Becoming Untrapped (Pico Iyer)

Listen now (61 mins) | "Silence is much better than shouting, and silence is what brings us together as shouting tears us apart."

You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So first I just want to tell you quickly about Pico. Pico Iyer is one of the most beautiful writers working today. He came on Pulling the Thread in January, 2023, to talk about his book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, and now he is back. So we can talk about his new masterpiece, Aflame: Learning from Silence, which for me has been quite prophetic. We'll come to that in a minute and I just want to apologize for the audio. I am in a hotel room with my three cats because I have been out of my house evacuated from my house for a week.

In the past three decades, Pico has made more than 100 retreats to a small monastery above the sea and Big Sur, it is a place I would love to go to one day. And after you hear how Pico describes it, I think you'll feel similarly today, Pico shares what he's learned from his time at the monastery, how he's found the type of silence that most of us truly seek. Why a recollection? Remembering what you already know on some level can be more profound than a great realization and how we might see the people in our life differently and more clearly. Interestingly, Pico says that it was during a stay at the monastery that he realized he wanted to get married. So a big part of the flame, as the title suggests, is forest fire and Pico. And I spoke, I'm looking right now just so I can give you the exact date on November 29th.

They're right, it was the day after Thanksgiving and scheduled the episode for this week, which is the episode that his book comes out. So in 1990, and Pico writes about this beautifully in his book, Pico's house burned down in what at the time was the worst fire in California history. And he tells us the story in this episode. I'll paraphrase it for you here. And so in this conversation you will hear us talk about living adjacent to these high fire zones and the implications of natural disaster in many ways, the difference between stuff and home and losing a home. At this point, we'll see how the rest of the week goes. I have not lost my home. And for that I am incredibly grateful. I'm going to record a solo episode about this experience as well later in the month. And then there's just stuff.

And if you go through this process of evacuation, which Pico and I discuss, you realize that most of the stuff in your life is not something you would even bother buying again. But Pico mentioned that he had lost eight years worth of work. This is before you could digitize anything. And all of his book notes were three books burnt in front of his eyes. And so his voice was in my head as I evacuated and I brought my work. I'm not sure I would've thought to do that, so I'm just going to read a bit and then we will get to the episode.

He writes:

“All chores complete. I sit out in the bright sunlight before lunch and the long drive home. I remember, jogged perhaps by my talk with Paula, accelerating down the road under our burning home. After those hours in the midst of flames, houses smoking on every side, the shattered hooks of cars littering the way I'd had to call my mother away in Florida visiting her nephew to tell her that all her 59 years of photos keepsakes, all her jewels, her lecture notes, were gone.

“There must be something.”

“No, I say it's gone. All gone. Everything we owned is ash.” Then I'd driven to a friend's house to sleep on the floor. Before I did, I asked if I could use a computer. My job at the time involved writing back page essays for Time Magazine and I just had a front seat view on the worst fire in California history. My small piece ended with a poem I'd picked up in Japan. Intuition seemed already to be reminding me that no event is simply good or bad.

My house burned down.

I can now see

better the rising moon.

I'm very tired, but that makes me very emotional. Alright friends, so let's get to our very special thinker, Pico Iyer.

MORE FROM PICO IYER:

Pulling the Thread Episode: “In Search of Paradise”

Aflame: Learning from Silence

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise and other books by Pico Iyer

Pico’s website

Watch Pico Iyer’s TED Talks:

Where is home? (2013)

The art of stillness (2014)

The beauty of what we'll never know (2016)

What ping-pong taught me about life (2019)

New Camaldoli Hermitage

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

Now. So I have not read everything that you've ever written, but is this the first time that you're writing about the monastery?

PICO:

Embarrassingly, ever since I first started staying at this mon street in 1991, I've been writing about it quite a lot. Lots and lots of articles for everyone under the sun. But I thought finally after 33 years, I should try and bring it together under one cover.

ELISE:

Unsurprising to you, I am now plotting how when I can go there, but I don't know honestly whether I could, yes, I could pack suitcases full of books and then let myself randomly choose as you do. But I do not know if I couldn't. I think I would need to use it as the most productive time in order to justify leaving my family to go. And that seems like that's not the point.

PICO:

I think that's exactly the thought that will accompany you on your long, long drive up from LA and exactly the thought that will disappear as soon as you go there. And I say that because it's the thought that accompanies me. So as you can guess, almost every time I would go up there more than a hundred times, it's always feeling really guilty. Leaving my aged mother at home, being out of contact with my bosses for three days, missing out on friend's birthday party, million reasons, always not to go. And as soon as I arrived there, I thought it was only by going there I'd actually have anything useful to offer to my mother and my friends and my colleagues. And also, I'm so glad to be freed of the need to be productive. And I suppose I realized it was only by doing nothing that I could actually do justice to anything at all.

And so I think if somebody were to hear about three days free of distractions, free of internet and cell phone sounds like, oh, the Ideal Writer's Retreat. But I quickly saw that although I can't stop scribbling when I'm there, it's the one place in my life I'm really happy not to be writing. It's the one place I allow myself not to write and just to let that whole part of myself dissolve and see things on a larger picture and decide what I should write or what I should do with my life. And it's a good place for reading what I've written, but it's in some ways too far from the real world actually to get a huge amount done. And that's such a blessing. So I think if you did go up there, I really hope you do and you're not far away. There'd be a lot of surprises in store because it's almost as if you'd suddenly lock a door to self. You've forgotten. And the self that's worried about all the things you were expressing would disappear. And in some ways I think that's what we're going there for. That's what I go there for, to get away from my worrying distracted chattery self with a to-do list six miles long.

