After his family home burned down in a California wildfire in the 1990s, journalist Pico Iyer found refuge in an unlikely location: a small Benedictine hermitage outside of Big Sur. Though Iyer initially arrived looking for a bed to sleep in, he soon found the silence of monastic life transformative, and over the course of the past thirty-three years, he has returned to the hermitage more than one hundred times. In his new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence, he explores the profound insights that come from silence—and how sitting in stillness can train us to care for one another in a world on fire.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Iyer to discuss how silence facilitates letting go of the self, why he sees monastic life as the true counterculture, and what his time at the hermitage has taught him about learning to love in the midst of loss.