Forum From the Archives: Travel Writer Pico Iyer Celebrates the Joys of Sitting Still
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on Forum, we'll listen back to my conversation with acclaimed author Pico Ayer last month about how stillness can inspire strength, peace, and action when the world feels up in flames.

After his California home burned in a wildfire, Iyer retreated to a remote monastery in Big Sur. There, he discovered the power of solitude and stillness to help process loss and cope with uncertainty. Iyer's new book is called A Flame. Join us after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Pico Ayer may be best known for globetrotting books like Video Night and Kathmandu and The Global Soul, but in recent years, his work has focused more on the joys and power of solitude and silence. His new book, A Flame, is tragically timely as it comes out amid the destruction and loss of life of the L.A. wildfires. Ayer lost his home in Santa Barbara in a previous wildfire, and A Flame is about how he found peace in a Big Sur monastery after the experience.

He joins us now to talk about what he finds in the quiet and stillness and why his inner journeys can mean more to him than his far-flung trips across the globe. Do you make space for silence in your life, listeners? What does it bring you?

Pico Iyer, it's a pleasure to have you on Forum. Thank you, Mina. I'm so happy to be here. You know, A Flame is about your decades of visits to a monastery in Big Sur, which you first went to after your home in Santa Barbara burned down. And fire is a recurring theme throughout the book. And with the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles, I just couldn't help but wonder what it's like to talk about this book at this moment.

As you said, tragically timely. Sadly, if you give the title of Flame to a book, it's going to be much too timely to many, too many people far too often. Fires are no longer a surprise. And at some point anywhere in the globe, there are likely to be fires remaking our lives. And so I suppose, as you saw, my book is an attempt to

to think about how we can stay grounded in the face of the impermanence that we all encounter and how we can almost stay hopeful in the midst of the uncertainty that is ever more urgent for us. So almost a response to the fires that are a fact of life for so many these days. And the title of Flame and all the meanings it encompasses, obviously fire,

But does it also describe what it feels like when you are in silence and stillness? Oh, this is a wonderful perception. Exactly. Because the book is about how to keep the inner flames of conviction and confidence and hope alive as the external flames rewriting our lives. And one of the reasons I chose the title was this classic story of the Desert Fathers who

And I think one monk came to an elder monk and he said, I do good deeds. I read the scripture. I try to be a good person. What more can I do? And the elder monk turned to him and said, if you so wish, you can become all aflame.

And I think by that he meant that if you really can take yourself to the deepest part of you, you're much less scared of external threats than you might be otherwise. And it sounds very abstract, but I've spent 50 years with the Dalai Lama and 33 years with these Benedictine monks, and I'm constantly moved and impressed at how unsuaged they are by suffering and difficulty. And they're living some of the most challenging lives I know, and they never lose hope.

There's another description you have about being in solitude, and you say, 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. Why do you think that is?

I think we get distracted by surfaces and externals. And if my wife were with me in this room, I might notice she hasn't combed her hair and she may notice I haven't buttoned my shirt. And we're not engaging with our deepest souls as much as when I think about her from afar. Sometimes I'll go into the room and just see her things and it pierces me almost to the point of tears because then I remember exactly the person who's there. And

I'm one of those people who loves solitude. I'm an only child. As a writer, I spend many hours every day by myself.

So the surprise of going to this very solitary monastery was to realize that solitude is just a gateway to a richer sense of community and compassion. And the only reason for me to retreat from the world was so that I could come back to it with much more to offer my wife and my mother and my friends. Solitude is a means to the end of richer companionship.

Let me invite listeners to share if they set aside time for silence and stillness. And if you do, how? What do you get from it? You can tell us by emailing forum at kqed.org, calling us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786, or posting on our social channels at kqedforum.org.

So interestingly, you quote an old friend asking you, isn't it selfish to leave your loved ones behind? Why did you want to include that? Is it something you yourself worried about at some point? Yes. I mean, I took great pains to include that sentence.

because it can seem like an indulgence. I'm aware that I'm very lucky to be able to summon the time and resources to go on retreat. And it must be said, so I've made more than 100 retreats at this Benedictine Hermitage in Big Sur over 33 years. And to this day, every time I drive along Highway 1, I'm really guilty about leaving my aged mother behind and fretful that my bosses can't get hold of me for 72 hours, worried I'm missing a friend's birthday party. But then, as I was saying, as soon as I get there...