ELISE:

And if the anxiety doesn't drive you mad when you're there, so you're not looking for a reason to go find some bars of cell phone reception or panicking about the things that you wish you could Google, it just goes away.

PICO:

I think that's precisely the magic and liberation. Of course, it doesn't work for everybody. And I've had friends who've gone there and they have been fidgety and they've left quickly or they've quickly been conscious of all the things they're missing. But I think the majority of people and certainly myself, that's the beauty of it. So I'm driving along the 1 0 1 Freeway, which well, and then Highway one and I'm full of agitation and anxiety and I step into that silence and I can't even remember that I was that person one hour ago. And I think it's partly because sort of left myself behind. I've left my chat mind behind. I was just reading a sentence actually from Thomas Merton who's of course the most eloquent spokesman on these sea. And he said, as soon as my mind is silent, the world becomes magnificently real. And I was realizing that the lots of different kinds of silence, but I think what most of us are seeking is to silence our minds, to stop it, just jumping around and chattering and coming up with this idea and that idea.

And I find somehow the silence sweeps all that aside. And then all I'm aware of is in that light on the water and the rabbit on my fence and the towing bells and the great beauty of big California, which is always beautiful, but even more if there's no screen coming between you in the world. I've been thinking recently how in some ways I feel it's the ego in us that loves to talk and it's something much deeper that loves to listen, that's more responsive to the world and other people and maybe even to some wisdom inside ourselves. So I think it's as if the talking self just disappears and the listening attentive, wide awake self comes out and then that self isn't concerned with your bosses or even with your family obligations or attacks, returns or anything. It's just right there in the moment. And you know that when you go back in 72 hours, you'll actually be doing richer justice to your kids and everybody else.

ELISE:

Yeah, I do sometimes go on retreats. I have a spiritual nature and I do find that I invariably, and they're usually two or three days and in places like Sedona and I will pack eight to nine books because I have a compulsion. I'll go to New York for two days and I'll bring four books and I know you can relate because who knows what the mood will be and what if I get stranded and I do find that I get knocked out. There's some part of my brain that's like, Nope, no work. Nope. And I don't care. I think that there's something incredibly, invigorating isn't the right word, I would say reassuring. And I find this when I go to Montana to ride horses. Same thing, that to not care about my work and the way that I've trained myself to care primarily about my work is really liberating.

And it's nice to remember that I'm more than that pico and that I'm capable of just being present without time tracking or being compulsive about it. You have a great line. You have many great lines. I could just read you lines and then ask you to expand. This book is poetry. You write, the travel is interesting. It keeps me in touch with the lives of others. The relief comes in getting to be oneself. And I think that that's exactly what you're talking about, right? There's no need to observe other people. Maybe you're observing animals, but you're coming home to yourself in some way where you're not tracking the details of a city

PICO:

Coming home. I mean, that's just perfect. And observing without judgment. In other words, I'm not observing as I would here in my day-to-day life in Japan, is this good? Do I agree with it? It's this guy going to be a friend or not? I'm just neutral. But you really, when you describe how you feel going on retreats, that's exactly it. And I love that sense of being, as you say, not caring because at some level that caring that you're describing, which I'm exactly the same as you, is a kind of conditioning. There's a kind of imprisonment. I don't think it speaks for the healthiest part of me. I feel that the deepest part of me is the one who responds to intuition or to the needs of the moment. And the less deep part of me, which is where I'm usually trapped, is what I did today.

Wake up, this is my list of the things I have to do and these are my chores for the day, and this is how my plan day is going to go. And as you said, to be released from all that is almost to be released to a much deeper, wiser self. I've been thinking recently how I think all of us have these social selves, and I think the social self is partly the one that's worried about our obligations and schedule and ambitions and plans, but we also have a silent self. I think you were almost saying this, that's much more spacious. I didn't realize I had the need for it until I started going there and I realized, oh, there's a much bigger reality in me and in the world that I'm neglecting if I'm just caring too much about where I have to be and what my next obligation is in the bank or whatever.

Coming home is such a beautiful way to put it. And I think the word that the monks use is recollection to sense, to suggest. It's not some great realization or discovery. It's remembering what at some level, but forgot. Because when we're in love or when we're moved or when we're in a beautiful place, we suddenly step out of the calendar and we're back in some much richer place where we're not caring or worrying about anything. And then soon enough we're back in the chatter of the world. But we have these intimations and this is really just an intimation. And of course, I'm sure you find the same thing, the challenge of going on retreat. What do you do when you come back from retreat? Sometimes the world hits you even harder. And how do you bring the clarity and freedom you felt there back into the rush of the modern world? And that's never an easy one to answer, but it's a good question to address, I feel.

ELISE:

Yeah, you have another line, well, you're quoting a monk. Anyone can sit in zendo, a monk down the road has written the trick is to sit in the world and that's it. You can go and I come back from these retreats charged, spacious, my kids feel it. My husband feels it not inherently changed or different, but my energy pattern holds in a very different way and then it gets slowly eroded. Yep.

