A post throughout each week of the month, offering quotes and resources linked to one contemporary author who writes about silence and its role as a spiritual discipline.
​Different weeks of the month offer different resources, as below:
  • first week: a short, image-backed quote with links to associated resources in the accompanying text
  • middle weeks: a short, image-backed quote taken from a longer one by the author, found below the image
  • last week: a short quote and questions to encourage reflection on all the month's quotations and images
Picture
Pico Iyer​, our author for February, has had a lengthy career as a writer and journalist, regularly contributing to multiple well-known publications around the world.

You can find out more about his book, Learning from Silence: Lessons from More Than 100 Retreats (Cornerstone Press, 2025), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.

Audio resources​

Guided Meditation: for any quote
Lectio Divina: use with long quotes
​For a 5 minute audio guided meditation to use with each week's short quote, click play on the image. To pause and restart click the same place. 
An audio guided Lectio Divina for the longer quotes. Click play on the image above. Allow 10-15 minutes for this. For a text version, click the button.
Monday 2nd February, 2026
Pico Iyer, Learning from Silence: Lessons from More Than 100 Retreats (Cornerstone, 2025), 30.
Image: Pico Iyer’s video for his Ted talk, ‘Silence, the Universal Medicine’.
​See https://tinyurl.com/IyersilenceTEDtalk 

​​​​​To read more about Pico Iyer's book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.

This month's author, Pico Iyer, was born in Oxford in 1957 to Indian parents when his father, the philosopher and political theorist, Raghavan N. Iyer (see here), was undertaking doctoral studies at the University as a Rhodes Scholar. His mother, Nandini Nanak Mehta, was a religious scholar and teacher. Given his heritage, and that his full name, Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer, combines that of the Buddha with the Italian Renaissance philosopher, Pico della Mirandola (see here), he was perhaps always going to be an esoteric seeker after enlightenment. For several decades Iyer has divided his time between living in Japan, with his wife, Hiroko Takeuchi, and California.

Pico Iyer's scholarship education at Eton, then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he received an congratulatory double first in English literature – a rarely awarded, high-level Oxbridge accolade – indicated that he was a writer of exceptional talent. Iyer went on to complete and MA at Harvard, where he taught both writing and literature, before moving to Time magazine to cover world affairs.

Since then, Iyer has become an acclaimed, best-selling author of some twenty books, translated into twenty-three languages. Their genres range from novels (see Abandon or Cuba and the Night), to travel and culture, what he is best known for writing about (see The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, featuring his Japanese wife or Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World), via biography (see The Open Road: The Global Journey of the XIVth Dalai Lama), essays (see Tropical Classical) and, latterly, books such as this month's that engage spirituality, even though Pico claims no particular religious affiliation (see also The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise). To find out more about all his books, see here.

This month's book, also published the same year under the title Aflame: Learning from Silence (Riverhead Books, 2025), is a touching memoir detailing Iyers nearly three decades of regular retreats into 'silence' to the New Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur, California (see here).  Whilst those who are more familiar with completely silent retreats may perceive his record of times there as somewhat different from the silence of a solitary retreat, he is a passionate advocate of the value of both silence and solitude, even though he says he has no regular, intentional meditative practice. You might enjoy his TED talk, 'Silence: The Universal Medicine' - see here - or his website on journeys of the inner and outer variety - here - which he headlines with 'We live our lives in the Outer World: we understand them through the Inner. So here is a set of journeys through Inner and Outer and the places between. Welcome.' 

If you enjoy longer podcasts, try his seventy-five minute interview for Time Sensitive, 'The Pleasure and Profundity of Silence': see here. 
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