I realize it's only by going there that I can reclaim anything joyful and calm and fresh to bring back to my mother and my colleagues and my friends. Otherwise, they're just getting my distractedness. And of course, they can all function very happily for 72 hours without me. I'm not the center of the world. And

I've noticed that every time I come back to my mother's house and she opens the door and she suddenly sees her son alight with excitement and gratitude and new ideas, she too is relieved that I made that investment. So as you say, one of my friends said, isn't it selfish to go on retreat? And I said, not if it's the only way you can learn to be a little less selfish. And I think if I was constantly driving the 101 freeway in rush hour traffic, going from the bank to the supermarket,

I'd be much less a good a friend and much less good a son and husband than I hope to be by just taking a deep breath and remembering what I love. What do you see as the purpose of your retreats into silence and solitude? To recall what's most important.

So I find these days so much is coming in on all of us all the time. There are a thousand things in my head, there are a thousand things on my desk, and I can't sift the trivial from the essential. And as soon as I step into the silence that's not an absence of noise but really a presence of everything I sleepwalk past,

the trivial falls away and the essential rises to the top and I know what I should give my life to and what I should return to. And I think the other part of it is that I don't trust myself so much when I'm chattering like this, but I feel all of us have a silent self, which is where the deeper part of us resides, not concerned with resume and career and making an impression on the world, but

but some much more profound connection. And so I want to reclaim that lost part of me without which I would be so much poorer and less useful. A person, T.S. Eliot years ago talked about the life we have lost in living. And the world is so accelerated now. I think we're all in danger of losing that life and then wondering why we're feeling so lost and overwhelmed.

You also quote Thoreau as saying, I have no private good, the seeming hermit, unless it be to my particular attempt to serve the public.

Yes. And, you know, some people think of Thoreau as the ultimate selfish hermit. And so I wanted to remind them that he writes in Walden, I'm not naturally a hermit. I love company as much as anyone. And when he went to live in his cabin on Walden Pond, it was only to be a more useful member of his community. His first lecture at the Concord Lyceum was not on solitude, but on...

And he was known around town as the guy who fixed people's plumbing and looked after Emerson's family for 10 months when Emerson was touring and holding melon parties every year. He was a central part of the community, partly because he took the time.

to gather his inner resources. And I suppose for me the most powerful example of this are the monks that I go and stay with because of course for me it's a very luxurious thing to sit in a little room above the radiance of Big Sur with absolute freedom and a day that lasts a thousand hours. But I can only do that because the 15 monks are working round the clock to look after one another and to take care of guests such as me. So they're living a life of complete service.

And if ever there's a way for somebody like me, a solitary writer, to learn about selflessness, it's by seeing models of service like that. Yeah.

I find that I'm seeing a lot of stories about people in solitude, and I'm not sure that it's having the incredibly great public effect. I mean, there's an Atlantic magazine cover story currently that is headlined The Antisocial Century, and the writer Derek Thompson says that self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America today.

A lot of that solitude is in front of screens, and he quotes people as saying people feel uncomfortable in the world today, and they are choosing solitude as sanctuary. So I wonder what your thoughts are on that, and if this is suggesting that there is a way—

to seek solitude that is truly rejuvenating in the ways that you describe. Yeah, that's such a good question, Mina. And I think the core issue is what are you filling your mind with? How much is it chosen solitude? And how much are you going to learn from masters of solitude who are masters, as I see it, of compassion, as the monks and nuns that I know are?

So you're absolutely right. I think when I'm at home or when I'm driving along the freeway, it's easy to feel very isolated and all I'm getting is the latest tweet or CNN update or whatever.

And when I drive up to that hermitage, since there's no cell phone reception, there's no internet connection and there's no television, suddenly I'm freed of all the chatter in my head. And I'm filled with the Pacific Ocean in the distance, the light on the sea, the rabbit in my garden, the song of birds. And that actually replenishes me and reminds me how little alone I'm in. In other words, I'm not in a little chamber surrounded by screens wishing I were with people.

but I'm sort of lost in something much larger than I am, and I feel an instant connection with everyone else in that community, the other 15 people who are going to stay, who are there for the same reason as I am. So when I walk down the road and I meet a fellow traveler and we exchange a couple of sentences,

I very quickly feel that that person's one of my closest friends because we're not joined by our CV or where we happened to work or where we went to college. We're joined by the fact we've both got this longing to recapture something deep and lost within ourselves, and we've both sought out silence. And so even a brief interaction there feels like a very rich sort of treasure for the heart. So I know exactly. We think of this as the lonely century, and we think of this as the century of silence

physical connection and actually emotional disconnection because our connections are through phones and planes and the like. And this is really an attempt to connect with the wider world outside us and to be reminded of things that outlast us. I mean, everybody who knows the Big Sur landscape knows that part of the beauty of that area is that the human element is very small. You're surrounded by tall redwoods,

the vast blue plate of the Pacific Ocean and high cliffs. And that itself, for me, is a consolation. And again, I remember during the pandemic, every day when I woke up, I thought, I have a choice. I can listen to the news and go online, and within about three minutes, I'll feel really hopeless and despairing. Or I can take a walk on this bright spring afternoon in California and feel flooded with hope and possibilities. And in both cases, I'm by myself.