PICO:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. If I spent three days in this silence, the spell lasts for about one day when I'm back in

ELISE:

The world,

PICO:

If I spend two weeks there, it lasts about three days. And so I guess the question both of us ask is how can we sustain the monastery or the retreat in our day-to-day lives? So I think I noticed that I started to try to incorporate more practices and I think there are variations on what you do anyway. So after beginning to stay at the monastery, I'll spend an hour every day religiously just sitting on my terrace reading. And that will bring me to a much more intimate and nuanced self. I try to spend 15 minutes every day, though I don't always manage this on what I call Lectio Dina, which is just reading something that's going to sustain my soul. So you mentioned Richard Rohr before. It's just some wise being who's going to speak to the deepest part of me? And if I can spend just 15 minutes on that every day, the rest of my day is going to be different.

And I think the other surprise for me, and it doesn't quite engage with the question of what you do when you're back in the middle of rush traffic on the 4 0 5 freeway in la, but it was only by being in silence and solitude and on retreat that I realized how important community was. It was while I was silent that I decided to get married. So interestingly enough, being so alone in that absolutely still space really brought the people I care about very close to me and reminded me of my obligations to them. And I think if I'd just been racing from the pharmacy to the bank to the tax consultant as I might be doing otherwise, I would lose sense of what I really care about and what's important to me. So if nothing else, just having a sense suddenly a sharp sense of priorities and trying to sustain that.

Even when you're in the back middle of rush hour traffic sort of make, I mean you through those retreats that you've taken in Sedona and elsewhere, you have a memory and a prospect and an intimation of something beyond the every day that's really valuable. It's like having a postcard of some much deeper world that's there so long as we choose to access it. And as you were saying, almost we have different ways of accessing it. People will take long walks or they'll practice yoga, whatever form it takes. But just to remind ourselves, ts Elliot calls the life we've lost in living to remind ourselves of a deeper different life from the one we so easily get caught up in. I so easily get caught up in for sure.

ELISE:

No, that's beautiful. Last year I was introduced to an interesting tool called Lumen. It's given me some valuable insights into my own body that have helped me to better support my metabolism. The technology behind Lumen is pretty cool, but it's actually very simple to use. Lumen is a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. All you do is breathe into the device first thing in the morning and then you pull up the app on your phone to see what's going on with your metabolism. It lets you know if you're burning mostly fats or carbs and it gives you tailored nutrition plans and guidance to support your workout, sleep and stress management. I also like that Lumen can help you track your cycle as well as the start of menopause. It will even adjust your plans to help keep your metabolism and energy healthy through hormonal shifts. Because your metabolism is intricately connected to so many different systems and functions of your body, optimal metabolic health can translate to an array of benefits such as improved energy levels and better sleep. To take the next step to improving your health, go to lumen me slash thread to get 20% off your lumen. That's LUME n.me/thread for 20% off your purchase. Thank you Lumen for sponsoring this episode.

I do think your decision to get married that whenever I am away from my life, the attachments that I have that are very real and profound become even more foregrounded. Not that I'm ever not thinking about my children, but it becomes quite clear, this is really the only thing that I care about or the only thing that matters. We can take that in. Let's talk about this idea of non-attachment. Richard Rohr talks about it as essentially Buddhist being able to cultivate the mind or right thought with not a lot of consideration for action, whereas the Christian tradition, or I guess Jesus to some extent is really all about orthopraxy or right action and less about thought. And it's really interesting when he writes about those things because they need each other in order to really come into the world, but they come at the same thing from two different sides. But it's interesting. I feel like at this monastery maybe there's both.

PICO:

That's such a rich and beautiful question as always. And just before we get onto it, I love what you said about your kids, and I think my guess is the difference is when you're in Los Angeles as you are right now, you're thinking about how do I get my kids to soccer practice or how do I get them the food that they need? Lots of small things. When you go on retreat, you're thinking, what is it I love about them? What's the heart, the core of them? And so I say that I go on retreat. It's like seeing the world when it's asleep or seeing your loved ones when they're asleep. So you're not fretting about the next chore you have to undertake for them. You're seeing them at their truest and their purest, and you're remembering why you're going to give your heart to them forever.

So to come to what you said about wonderfully, I think you're right. I think this is a place where action is much more important than thought and it's therefore frees us from our ideas and our ideologies, which I think right now are cutting us up and dividing the world up. As you know, the heart of this book, in some ways, this is a devoutly Catholic monastery and I'm not even a Christian. And yet these one their doors to me. And I am, I think as deepened and instructed by it as if I were entirely of the same faith. But my sense is that our beliefs to me are much less important than what we do with them, our actions. And it's so interesting you cite that of Richard Rohr because as you know, I include the Dai Lama in this book and I spent 50 years talking with the Dalai Lama and he always says pretty much exactly what you said, which is that he feels that, for example, the Tibetan monks having been isolated from the world on top of the Himalayas for most of history, probably have an edge with meditation.

They've had a really good chance to deepen and cultivate meditation. But he always tells his Tibetan monks, you need to learn from your Catholic brothers about social justice, about action, about tending to the suffering. And he is so moved and instructed by the way that Christian people go out and help people who in desperate need. And I think that's one of the moving things about me about, for example, the monks that I meet because I'm enjoying this perfect stillness. And quite often, as you know, I have gone to stay with the monks in their cloister and they're not still at all because they're working all day long to make guests like me comfortable and to tend to one another. And their whole life is really about service and obedience. And so I think that's why when I first went there, and you may have found this on your retreats, it was just the radiance in heaven of absolutely free day that lasted a thousand hours and a sense of the beauty of being alone in this glorious world.

