Art of stillness

Travel writer Pico Iyer has some insights for all

I forget how much I appreciate Pico Iyer, arguably the greatest travel writer alive today. He has taught me a lot about stillness and finding the stillness within me - even when I am zooming around the planet.

Anne Lamott in Conversation with Pico Iyer on AFLAME

I read this great interview the Six Senses did with him recently and he’s been on my mind. Plus he has a new book out called “Aflame,” which tells of his decades visiting a silent Benedictine retreat.

In Aflame, Iyer chronicles three decades of transformative stays at a tiny monastery high above the sea in Big Sur, California.

Over half a lifetime he has made more than one hundred retreats in this small Benedictine hermitage—sometimes for a week, sometimes for almost a month, often staying with the monks in their enclosure—emerging, nearly always, with a rare sense of joy, clarity, and liberation.

Nowhere in his life of travels has so transformed or reoriented him as his time in silence and his encounters with men and women of e…