But when I'm taking a walk in nature, I feel the opposite of lonely. And when I'm sitting before a screen, as you say, I probably feel an acute sense of isolation. We're talking with Pico Iyer about his new book, A Flame. More after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Nina Kim. We're talking this hour with writer Pico Ayer about his new book, A Flame, and why his inner journeys can be more to him than his far-flung trips across the globe. Ayer also lost his home in Santa Barbara in a previous wildfire, and A Flame is about how he found Pico.

Peace in a big surhermitage after that experience. And listeners, you are invited to join the conversation. Tell us by posting on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram threads, at KQED Forum, or by calling 866-733-6786. If you set aside time for silence or stillness, how or where and what you get from it,

or if you have ambivalence about pursuing solitude or how we pursue solitude these days, you can also email your comments to forum at kqed.org.

And David on Discord writes, I'm a big fan of silent retreats at Benedictine monasteries. I went to New Mallory Assistercian Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa during the time they filmed Field of Dreams. In fact, many of the monks can be seen on tractors in the final scene of the film showing, if you build it, they will come. Anyway, as a layman, the monks demonstrate hospitality by providing a simple room or board for free, decantation optional, and attendance at Vespers also optional.

I want to talk more about this hermitage that you go to Pico, and I'm wondering if you could read a passage from your book. Yes, of course. Maybe I will read the very first page of the book, thinking about all the people who are suffering in Los Angeles in the middle of the fires, thinking about the fact that I was caught in the middle of a fire, as you say, and lost everything in the world many years ago, and remembering

remembering how last Wednesday I flew into Southern California just as the fires were raging and went into our rebuilt house, no power, no phone service, and was living by the light of a little lantern the whole of last week, which is how so many people have to live now, even in affluent California. So this is how the book begins. Two men in white robes stand at the end of the road high above the empty highway.

That fire last October, says one, young and slim, his eyes burning under his shaven head. It came within three miles of us. At one point, our road got blocked and there was no way out. It was radiant. His older monastic brother says nothing. For three days and nights, Cyprian goes on, the sky was black, like sooty fog all the time.

I went down to the last bench and the whole ocean was blood red. Plumes of smoke were rising from the hills. I heard trees exploding. It was incandescent. I don't know what to say. Fire has already left its mark on me. You pay for your blessings, I venture at last. We do, says the other, burly with gentle eyes. A lot of people don't understand that. They see only the beauty.

The beauty, of course, is hard to miss. In the distance, headlands that stretch towards the cities to the south surf, scribbling white around their edges. To our right, a wide expanse of ocean with not a thing to interrupt the blue. A deep valley to our left and dry golden hills from which mountain lions sometimes emerge or their prey. 900 acres of live oak, madrona, redwood and desert yucca a quarter of a mile above the sea.

I wonder if beauty always has to carry a trace of mortality, I try. And my two friends are wise enough not to say a word, looking out over the charred hills to the promise all around.

Viggo, I are reading the opening to A Flame Learning from Silence. Are there more details you want to share about that place? We've talked a lot about the landscape, but are there particularities that we haven't mentioned yet that do something for you when you're there? Yes, and I think most of all, it's the open-mindedness of the monks, just as David was suggesting with his experience in Iowa. So I'm not a Christian.

And yet these devout Catholics open their doors and open their hearts to anyone who shows up at their doorstep. And I quickly saw that they are much less dogmatic than I and my friends are. They're not pious. They're not holier than thou. They're very down to earth. And it made me realize that people who are deeply committed to a tradition are the ones most repulsive.

ready to learn from any other tradition, as I've seen from the Dalai Lama, too. And I think one reason, after 33 years, I wanted to bring this book out now is that I do feel that our nation and our world are more divided than ever.

And the image of Christians reaching out to people who are not Christians and welcoming them and extending hospitality without asking questions seemed one way we could get past our divisions and silence another, because I feel it's our words and our beliefs that are cutting us up. And beyond them, on the far side of them, is a silence that brings us together. If you and I start talking about politics or religion, we'll probably be at odds pretty quickly. But

But if we're sharing a moment of silence, even with 100 people, I think we're joined together in our deepest part beneath our ideologies and assumptions. And also I think that's where the hope lies. I've never seen my friends so despairing as right now. So as a writer, I was thinking, how can I offer some light and inspiration? And that's what I find in the example of these monks and in the silence on the far side of my babble. Yeah.

Well, let me go to some calls that are coming in. Robbie in San Jose. Hi, Robbie. You're on. Hi. Thanks for having me over. I'm just loving what the speaker is saying. And I can totally relate to that.