And the longer I stayed, I realized that that feeling of solitude was really just a gateway to compassion and to kinder action. And the only point of being alone was first to realize I'm never alone, and secondly, what am I going to do with it? How can I actually tend more caringly and discerningly to the people around us? So I love that notion of right action. I think the Buddhist would say that it's through the mind that we decide how best to work with the world. But what I find when I step into that silence is I'm released from my mind. And so the world is as close to me as I am, and my only instinct is to tend to the people, including the strangers I meet along the monastery road as I would to my dearest friends or to myself. In other words, there's some barrier between me and the world that's completely dissolved. And I think that's probably what most of us crave, and that's probably where the compassionate impulse arises. I wish I could be equally compassionate in the rest of my life, but at least it gives me a glimpse of what is possible. And seeing the monks in action gives me an even richer glimpse probably,

ELISE:

Yeah, I'm trying to, I could pull it up. But in The Righteous Mind, which is a Jonathan hate book, he writes about going back to this idea of service and compassion, and obviously particularly here in the US where we've been so secularized that these sort of foundational faith communities don't exist so much or they're often part of a more conservative America. And yet those people tend to be more generous doing more work in communities, stronger relationships within communities, volunteering more, all the things that we would I think call incredibly virtuous, noble ways to show up. And I think many of us who are less structured around that type of community are really fixated on right thought and doesn't always get expressed into the world. So it feels like a call, particularly in this moment in time, to really bridge the two and show up rather than just shout.

PICO:

Silence is much better than shouting, and silence is what brings us together as shouting tears us apart. But the other thing I would add to your wonderful list is in my experience that people committed to the religion are deeply, truly committed, much less dogmatic than I and my friends are. And in this world that is so divided by I thinking I know better and more than you do, or I belong, I know this and I believe this, and you don't, and you're wrong. So one of the first happy surprises of spending time there was that these monks were much less attached in a bad way to their doctrine. And I don't think they know, or certainly they don't discriminate between the people they're attending to. Lots of the people who stay there are probably Buddhist or Sufi or nothing at all. And as far as they're concerned, all of them a human, all of them are Jesus, whatever it is.

But each one of them deserves as much of their attention. And so that too, I mean, that's a really wonderful thing. And when you were mentioning retreats before, and I've been on other retreats too, and I know sometimes they're based around an orthodoxy, a kind of teaching that's being shared, or sometimes they're based around a teacher. And I think one of the happy things about this place for me is that it's freed of, in some sense, it's not about anything human. It's not about one person or it's not about one belief system or approaching the world. It's really, I think they're just knitting you to silence, which is essentially non-denominational. It exists beyond all the divisions we make between Buddhists and Jews and Christians and Muslims and the rest of it. And I think the monks, as in most such retreat places, know that whoever you are and whatever your background, whatever your orientation or lack of orientation, you'll just find what you need there, something more spacious or more illuminated than you would find the rest of the time.

And it doesn't really matter what name you put to it, and they're not asking you. They don't ask anyone to attend any of the services or to read the Bible or to anything explicitly Christian. So apart from the social justice component and the action in the world that you highlighted just a freedom in the mind, I think that they exemplify, for me, that's really refreshing. And as you said, harder and harder to encounter. I mean, if I'm going around my daily life and meeting my friends, most of them and probably like me, have these hard and fast assumptions about what is right. And when I go to that monastery, it falls apart. And so as Jonathan ha probably says in that book, I worry about what will happen when monasteries and convents fall away because they're offering a very specific kind of liberation. And if they're just replaced by guided retreats or spiritual teachers, I think something fundamental might be lost.

I was going to say, it suddenly struck me. I never thought this before, but these guys don't regard themselves as spiritual teachers. They probably regard themselves as spiritual servants, but they're certainly, they're not claiming to lay down the law or to know more than the rest of us. I had a touching experience when I completed this book. Of course, I felt a little anxious about writing some fairly intimate things about the monks that I spent time with. So I sent the manuscript to two monks to make sure I hadn't trespassed or presumed upon them, especially since they've made a vow of anonymity. And one of the monks who I described being surrounded with doubts and fears and sometimes frustrations, he wrote back to me instantly and he said, please keep all of that in. It's our brokenness and our woundedness, our humanity that we have to share with the world. The last thing we want is to present ourselves as serene and up in the clouds and beyond human challenge. We're in the thick of it, and the more you share that, the better. And so I so touched that he didn't want me to brighten up my depiction of him or pretend that he didn't live close to lots of problems and questions.

ELISE:

It's beautiful. And when you say silence, it's not vipassana, but it is, you're mostly alone.

PICO:

You're as alone as you want to be. There are essentially no rules. So they ask people to be quiet in a sense that nobody's playing a radio, and they invite you to take conversations with them, the monks or with friends or with strangers, and you can walk down the road, which of course is leading 1200 feet above the great beautiful expanse of the big Sarah Ocean. So it's already a very lovely place, but when I hear people coming out from a vipassana retreat, for example, I instantly resonate to where they are. It makes absolute sense. And we're probably speaking the same sentences. So I think at some level, any practice of silence brings you to the same place.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I've been to this website multiple times, $145 a night. I know, was it 30 when you started? Yes.

