In Stillness, What You Need Finds You—with Pico Iyer

“It’s never possibility that’s not present. Only me.”

Dear Friends,

The first time I read my favorite poem, On Prayer, this stanza stood out to me…

For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?

And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.

And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.

When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.

Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion.

For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking you shall not receive:

And if you should enter into it to humble yourself you shall not be lifted:

Or even if you should enter into it to beg for the good of others you shall not be heard.

It is enough that you enter the temple invisible.

Kahlil Gibran introduced me to the concept of emptiness. Still, I always wondered how one “enters the temple invisible.”

I was given a window into that journey through my dear friend Pico Iyer’s new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence. It is a stunning reflection of his own experience becoming invisible across 34 years and over 100 stays at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur.

Here’s how he describes this awakening…

“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.”

We all crave this quality of presence; A yearning Pico captures in one of my favorite passages in the book. Here, he is in conversation with a monk at the monastery…

“It must be so hard to die to all of your hopes, but I suppose that's what your life is about, a preparation for death.”

“Yes,” he'd said, “We do have to prepare for death. But I adamantly believe that this isn't first and foremost a training for death. It’s a training for life. It's teaching us how to live.

He'd looked away for a moment, and then back at me. “The longing itself,” he'd said, “is the ecstasy.”

I gasped when I read “the longing is the ecstasy” and was eager to hear Pico’s perception of it…

“Simone Weil said that the danger is not that there’s no bread available. It’s that we won’t acknowledge that we’re hungry.

In other words, we're driving along the 405 freeway and we know that something's missing. But, we say: ‘Oh, it doesn't matter. I'm in a good job. I'm taking care of my family. It’ll take care of itself.’ We drive right past that ache and longing that speaks for something lost and forgotten.

The monks will tell me, or anyone who visits, that what you get at the hermitage is recollection; Meaning it's not a discovery and it's not revelation. It's recollection in the sense of collecting all of the scattered pieces of yourself and remembering something that you know deep inside of yourself, but that you forget in the rush of your everyday life.”

Pico discerns these perspectives as arising from either his social self or his silent self…

“We all have to be somebody. But, it’s a virtue to know that that’s a performance on a stage. There is something deeper and more mysterious going on backstage.

I worry that the external world is so deafening now that it drowns out the inner voice. The inner life is all that we have. Meister Eckhart said: ‘As long as the inner work is strong, the outer will never be puny.’ Take care of your inner landscape, and your relationships, your career, all of that will take care of itself.”

Pico illuminates our time in stillness as an investment in our “inner savings account.” We all know which practices contribute to our’s. Still, we rarely create ample space for them. Here’s your invitation to do so…

“We need to give ourselves the luxury of time without any fences, where we can do nothing or we can do anything. The more busy we are, the more we need to do that.

The Greeks have two words for time. There's Chronos, which is the time marked on the calendar and clock. Then, there’s Kairos, which is sacred time and speaks for those moments that are essentially out of time; When we're deeply in love, praying, or step out onto a beautiful landscape and feel taken out of ourselves. That's why we call them timeless moments.

It’s not permanent by any means. But, in the course of anybody's day, there will be times when you're lifted out of time. The important thing is to be present when they're there.”

The thread that weaves our conversation has become a guiding principle for me: When you spend time in stillness, what you need finds you.

This hour is a rich exploration of the beauty of surrender, why silence is the most trustworthy answer to any question, and how to be present when the muse appears. As Pico writes: “It’s never possibility that’s not present. Only me.”

I hope this conversation touches your soul as deeply as it did mine.

Sending love—especially to all those affected by the tragic wildfires here in Southern California. May you be blessed and carried gently during this time.

Jenna