I visit the Isha Yoga Center in Los Angeles for the occasional retreats and I learn the meditation there and I've been practicing it for quite some time. It just gives me that space to disconnect from daily pressures of life and just be into myself. And what I notice is that I always come back rejuvenated and happier every day.

And like the speaker just said, when I'm going on retreats where there are so many more people just like us who go into that silence, it just creates a very powerful space to go into that silence and come back rejuvenated.

I especially loved what the speaker said about the choice we have daily. A similar quote from one of my favorite speakers, Sadhguru, says, "We have a choice every moment to either be happy or sad or in despair or angry, right? And we can make that choice to become how we want. So if you want to become more happier, we have that choice every moment." And I find that that silent space every day to meditate and revel in that.

Oh, Robbie, that's really lovely. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences with it and what it's given to you. Thank you. Let me go next to caller Scott in Dublin. Hi, Scott, you're on.

Hi. I am aware that Mr. Iyer has done some work in the past with Leonard Cohen, and the things he's reflecting on remind me of a little bit I know about Leonard's later decades, in which he split time between a monastery and his life in Los Angeles and as a performer. And I just wondered if...

if Mr. Eyre has any comment about Leonard Cohen's work and how it relates to these thoughts about solitude. I'm sure he does. Thanks, Scott. Yeah, thank you indeed, Scott. So Leonard plays a big part in this book, partly because I wanted to remind us that

The silence I'm describing is non-denominational. In other words, it's available to everybody and it's to be found in every monastery and convent, in my experience, in every tradition, religious tradition. So in Leonard's case, it was a Zen monastery where he was living as an ordained monk for five and a half years when I first met him in 1995.

And what struck me at that point was that here was a man who had been a celebrity for 30 years, who could be doing anything he wanted with anyone in the world. He'd savored all the pleasures of the world. And he told me with characteristic passion and eloquence, this is the real profound and voluptuous and delicious adventure. This is the great excitement in life.

scrubbing floors, shoveling snow, looking after his 88-year-old Japanese teacher and giving himself to his community. And...

You know, monasticism always involves a great sacrifice, but here he'd given up the whole being, the public entity that was known as Leonard Cohen, turned himself into an anonymous grant and was just serving the other much younger students in his community. And I think the other thing that might be worth saying in this context about Leonard is that he was far and away the most articulate writer I've ever met. Of course, he was a wizard with words, as we know from his poems and songs, but also in person. He could talk spellbindingly about everything.

But the first time that I went to have lunch with him in his very modest house in an unfashionable part of L.A., we spoke at lunch and he spoke beautifully about politics and the life of the spirit and his journeys to Cuba and Greece and much else. But at the end of the lunch, he took two folding chairs out to his tiny front garden, looking out on a quiet residential street and facing a little bed of flowers. And he sat down and he invited me to sit down next to him. And then we sat and we sat.

We sat, nothing, no words. And finally, I thought this was a gentle hint. I said, you must be busy, I should be going. And he looked at me beseechingly and said, please don't go.

And I was so touched that his monastic practice had taught him that really silence was the richest form of friendship and trust he could extend to anyone, even though he spoke so beautifully in every sentence, that silence was what was going to join us at the core. And I think many people who visited his home found that they would just sit in silence with him. And then, of course, I remembered that

The monastic name his wise teacher had given him was Jikan, which means the silence between two thoughts. And so that teacher realized that somebody who lives by and with words like Leonard Cohen

probably found his truest, deeper self beyond words and in silence. I find that I have a social self and I have a silent self. And the silent self is the one I really have faith in. And that's what I want to recover because if I lose that, my social self is just going to be as flimsy as a cocktail party napkin.

He also mentions the fact that he had entrusted someone for so long who took all his money. Yes, while he was at the monastery. And that was a sign that he was too unworldly in some ways, that he forgot all about his life in the world while he was serving the others.

But what I said to him at that point was, well, being in the monastery was probably the ideal preparation for coming down from the mountain and finding that you were almost bankrupt. And as many of your listeners know, I'm sure he went on the road when he was 73. He gave 380 concerts in his late 70s and suddenly became more cherished than ever before.

Partly because I feel, having first met him in the monastery, that he was bringing to the great concert halls of the world all the passion and depth and intimacy of a meditation hall. I think when people saw him on stage, they'd see him kneeling and bowing before his fellow monks.

performers and musicians and almost emptying himself out. And they didn't feel he had any designs on them. He wasn't trying to sell them on his music on Leonard Cohen, but he was really trying to invite them into something larger than themselves. So I think his concerts would never have been so successful if he weren't a monk. By talking about how it was the exact preparation, you talk about how

It is not your success or the way that you make a living, but really the stillness, what you gain from the time of stillness and silence that will sustain you through the inevitable nasty moments of life, I guess. Exactly. What is that it? What is it? Thank you, Mina. Yes, that's the heart of it. So my question to myself is, what can I bring to the ICU?