PICO:

Yes. That's how I used to stay for three weeks at the time. And now it's only three days at a time. Yeah, even three days is a great help. They're running out of monks and they're also running out of funds. And in California these winter storms, so seven of the last eight years, they've been cut off entirely from the world from months on end, two times by fire, three times by storm, two times by Covid. So they always say that their worship and their sense of community is deepened when they have no visitors, but of course their revenue goes down to zero and they need $3,000 a day just to keep the place going. So it's as fragile as all the other such monastic institutions across the globe, all the more so as you mentioned, fire. And in the wilderness of the hills of California, they're really at the mercy of fire and acts of God as it were.

ELISE:

Yeah. Let's talk about fire because obviously it's a theme throughout the book, both in terms of the way that it encroaches on the monastery, your house that burned while you were in it.

PICO:

Yes, I was very lucky to be. It was the worst fire in California in history at the time. This was a long time ago, 1990. But yes, I was alone in my family house and fire broke out just up the road from us. And our house was pretty much the first that it came to. And so I jumped into a car with my mother's cat and I went down our driveway. And when I got to the mountain road, I couldn't go up and I couldn't go down. And the only thing that saved me was a good Samaritan who had a water track, and he'd seen a fire in the hills and he'd driven up to be of help. And then he'd got stuck by chance right at the bottom of our driveway. So when I drove to try to escape there, he was in his shorts shirtless, standing in the road with a hose, and every time the fire approached, he just pointed the herse and it would recede, and then it would approach from another direction and then from another direction.

So by saving his life, he saved our own. But I was caught in the middle of the fire four, three hours, and at one point I was literally under our house so I could see the flames making their way through our living room and then wiping out every childhood memento and photograph and teddy bear I'd ever had. And then going on to my office and my next three books, my next eight years of writing were all in handwritten notes. This was almost pre-computer days, so all of that was reduced to ash. So I witnessed all that, but still at the end of that night, at some level, I'd come out ahead because to be stuck in the middle of a far for three hours, it was such a miracle that I survived with my life. And I think it was much harder in many ways for my mother who was away visiting a nephew in Florida. And she just got a phone call for me that evening saying, by the way, you've lost everything you have. She said, there must be something. No, all gone. And she was 60. So really her whole life and every physical, tangible trace of it had wiped out, and she just had that sense of powerlessness receiving the phone call, whereas I, being in the middle of it saw there was nothing that could be saved and was so grateful that I had been saved just through a kind stranger.

ELISE:

So living in Los Angeles, there were several years in a row where we had to prepare for evacuation, and then a few, maybe five, six years ago, our house almost burned down in the Getty Fire. And with the Getty Fire, because I think the previous year we'd had to pack for evacuation, we'd sent our kids with our wonderful nanny who lives with her husband like an hour and a half away during the weekends. So she took the kids and we were home with our cats and you pack. And so we did this fire drill, my husband and I, and granted, we don't have that many valuable things. We packed some photos, we packed important documents and some jewelry, but I was like, I'm not bringing my wedding dress. My books are probably my most valuable things. And so the next year when we evacuated in the middle of the night, we had a go bagg of documents that was already packed from the year previously. But similarly, I was like, stuff, it's stuff. I'm grateful that our house didn't burn down. But I'm also grateful for that experience because in its own way, it was a really powerful reminder of life being mostly detritus. And not that I don't like the idea of having photo albums and memories and whatnot available to me, and I don't want to in any way say that that isn't a terrible thing to lose. But there was something about it where I was like, if this happens, it's not the worst thing.

PICO:

It's not the worst thing if you survive. And yes, it really reminds you again of what is essential. And just as you say, I found it reminded me that everything important was intangible. I could replace all my books and clothes and furniture, and I didn't actually need 90% of them. I could live much more lightly afterwards. And that everything that was really important was irreplaceable in some ways. So I think the Sufis say, I remember you and I spoke about Sufis when we were talking in this podcast two years ago, that only what is yours is what can't be lost in a shipwreck. It's a variation of the same thing. In other words, whatever you're carrying inside you in your memory and imagination and heart is all that really can belong to you, or maybe all that is. So yes. And the only two changes.

So after thanks to the insurance policy, we pretty much had to rebuild our new house in the same location, and we've probably evacuated it much like you 12 times since it came up. The only two changes we've made in our life was that if you were to come into our new house, you would see right next to the front door, six suitcases, which my mother filled with all her photos. And ever since that big fire all those years ago, I keep all my handwritten notes in the bank. So that's the only change that I realized that was really important to me, and I didn't want to be stripped of that. But as you say, the rest, if I lost everything, certainly not the end of the world and not entirely a bad thing.

ELISE:

Yeah, I'm sad about three books, lost and handwritten notes. That's hard.

PICO:

Yes, yes. So I had the interesting experience. So the day after that far, I called up my editors very wise and kind, much older man, and he commiserated because he's very kind, but because he was wise, he said, Pico. Actually, I think losing those notes might be one of the best things that could happen to you as a writer. Because as you know, if you're writing from your notes, again, you're kind of trapped inside your head in your notary outline and your plans. And he realized that if I was to write from memory or heart or imagination, I'd be tapping a much deeper place and that actually I'd be able to address whatever I was writing about far more intimately than if I was working from my mind and my ideas. So I think he was right. Even losing those notes was not necessarily the worst thing in the world.

