Once, when I was 18 and living in San Francisco, I spent a Sunday afternoon at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Muir Beach. I did not arrive in time to sit zazen, or for any lecture or discussion, although if you had asked, I would have said I was interested in such things. Instead, I came for tea and lunch, followed by a tour, all of which now gleams in my imagination as the emblem of a life unlived. As for how that works, let’s put it like this: I was, if not quite spiritual, compelled by the idea of spiritual practice, its rigor and its clarity, the focusing of consciousness required by contemplation. What I was not was disciplined enough.
I kept thinking about that experience as I read Pico Iyer’s Aflame: Learning from Silence, which traces the 30-plus years the author has spent visiting the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. Founded in 1958, the hermitage dates the heritage of its monastic order to the 11th century; at one point, Iyer describes a gathering, at a retreat center on the Central Coast, “to celebrate the one thousandth birthday of the Camaldolese congregation.”
A thousand years, Psalm 90 suggests, are like “a day that has just gone by” in the sight of the universe. Or no, not quite the universe, since the psalm, being scripture, eschews the neutral language I prefer. I remain now, as I was at 18, suspicious of organized religion, of organized anything, of all the rules and structures we erect to contain our contemplation, when what we really desire is a space for the unfettered and the wild. Iyer, as it turns out, occupies a similar territory. Early in these pages, he recounts a conversation with a friend, who asks, “You’re not getting religious?”
“If you’re freed of all distinctions,” the author answers, “there’s no need of words like ‘God.’”
It’s not exactly correct to describe the hermitage as freed of all distinctions; it houses a Benedictine order, after all. Still, even within the context of its traditions, it is a remarkably open community. The prior Cyprian offers an example. “There’s a candle on the altar in his simple cell,” Iyer writes, “and next to it a Buddha. Bamboo lanterns and, on the wall, a scroll depicting Jesus in the lotus position. As if to remind him of the life he’s given up, a poster of On the Road.”
What Iyer is saying is that we exist, at once, in all our incarnations, that we are ever who we were and may become. Time, in that sense, can’t help but become fluid, less a succession than a collection of moments, recalled and contemplated according to the movement of the mind. Again, let’s look at Cyprian, who is not the prior but rather one in a series of priors, each of whom slips in and out here, as Iyer encounters or remembers them. Aflame, then, is less a narrative per se than a set of riffs, of traces, each distinct but also joined at a layer underneath the surface of the text. If this is the case with all literature, all art—which is, after all, essentially reflective of its creators’ fascinations and fixations—it is also harder than it looks.
That’s because books, by their nature, exist in time—the time required to write and to read them, the time in which their action (such as it is) occurs. In Aflame, however, Iyer turns away from all that, building a volume out of his own loose notes from three decades of practicing silence, one that eschews resolution as an aim. “The sacred,” he reminds us, “is not a sanctuary, I’m moved to remember; it’s a force field. In many ways a forest fire. You can try controlled burns or back burning, you can walk towards the heat, but its power comes from the fact that it can’t begin to be controlled, or anticipated.”
These are not merely abstract meditations; situated where it is, in the midst of a high-risk wildfire area, the hermitage is threatened with devastation several times as we read Aflame. So, too, is the home near Santa Barbara, itself a replacement for an earlier one destroyed by fire, that Iyer shares with his aging mother, who as the book progresses grows increasingly infirm.
And yet, this is the way of all things, is it not? As Thérèse, the octogenarian whose property adjoins the hermitage, explains, the recent loss of several trees on her land has become the most unlikely sort of gift: “When I woke up,” she says, “and found the storm had taken away two sycamores, I thought, ‘My friends!’ But now I have a wider view. It is much better.”
For Iyer, such an anecdote becomes the stuff of parable, although that’s not what he’s after, either. Rather, the objective is to sit. The silence he encounters is neither oppressive nor all-consuming; there are plenty of conversations, as well as books to read, drawn from the hermitage’s small library. There are all those notes to take. Time, in such a setting, loses meaning or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, urgency. “In my life below,” Iyer acknowledges, “I’m so determined to make the most of every moment; here, simply watching a box of light above the bed, I’m ready at last to let every moment make the most of me.”
This, I think, is what I might have hoped to find at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center on that long-ago Sunday afternoon. But to the me I was then, spirit seemed distinct from substance, not at the center of it. “Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish, or from doubt,” writes Thomas Merton, in a line cited in Aflame. Lest we miss the implication, Iyer adds his own gloss: “The cell is a desert without guarantees.”
The cell, the soul, the world itself. That is what we have. It is no coincidence that, as Iyer mentions, “the word blessing comes from the French blessure. The word for ‘wound.’” Nor that the monk to whom he is speaking should respond, “Yes. That makes sense. A blessing can go right through you like a wound.”•