My loved ones will be at the ICU often, and I too at some point. And I remember while I was writing this book, I suddenly received a phone call that my mother had had a massive stroke. So for 35 years she was, for 35 days she was in the intensive care unit, teetering between life and death. And I'm her only child, and I was sitting by her bedside, and like anyone I was thinking, what do I have to bring to this moment? How can I support my mother? How can I find strength in myself? And just as you say,

I realized that my resume was of no use then. All the books I've written, not much help. Such money as I had in the bank account of limited use that I felt the only thing I could bring to my mother and to myself in that difficult moment was my inner resources. In other words, what I'd gathered in my inner savings account. And that would come not from racing around in the world or decorating my CV.

but spending time in silence and trying to access that part of me that is less frightened and less fretful and less ambitious. And I say this only because whoever you are, life is going to make a house call many times over, and each one of us is going to face a version of the situation. It could be a wildfire, it could be a bad diagnosis, it could be a car crash. But I think we have to be ready to deal with difficulty, and in some ways we have to prepare for difficulty. And so a long time ago after our fire incident,

I thought, well, I want to learn from monks because they're essentially teaching us how to live and how to love and how to die. And those are important things that all of us need.

We're talking with writer Pico Iyer about his new book, A Flame Learning from Silence. And you, our listeners, are sharing if you set aside time for silence and stillness and what you get from it, or are you ambivalent about pursuing solitude or those who do? And you're sharing that at 866-733-6786 by emailing forum at kqed.org, finding us on our social channels, on threads, Instagram, Facebook, Blue Sky, and others.

Anne writes, I find silence and withdrawal the ultimate act of selfishness. So much more can be gained by helping other people. Steve on Discord writes, I have long relished even needed solo time for reflection and introspection. But that's genuinely solo isolation, never seeing anyone. These days, I find I can actually get that wish, that with one other person, my wife. I experience her as so much a part of my being that she isn't an intrusion into my isolation.

I do want to ask you about one thing I do worry about, Pico, which is when people do say, and I don't think this is what you meant, but it's just a reminder of like, oh, I turn off the news. I don't engage with that so that I can be happy, right? But there's also this part of me that is fearful about

Using solitude and the need for it and what you can gain from it as a justification to sort of disengage from politics and government, the things that are extremely interested in engaging with you, right? And so to shut it out is, you know, for very understandable, maybe self-protection and so on, right? Mm-hmm.

can then proliferate the things that really ultimately will cause great suffering. It's a very good point. I think my, again, question to myself is, how can I help and what can I do? And there are certain things that I need to know about that are happening in the world, but that I don't feel I have much ability to affect. And there are other things, like the people around me and the people I'm going to meet later today, that I do feel I have.

I can affect and I want to affect positively. As you know, I've been in the mainstream media for 42 years now and I spend a lot of my time going to Iran and Cuba and North Korea to witness those places firsthand. So I'm not getting them just through my screens. But what I'm

But what I feel is that we all need to know what's happening in the world. But so much of what fills the media now is commentary, prediction, projection and opinion. And that doesn't really help. So, for example, with the fires in Los Angeles, we need to know what's happening there. We need to think about the people who are suffering and how we can help them. But we probably don't need hundreds of commentators like myself discoursing on the fire.

That just is coming between us and the reality. And I find in my own experience, my thoughts are much less interesting and important than the real world. And I kind of want to get out of my thoughts and into the world, which maybe is a variation of what you were saying.

And I think when you're extending the invitation wonderfully to our listeners to share their moments of silence, and I think probably everybody listening to this conversation does something to clear her head or to gather her thoughts, whether it's swimming every day or practicing yoga or cooking or going for a run. Most of us do that, but the world is accelerating at such a pace.

that I worry that we're living at a post-human speed now and that humans were never meant to live at a speed determined by machines. And the only way we could do that is by becoming machines ourselves, which none of us want. So I do think that if we get caught up in the whirlwind of the news and the latest Instagram feed and the latest update,

we don't have any time and space to make sense of all of it. And the more and more is coming in on us, but we're buried under it rather than being able to take a clear perspective. And we have to step back a little just to see the larger picture. It's like when you step into a museum and there's a very complicated canvas there. You have to keep stepping back and back and back to see what it's saying to you and to make sense of it. And if I am one inch away from the world, it's just chaos.

And it's only when I'm one yard away from the world I can begin to see its proportions and, again, what's important. Right. But you're seeking that. You're seeking to understand it. And I guess that's the part I fear, that people will stop seeking to understand it because it is just grim.