And it always, because I grew up in many different places, I'd always felt that a home is not where you live, it's what lives inside you. My case, it was my mother, my wife, to be, the books I love, the songs that go through my head, and I still had all those, as you were saying, I mean, that evacuation drill you're describing is such a useful drill for any of us to perform, just to remind us of what's really essential. And I have a fire a lot in the book, as you said, partly because physically this remote monastery is always being encircled by flames, and the monks are having to evacuate. But also, of course, because their job in life is to keep the flames a flame, a light inside themselves to keep themselves burning with devotion and surrender. And so it's an interesting notion that they can't allow the embers to die out inside themselves. Well, then they're not living the life that they committed themselves to.

ELISE:

Beautiful. This is the three lines of a poem that you put in the piece the night after your house burned, my house burned down. I can now see better the rising moon, which is so beautiful. It's funny, Pico, I'm working on my next book, and this isn't even all of them notes for a chapter. And I'm like, oh, what your editor was saying, my editor would say the same thing to me too. Just write God.

PICO:

Yeah, follow the call of your emotion or instinct or something like that. Oh, you as a fellow writer will appreciate. After I'd lost everything, and I finally, after three hours at the last, a firetruck came up to me and said, you can drive downtown to safety and go to a friend's house. Now. I thought, well, one of the few compensations of being a writer is if you've been through some drama like that, you can have your say. You haven't been stripped of your words and your thoughts and ideas. And in those days, my job was to be an essayist for Time Magazine. So as soon as I went to my friend's house, I went to use a computer literally the night of losing everything in the world. And I wrote that piece for Time Magazine, an eyewitness account of what was then the worst fire in Californian history.

And now when I look back on it, it's interesting to me, I'm a little surprised that poem came back to me, and that even when I was quite young, in the middle of this very dramatic event, something in me sensed as we've been saying, this wasn't entirely a bad thing, and maybe this would help me to see what was really important. And maybe I'd lost sight of that in many ways earlier. So now when I think back on that, and I hear that poem again and wrote about it in this new book, I think, oh gosh, I didn't consciously want to, oh, I want to end with something as inspiring or affirming, just writing this piece very quickly in a few minutes. The night of the far this came out of me, I'm glad that came out of me as what instead of less productive responses.

ELISE:

Yeah, isn't it? It's kind of amazing too, and maybe it's a type of insanity, but I haven't thought about moving. And I grew up in Montana too, where we lived way up a valley and there was this constant threat of fire and evacuate, and we had horses, and it was a whole scene, as you can imagine, but you've rebuilt the monastery obviously isn't going anywhere. And it's fascinating to me that we just persist even in light of just more fire, more danger, more global warming, and I don't know what that is. I guess we just don't abandon our homes or what is that?

PICO:

What is it? Yes. So I have two different thoughts when I hear that. The first is I never complain about the fire. I do feel we're living where humans were never meant to live, and we're asking for trouble living in the hills of California and knowing more with every passing year, how perilous that is. So we're choosing to put ourselves in danger, but I also feel that safety in some ways is an illusion. And I think probably, especially with all the natural calamities around us, now, you and I know that if we left our homes in California for somewhere else, we're at the mercy of hurricanes or typhoons or flash floods or earthquakes, or who knows what, that at some level, there's no place on earth where you're going to be entirely safe. And you will know from reading this book, I think one of my most humbling reminders of that was there was one moment 2008 when our rebuilt house in Santa Barbara was encircled by flames, and the monastery in Big Sur was circled encircled by flames, and all the monks were evacuated pretty much.

And I was staying in the same friend's house where it stayed after my house burned down. And every morning when I woke up and I looked up in the hills, I didn't know whether I wanted to look up or not because all I could see was black smoke. And I thought, if it recedes, I'm going to see a big emptiness where my new house, it's going to be burnt down. Maybe I shouldn't even look for it or look at it. I didn't know what to do. So finally I thought, oh, well, there's actually a beautiful monastery overlooking the Pacific Ocean right here in Santa Barbara. Only 20 minutes drive away. So I went up to that monastery, and as soon as I just sat in the sunlit garden, quite a long way from the flames, took a deep breath, I felt absolutely calm. The ocean was as still as ever, the silence was impeccable.

I could see the planes flying over to try to put out the flames. So I absolutely clarified and restored, and I felt so calm, and it offered me just the medicine I needed. And I went back downtown and I felt much better. And then five months later, that monastery I'd gone to was burnt to the ground, and those poor monks had to go, and they were moved quickly to another convent in town, and now they're even out of that convent. And so literally, I think they're more or less homeless. But yeah, it reminds us, there's certainly no guarantees in the world, and we're reminded of that pretty much every day, sadly, at this point. So maybe that makes us more fatalistic than we would otherwise. And you and I think, well, we'll live in our imperiled homes because is there anywhere that's not imperiled?

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I don't honestly think that there is. How many monasteries convents are there that people can visit? Is this a common thing?

PICO:

It it's a common thing. I mean, there are many, many more than we imagined. I remember years ago, there's a lovely book of retreat houses around the US in every kind of denomination, but they're all fading out. Their numbers are diminishing. And the sad fact is that more and more people, such as myself are going there on retreat, but fewer and fewer are signing up for life. So they're all running out of monks and nuns, but there are lots of them in every neighborhood. And so I have a particular affinity with this one in Big Sur. I sort of fell in love with it, the way you fall in love with a person, and that's your person for life. But I often tell my friends, wherever you are, there'll be a place like this, and you're not going to lose anything by going there for three days.

