Anderson Tepper at the NY Times:
Pico Iyer seems to have spent his life in motion, shuttling between homes in Japan and the United States, not to mention journeys to Ethiopia, Tibet, Cuba and beyond. But there’s one place he’s gone to seek out stillness ever since he was young: the Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple. Perched in the hills above his childhood home, the temple offers sweeping views of the bucolic California town and the ocean shimmering in the distance, and it provided Iyer with an early sense of refuge, he said.
“I think we’re all seeking out places of quiet, to retrieve something we’ve lost,” Iyer said, sitting in the temple gardens in late October, not far from where, as a teenager, he heard Christopher Isherwood lecture on Hinduism. “Even as a kid, when all I wanted was action and excitement, something brought me here, to the quietest place I knew.” If Iyer’s career has been built on a restless investigation of far-flung corners of the globe, this is the perfect spot to pause and reflect on his new work, “Aflame: Learning From Silence,” an examination of arrival — not departure — and the art of sitting still.
more here.
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