Yes. Lynn writes, I find inner quiet in a single immersive and mindful practice. For me, that is the Japanese tea ceremony. It is better with other tea practitioners so we can make tea for each other. But a solo practice works too. The practice involves simply beauty, respect, and cleanliness in every motion. Even the conversation is very limited, focused on expressing gratitude. More with Pico Ayer after the break. Stay with us. I'm Nina Kim. Stop now.

Thank you.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

We're talking this hour about the benefits of silence and solitude in a world that feels chaotic and constantly changing, about the connection between seeking silence and taking action. We're talking about it with Pico Ayer, travel writer and journalist. His new book is Aflame, learning from silence, and his many other books include The Art of Stillness, The Half-Known Life, Video Night in Kathmandu, The Global Soul, and Autumn Light. Do you set a time for silence and stillness? How? Where? What do you get from it? Has it

helped you recover from loss? Have you spent time in beautiful places like Big Sur? What do those landscapes give to you? Have you felt ambivalent about pursuing solitude or those who do? You can call us at 866-733-6786, the email address forum at kqed.org. You can post on our social channels. Let me go to Jim in Novato. Hi, Jim. You're on. Hi.

Hello. I'm so glad you're still around, Pico. I loved your book, Video Night in Kathmandu, and I haven't really heard much about you since then. I started meditating in March of 2001, and that was the, you know, and then in September, the planes hit the towers. So that was a good time to start. And in the past 21 years, I've

It was very hard in the beginning for years and years and years. I tried to develop a practice where I would get up every day and do it. And then in March of 2001, I finally said, I'm going to do it. And so in that time, I probably only missed the morning meditation maybe a dozen times out of all that time. And no profound revelations or anything. However, every once in a while, very rarely, I would get an answer to a construction problem that was up.

you know, very difficult, just come to me during my meditation. And I'll just end it right there. Thank you very much. And I'm looking forward to buying your book. Thank you, Jim. Yes, Pico, you, Jim may not have been familiar or with a lot that you have done since Video Night in Kathmandu, but you have written so much and you have a very busy, successful writing career. So I want to ask you about this.

transitioning back to the world, transitioning out of the silent spaces because you share this story that made me chuckle, how you felt so alive when you got back from being in silence that you roared through two weeks of emails. And sometimes in your haste, you ended up writing something sort of abrupt or insensitive. And you write in your book,

Two days later, the realization. What does it mean to sit in silence if it leaves me, at least for my first few hours back, less attentive, less thoughtful, more cruel than I'd ever hoped to be? So what is happening when you come back and you're like, I'm going to respond to two weeks of emails? And also, why did you want to include this moment?

Well, I wanted to challenge my complacency and remind myself and the reader it's not all love and light and that there are consequences. It's such a shock to the system to leave. And when I go there for three days, I would say for a day and a half alone,

after I come back. I'm still walking on air to some extent, but pretty soon I'm fretting about my tax return and cursing the next diver on the freeway and back to my old habits. And sometimes, as that excerpt shows, and I wanted to include it in the book, I'm so missing the paradise I've just quit that perhaps I'm more impatient and more inattentive after I come down than I would ever want to be. But I think it speaks perfectly to what Jim was saying, because

And my friends who meditate say much of the time their monkey mind is chattering all the time. They end up more exhausted than they were before. It's not giving them instant results. But cumulatively, over 20 years, I think it does begin to change us. It's like the 10,000 rule if you're practicing the piano or playing a sport or whatever. Slowly, slowly, slowly for all the frustrations.

you do evolve somewhat in a way you wouldn't have otherwise. And that's what I found with writing too because I've done so much of it. And so sometimes when I go on retreat,

It's one of these torrential winter storms breaks out and the rain beats down on the roof and the wind shakes the flimsy foundations of the little trailer I'm sitting on. And I look out and it's absolute mist and I can't see a single light or sign of human habitation. It's really scary and unsettling. And I know just to get a carton of milk, I'll have to venture out and probably never come back. So not all the time in the silence is comforting. And all of us know that if you're left to yourself...

Shadows come out. Demons jump out. That's what Jesus experienced on 40 days and nights in the wilderness. It's what the Buddha experienced on his night of enlightenment. There can't be sunlight without shadow. And sometimes in silence, most difficult memories rise to the top too.

But I still would rather face all that in the relative comfort and safety of this place than when I'm racing to the airport, as I will be doing 40 minutes from now, and sort of jangled and not able to live fully and bring myself to whatever I need to face. How does your writing at the Hermitage differ from your other writings?

Well, when I'm there, it's the most creative place I know. I can't stop scribbling. But after a few years, I realized that none of what I write there really translates to the world because it's too quiet and it's too above the clouds. And it has the sound of somebody whispering to himself in an empty room, probably because it is the sound of somebody whispering to himself in an empty room. But my writing about the Hermitage has certainly changed a lot over the 33 years I've been doing it. And so this book,

I tried to make almost like a haiku. So it'd be very personal, but it wouldn't have to do with personality. And each little vignette is meant to be a kind of parable. It was a real challenge because...