I think three days is enough to make a significant difference, but I can't imagine there's a state in the union that doesn't have quite a few options such as this. And I've stayed in monasteries in Australia, in England, and Japan and all over, and I was just in New Mexico at one earlier this year. So there are plenty of them, though. I find a special magic in the big, so one maybe because always loved that stretch of big coastline, so unworldly and the world, and its cares and its clocks fall away as soon as you're in that stretch above the ocean.

ELISE:

Yeah, there are just very few places like that that feel truly completely cut off and more or less not obviously 100% inaccessible, but mostly one thing that I love that seems to be your preference to is book roulette. The idea of going to the bookshop at the monastery and just pulling something off the shelf and committing to it. Have you found your greatest hits that way?

PICO:

Well, it speaks perfectly to what you were saying about caring. And usually we're burdened by cares. You and I are both probably burdened right now as we're at home with our cares. So I only play book roulette when I'm at the monastery. Sadly, when this conversation is over, there's a book I have to read, as it were for homework today and many more for the, so I pretty much have no choice what I'm going to read to get home for the next month. It's one of the luxuries there. So I know every time I go, I go with a suitcase with about 20 books, and as soon as I settle into my little cell as I called, I put them on a shelf, but I have no idea which ones I'm going to read. So even among my 20 books every hour of the day, I'm playing book roulette.

Oh no, Emily Dickinson is just the voice I need to hear today. Or actually, I'm going to bury myself in Melville today, or Richard Rohr who writes his books in the same trailer in this monastery where I used to stay. He's what I need to hear. So I free myself of plans. And then, yeah, it's a wonderful thing, I think with the bookstore when I go to the Monarchy bookstore and they have books from every religious tradition and books about the environment much else. As you said, I pick a book at random, and the beauty of that is it's a book I would never read otherwise, and it becomes my friend. And I'm also reading in a very special way there. So freed of Little Pico. Every book I read, it feels as I'm writing it, my attention is so sharpening each sentence goes through me in a way.

It doesn't usually when I'm reading here at home, I'm distracted some of the time. I'll go through three pages and I won't remember a word that I've read, but there every sentence I hear from a monk or from another retreatment stays with me. I only hear a few sentences every day, and every sentence I read really, really becomes essential to me. And I think one of the small things I like about this particular monastery is I remember I grew up in Christian schools in England. We had to go to prayer chapel every morning, chapel every evening, recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin on Sundays, read the gospel according to Matthew in Greek, I got a lot of the Christian of tradition, there's a little boy. So I thought, this is the one thing I don't need to more of. And so when I started reading books in my twenties, I would be drawn to everything that seemed far away and exotic and Buddhist books, Sufi books, anything that other than the world I knew.

And when I went to the bookstore, suddenly it opened my eyes to, oh, actually, there are a lot of wonderful books in the Western edition in Christianity. There's Thomas Merton and the Cloud of Unknowing and all kinds of things, which otherwise I would've run past. And so some of the books I choose from the bookstore are actually Christian books that I never would've thought to pick up before. And I'm not loving them because they're Christian books. I'm loving them because they speak to some truth that I instantly recognize. So I don't know that the books in the monastery bookstore are among my greatest hits of all time, but I do feel that when I'm reading them, they feel like the best friends possible, and they hit me much harder there and in that very quiet, distracted setting than if I were to pick one of them up now, I just wouldn't be able to bring all of myself to it and my full attention.

ELISE:

No, that makes a ton of sense. And it's just listening to, and I'm laughing because my mom, when we're in Montana, is always looking through my, she's a voracious reader and she's always looking through my stack and she's like, what? Who are you child? Because it will be things like The Cloud of Unknowing or Marguerite Porete or she's like, where did you come from? And that was not what I used to read either at all. I had no interest or inclination in that direction until my thirties probably. But it's interesting how hard you can fall towards or how they're such a solve. They're so needed in certain moments. How many books Pico do you read in three days?

PICO:

Well, that's itself embarrassing and an amazement. So when I go there, as I say, the beauty of it is I'm truly on holiday because when I'm regularly on holiday, if I'm going to Paris again, I have my big itinerary and I've worked out every minute of each day. I'm kind of trapped inside my plans. But there I'm absolutely on holiday. So it feels as if I spend the day daydreaming, writing letters to my friends, taking long walks above the ocean, just sitting in my garden, enjoying the view, doing very little, and then I'll go to the suitcase and I find I've maybe written 15 full a four pages of notes in that day where I was doing nothing. And I've read two books or three books in that day.

The day is so long, I'm not one minute in the car, not one minute doing any form of true freedom. So let's say the 16 hours, I'm awake, all of it. I can do anything I want. So even if I'm taking walks for two hours and doing nothing for two hours, writing letters for three hours, that still leaves nine hours. So it's amazing how much I go through. And I think when we were talking earlier about the books that we read, I think one of the great freedoms that this place or this silence has given me, this freed me from a lot of my preconceptions, which really I think I hem myself in by. And so one of the nice surprises for me of this particular Benedictine monastery is the Pra who's become a close friend. He leads sessions at the Tassajara Zen monastery.

