Description
Pico Iyer is one of the great storytellers of our time. He has traveled the world for decades, writing for periodicals or doing research for one of his many books. During that time, Pico visited the Benedictine Hermitage in Big Sur over a hundred times, in search of silence.
Summary
Pico Iyer returns to our Zen Luminaries Series for a wide-ranging discussion on his life, work, and latest book, Aflame: Learning from Silence.
Reading Aflame may help many to lead lives of greater compassion and deeper peace of mind.
—His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Pico Iyer is one of the great storytellers of our time. He has traveled the world for decades, writing for periodicals or doing research for one of his many books. During much of that time he would return, again and again, to the Hermitage—a Benedictine monastery high above the Pacific Coast in Big Sur, California. Pico has visited the Hermitage over a hundred times in the past thirty-two years, in search of silence. In Aflame: Learning from Silence, he shares memories and reflections on his time spent there in solitude.
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.
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 why I love them; in silence all the unmet strangers across the property come to feel like friends, joined at the root.
And there has been been fire, not just the fire that destroyed Iyer’s Santa Barbara home, but the grass fires threatened his treasured Hermitage and its resident monks.
“Sooner or later the world must burn, and all things in it,” writes the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Yet he also knows that the monk’s first duty is to keep the fires within alight. “If you so wish,” observes one of the Desert Fathers whose sayings Merton collects, “you can become aflame.”
Join us for a fascinating conversation with Pico on the Hermitage, Leonard Cohen’s time as a cloistered Zen monk, his long friendship with the Dalai Lama, and fires that burn within our hearts and in the world outside.
—Jon Joseph
Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England in 1957. In 1980, he became a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, where he received a second Master’s degree, and in subsequent years received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters. Since 1982, he has been a full-time writer, publishing fifteen books translated into twenty-three languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism.
His books include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road and The Art of Stillness. He has been a constant contributor for more than thirty years to Time, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and more than 250 periodicals worldwide. His four recent talks for TED have received more than eleven million views.
Since 1992, Iyer has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan.
Source: www.picoiyerjourneys.com
Jon Joseph Roshi of San Mateo Zen and PZI created this series to support the hardworking innovators and shining voices of modern Zen: scholars, writers, poets, translators, activists, artists, teachers, and more.