Since I write so much when I'm there, I'd accumulated more than 4,000 pages of notes, and I had to compress them into as short a book as possible. So it meant that almost I was speaking from silence, and the book is largely about silence and everything that's not said and everything that's left out. So it's very, very compressed, and it's meant to be like a series of small explosions. But I would write about this hermitage in a way that I would never write about anything else in my life because it's about...

Cutting away everything inessential and coming to a core and just the directness of facing something right at the heart of things. Yeah. You tell a friend that the point of being there is not to get anything done, not to finish something or to write something. It's not like a writing retreat, but it's to see what might be worth doing.

Writing about, I guess. Yes, it's the only place in my life where I allow myself not to write. Otherwise, I'm hostage to my schedule, as most of us are. I wake up pretty much every day of the year, go to my desk and do five hours of writing. And that's the only place where I allow myself to do the most important thing of all, which is nothing.

And it's only by doing nothing I realize I can usefully do anything at all. So the day lasts a thousand hours in the absence of a cell phone and computer, and I wake up and I just let intuition or the moment determine what I do. Shall I take a walk? Shall I pick a book out at random? Shall I just sit in my garden? And sad to say, I never allow myself that kind of freedom in my regular life, so I have to make a conscious attempt to incorporate it. And people do think that this could be selfish, but to me it's like a football team game.

When they're moving down the field, they have to have a huddle so they know how to constructively move down the field. When they're using a hurry-up offense, it's often chaos. So unless we take the time to take a deep breath and decide what we want to do and how we want to do it, I think we're just stumbling blindly through the world, or at least I am. Let me go to caller Lisa in Sacramento. Hi, Lisa. You're on. Hello.

Hello, good morning or afternoon, yes. You know, I just wanted to say that I don't even have to take a trip to Big Sur to experience how transformational it is to take time in silence. I can go to the Sacramento River. I can go to a park. I mean, just getting some kind of green time is what improves my mental wealth is how I've heard it put before. But just to stop and

and be silent and take it in. It's taken me years to get here, but it's been a transformation and a huge game changer for me. So I can't say enough for just being still. And it doesn't have to be for a long time. Taking that deep breath in, you know, and being still. We're nodding in the studio, Lisa. Let me go next to David in Daly City. Hi, David, you're on.

Thank you. I have been to the Hermitage, and I can empathize, but I have a slightly different perspective. When I was a freshman in college at 17, my freshman English teacher was James Gunn, a science fiction writer, and he assigned us the topic, To Find Oneself, One Must Find Oneself Alone. And I reflected on that and realized that the

The place and time where I was able to constructively solve problems for myself was hiking in the woods. And so I have built into my day now, at 6.30 in the morning, I hike down to the trails along the Pacific Ocean, and I'm alone with myself, maybe the birds and a coyote, but that's where I find the greatest gift of solitude.

You know, Pico, thank you, David. David's comment is reminding me. So you had a friend, I think, and you write about this in the book, who sort of recorded themselves in a moment of, you know, when they were in silence or in solitude at a retreat and then said they listened back and they couldn't understand any of it. And you said, but that's who you really are. Yes, because I think they said I sounded so happy. Yeah.

And I sounded, you know, I was not fretting the way I usually was. And I love what both Lisa and David said, because that's why I wrote the book, that silence, you don't have to go to Big Sur. It's available to everyone. You don't have to spend three days. You can take a walk for an hour. You can probably, almost anyone listening to this has a park or a beautiful space available to them in California where they can just go and collect themselves. And as Lisa was saying,

limit the screen time and increase the world time in some ways. And this came home to me and I think to many people during the pandemic because I couldn't travel very much. Of course, I couldn't go on retreat. So I just started taking a walk up the road behind my mother's house early in the morning as the sun was rising over the hill and flooding the valleys with gold. And I would look at the ocean in the distance and think,

This is as beautiful as anywhere I would go, anywhere in the world. It's in my backyard. And until the pandemic necessitated it, I'd never walked to the end of the road where my parents had lived for 50 years, 20 minutes away, and had overlooked the treasure in my backyard. So I think whoever is listening to this has these treasures and this silence close at hand. And it's just a matter of

determining to seek them out. I mean, William James said, our life is determined by what we choose to pay attention to. And I think that's the heart of the matter. Do we want to pay attention to taking that hike or seeking out the silence? Or do we want to pay attention to what happened in Wall Street six seconds ago? Let me go to Hussein in San Francisco. Hi, Hussein, you're on.

Good morning. I would like to ask you, the author, about another author that was born in India and died in India. His name was Bedeel, and he wrote a lot about silence. And I'm just going to quote one line from Bedeel and translate it into my poor English to see how much similarity does that have with what he's doing.

