"Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some
moments," Alan Lightman wrote in his sublime
meditation on science and spirituality, "and at others to ride the passion and
exuberance." In his conversation
with E.O. Wilson, the poet Robert Hass described beauty as a
"paradox of stillness and motion." But in our Productivity Age of
perpetual motion, it's increasingly hard – yet increasingly imperative – to
honor stillness, to build pockets of
it into our lives, so that our faith in beauty doesn't become
half-hearted, lopsided, crippled. The delicate bridling of that paradox is what
novelist and essayist Pico
Iyer explores in The Art of Stillness:
Adventures in Going Nowhere
(public library | IndieBound) – a beautifully argued case
for the unexpected pleasures of "sitting still as a way of falling in love
with the world and everything in it," revealed through one man's sincere
record of learning to "take care of his loved ones, do his job, and hold
on to some direction in a madly accelerating world."
Iyer begins by recounting a
snaking drive up the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles to visit his
boyhood hero – legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. In 1994, shortly
after the most
revealing interview he ever gave,
Cohen had moved to the Mt. Baldy
Zen Center to embark on five years of seclusion, serving as personal assistant
to the great Japanese Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, then in his late
eighties. Midway through his time at the Zen Center, Cohen was ordained as a
Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and given the Dharma name Jikan – Pali for
"silence." Iyer writes:
I’d come up here in order to write
about my host’s near-silent, anonymous life on the mountain, but for the moment
I lost all sense of where I was. I could hardly believe that this
rabbinical-seeming gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses and wool cap was in truth
the singer and poet who’d been renowned for thirty years as an international
heartthrob, a constant traveler, and an Armani-clad man of the world.
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