He practices yoga. His great love is India. He probably knows much more about Hinduism than I do. So again, these monks and many of the people who visit there are so deep in their tradition, they're open to every other tradition. Just what I used to find with the Dalai Lama when I spent a lot of time with him, he's such a good Buddhist that he's really keen to learn from many Christian and in fact, to deliver long lectures on the gospels to groups of Christians. I suppose somebody who has a very strong commitment is much less threatened by others. And when you and I were talking about shouting and dividedness, I think we often temp to shout about our beliefs, clinging onto them rather defensively. People who really know what they believe, such as monks and nuns have none of that need. And they're very keen to turn to wisdom wherever it comes from.

ELISE:

And I think going into wisdom traditions or reading a lot of Sufi texts or mystical Christianity, etcetera, everything's more or less saying the exact same thing. And there are themes of constancy, which brings me to, I'm assuming it was an Oprah interview, but you did not say Pico. But you mentioned there's that brief interlude where you talk about going and being interviewed and being asked how you define God, and you said reality. That's it. Right? And that seems also like what every mystical tradition is engaged with, contending with reality.

PICO:

Yes. I was just remembering that moment two days ago, and absolutely. And I came up with that idea only because I didn't think about it. I didn't spend the second thought as from reading the book, I'd been told that there were going to be some rapid fire questions at the end of this interview. And the ones I got were actually different from the ones I'd been told about. So they came out of nowhere, what's your definition of God? So I didn't have a second to think. Reality just came out of me. And then later I thought, I'm so glad I didn't think about it. Something came to me like with the poem that I wrote the Evening of the Father. It's probably wiser than I am, but yes, that I would absolutely agree with it. And I so agree with you. I was going to say in fact a minute ago that all those texts from every tradition word for word, the same thing, it's just a contemplative truth that is available to anyone when she sits down and inquires and closes her eyes or opens her eyes just for a few minutes.

And as you know, I have a lot of Leonard Cohen in this book. I spent time with him, especially when he was living as a monk and he would say of his zen teacher, this is John of the cross, this is Rumi, this is the Buddha, this is a Mozart. He would say, it doesn't matter what the words are, it's exactly the same thing. But for him in Los Angeles in the 1990s, that's how he could get Rumi best was through this old Zen teacher. But really the names are the least important thing about such wisdom.

ELISE:

You have a fascinating life. Pico, anything coming down the pike?

PICO:

I have a stack of pages probably very similar to the one you showed me. I went through the last seasons of her life very closely with her mother. I was her only child and I was by her side until she died a couple of years ago at the age of 90. So it's a book about aging and dying and Shakespeare because when my mother was getting old and her mind and her body were beginning to fade for all the wonderful podcasts and books and TV shows that are available about aging, such an important theme. Now, the only one that really shed light on our situation was King Lear. So I started reading King Lear more and more, and I thought, this is uncanny how it gets the predicament of a child and an aging parent. And so that opened a door to Shakespeare whom I've always loved. And so I've been really indulging myself by spending months on end here in Japan reading Shakespeare and writing about it and honoring my mother and recreating her life and why she gave so much to me now that she's no longer.

ELISE:

Oh, that's beautiful. I can't wait to read it.

PICO:

Can I ask, is the book that you're writing, does it have a memoirish component or can you tell us what is?

ELISE:

What it is? It will have only a bit of memoir in the way that you use memoir to help people contextualize or understand my perspective. And to break it up a little bit, it is a book about polarization and binaries and shadow what? And just looking at different parts of culture and the way that we adopt these binaries without conscious thought and then polarized. So I'm going to get into big cultural polarization at the end, but it's mostly in lower stakes ways, just so that people recognize like, oh yeah, I do that. And big cultural themes. So it's about the shadow of cultural femininity and the cultural masculinity, and it's a big bite Pico.

PICO:

So when you do make that drive up to the monastery I described in the book, the thing you'll instantly recognize is it's the place beyond all binaries. And I, and I remember, I think I cite in the book when I was visiting Leonard Cohen in his monastery on Mount Baldy behind la, and I think I said to him at once, this is the place beyond all questions. And he said, no, this is a place beyond all answers. This is the place where you don't have to even worry about that kind of thing. And I'm so glad you're writing on that. It is the sort of urgent issue of this.

ELISE:

Yeah, hopefully I can land it. But yeah, just naming what's present, because I don't think that we recognize the ways in which we get stuck in the unconscious shadow, mob shadow, and all of those things that really take away our free will. That's for sure. And our ability to respond from our hearts.

PICO:

Yes. And our ability to communicate with our neighbors probably if each of us is just stuck in our own assumptions or whatever it might be. Oh, good. Eagerly.

ELISE:

I wish I could be casual friends with people like Leonard Cohen. I would've loved to have known Leonard Cohen. This is that bit that he mentioned from the book when he went down to see Leonard. Here. You find answers. I suggest to Leonard Cohen shortly before I leave here, you find freedom from answers. He replies in the grave and gravelly baritone, beloved by many freedom from questions, a landscape without doubt. That is so beautiful actually to think about questions and answers and their relationship to doubt and what it is to really just be present without trying to figure it out or assuming you can figure it out. It won't surprise you all to know how desperately I want to go to this monastery and sit apart from everything for a while because man, I am always trying to figure it out. And it is exhausting. And for those who are wondering, it is New Camaldoli Hermitage, and it's in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur. I am dying to go and perhaps I will see you all there.