The line goes in Farsi. Of course, Beidala, at that time when he wrote this in India, he was born in Patna, India, and he died in New Delhi, India. And the translation of that line goes like this. There are so many sweet pleasures in silence. Take a bamboo flute as an example.

It encapsulates, when it encapsulates its complaints as a knot in its heart, it turns to sugar. Of course, sugar at that time was not so notorious as it is now. Hmm.

Hussein, thank you. Any response to that line? No, it's just a beautiful reminder that this exists in every continent and in every century. When you mentioned Farsi, I once wrote a whole book about the great poets of Iran who've given us all this wisdom in history.

their own dual terms, but it comes essentially to the same thing. A Spanish Catholic priest who practices Zen wrote a beautiful book not long ago called Biography of Sai and Singh, much the same thing. But thank you so much for sharing that pearl from India. Yeah, thank you, Hussein. Let me remind listeners, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Your experience of losing everything that you owned and handwritten notes for a book that you were about to write as well, um,

Your friend Paula asks you if losing everything, if it was losing everything that brought you to the hermitage. And in a way, literally, it is because you have a friend who sees you sleeping on the floor at another friend's house and says, hey, you should try this hermitage for 25 bucks a night. That is a much better place for you to be. But your response is, I don't think so, but it did clear the way for many things. So talk about that experience of losing everything and why that response.

So yes, I lost everything in the world. And as you say, I felt not just losing my past, but my future. All my boyhood dreams of becoming a writer were sometimes, in certain respects, reduced to ash because I lost actually my next eight years of writing and the next three books that were all in handwritten notes.

But as the months went on, I did see how it wasn't entirely a loss and could be a liberation. So when I called my editor, for example, and I told him, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to produce all those books. I don't have any notes. He commiserated. But then he said, you know, if you don't have your notes, you're going to write from memory. And

from emotion and from imagination, actually from much deeper places than your notes, it can probably make you a better writer. And when the insurance company came along and offered to replace all my belongings,

I realized I could live without 90% of the books and clothes and furniture I'd accumulated. I had much too much stuff, and I'd always wanted to live lightly. And suddenly, I got the chance to sort of remake my life and fill my room and my head with much less than I had before. And as you said perfectly, I'm sure I never would have thought of going to a Benedictine hermitage had it not been for the fire. And now I've come upon one of the best liberating forces in my life.

So I've been thinking about that in relation to my friends in Los Angeles and realizing it's going to seem like terrible loss right now. But as the years proceed, I think it may take on a different coloring. When I think back on it, I'm so surprised that

After being stuck in the fire for three hours, finally a fire truck got up to us and told me it was safe to drive down. And I went to a supermarket and I got a toothbrush and it was the only thing I had in the world. And then I went to my friend's house to sleep on the floor. But before I slept, I went to a computer because my job in those days was to be a columnist for Time magazine and I would write the back page essays. And

And so I wrote an account of the fire because I'd had this eyewitness account of what was then the worst fire in Californian history. And I ended it with a poem I'd found from Japan in the 17th century where the poet writes, My house burnt down. I can now see better the rising moon.

In other words, losing everything sharpens your sense of priorities. Suddenly you see what you don't need and suddenly you see what you most care about. So the very night I lost everything, something in me, maybe wiser than I am, realized this isn't all a loss and not everything is lost. You still have your mother and your thoughts and your memories and your words and your inner savings account and your wife.

Yes, and as each month passed, I more and more found how much I still had and how much I hadn't lost internally. I'd always believed that home is not where you live, but what lives inside you. And I really came to see that powerfully in the wake of the fire. A couple of comments, this listener on Discord writes...

I find it oddly poignant that I'm listening to this program on silent contemplative living and reflecting, and elsewhere on my browser, I'm just learning of the passing of David Lynch, someone else who I think advocated quiet reflection as a necessity for living fully. A great meditator. Yes, I'm so sorry I hadn't realized. And when you watch David Lynch's films, you can feel the silence and the stillness from which they emerge. It's a terrible loss. Yes.

And the listener writes, what a timely and peace-giving program. Thank you. Well, thank you. We need all the peace we can get in these tumultuous times. And so as a writer, I worked very hard on this book to try to make the reader feel as calm as I have sometimes felt because I think we're all crying out to be released from the acceleration and distraction of the world and brought back to the kind of hike that David was describing or the kind of quiet place that Lisa was talking about.

They're there externally, but I think we're also glad if we can find them within ourselves again. The book is A Flame Learning from Silence by Pico Ayer. Pico, thank you so much for being with us today. Such a privilege. Thank you, Mina. And my thanks as well to Dan Zoll for producing today's segment. And as always, so grateful to you, our listeners. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.