather-tanning workshop. No wonder. Gazing out miles and miles in every direction, I could catch nothing but emptiness—vast enough for the mind to go anywhere (or nowhere at all)—and the sound of the wind, whipping in my ears…

Mongolia haunts a visitor as few other destinations can. After I’d returned home, the power of stepping out of my luxury ger in the Gobi to be met by a 74 million–year-old volcanic outcropping, the eeriness of knowing that dinosaur bones were all around, had gotten inside of me, like a shared dream I couldn’t shake.

In a world flooded with distractions, Mongolia returns one to something ancestral. The clock has little meaning here. Days turn into an ageless cycle of random moments, scanning of the heavens, simple meals, long journeys. Often I didn’t know whether I was traveling into the past or the future. I could simply tell that this was a place that everybody would recognize, if only because it’s somewhere lost inside most of us, lodged like the people we once were and might one day again become.

~ Pico Iyer, excerpts from The Heart-Clearing Stillness of the Mongolian Countryside (wsj.com, February 27, 2018)

Notes:

  • Inspired by Maggie O’Farrell in “I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death“: “When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was read to me and Alice sighs, “Oh, how I long to run away from normal days! I want to run wild with my imagination,” I remember rising up from my pillow and thinking, yes, yes, that’s it exactly. The school trip showed me that it was possible to ease this longing, to sate it. All I had to do was travel. After he had sailed around the Mediterranean in 1869, Mark Twain said that travel was “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Neuroscientists have been trying for years to pin down what it is about travel that alters us, how it effects mental change. Neural pathways become ingrained, automatic, if they operate only by habit. They are highly attuned to alterations, to novelty. New sights, sounds, languages, tastes, smells stimulate different synapses in the brain, different message routes, different webs of connection, increasing our neuroplasticity…I sensed this, at an instinctive level, at age seventeen. That unassailable flood of novelty, the stimulus of uncharted territory, the overload of the unfamiliar, with all synapses firing, connecting, signalling, burning new pathways. I have never forgotten that bus ride from the airport into the centre of Rome, my first sighting of the city. And I have never lost the thrill of travel. I still crave the mental and physical jolt of being somewhere new, of descending aeroplane steps into a different climate, different faces, different languages. It’s the only thing, besides writing, that can meet and relieve my ever-simmering, ever-present restlessness. If I have been too long at home, stuck in the routine of school-runs, packed lunches, swimming lessons, laundry, tidying, I begin to pace the house in the evenings. I might start to cook something complicated very late at night. I might rearrange my collections of Scandinavian glass. I will scan the bookshelves, sighing, searching for something I haven’t yet read. I will start sorting through my clothes, deciding on impulse to take armfuls to the charity shop. I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, wherever I can find it. My husband might return from an evening out to discover that I have moved all the furniture in the living room. I am not, at times like this, easy to live with. He will raise his eyebrows as I single-handedly shove the sofa towards the opposite wall, just to see how it might look. “Maybe,” he will say, as he unlaces his shoes, “we should book a holiday.”
  • Photo: Frederic LaGrange – “Still Waters.” A full moon rises over a pond near Buir Lake in eastern Mongolia, near the Chinese border.

Sunday Morning

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chapel-church-silence-alone-solitude

Perhaps we wouldn’t need chapels if our lives were already clear and calm (a saint or a Jesus may never need to go into a church; he’s always carrying one inside himself). Chapels are emergency rooms for the soul. They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our own lives—usually by finding all we aren’t, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up.

“I like the silent church,” Emerson wrote, “before the service begins.”

~ Pico Iyer, Where Silence is Sacred

Image: Groteleur