Quoting Silence, February, 2026:
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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
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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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
See https://tinyurl.com/IyersilenceTEDtalk
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.
Monday 9th February, 2026
Pico Iyer, Learning from Silence: Lessons from More Than 100 Retreats (Cornerstone, 2025), 43.
Image: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, unsplash.com/@hubblespacetelescope
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 42-43 of Pico Iyer's book. To read more about his book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
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Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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'In my trailer again, above the ocean, I feel a storm approaching. The wind is shaking the roof of the bathroom, the trees are shivering outside. I look out my window and see the exodus begin: the line of departing cars might be exiles hurrying to the train station as the troops approach.
What to do? Join the other vehicles on the road, and abandoned the one shelter I’ve found, my best preparation for life? Stay, and run the risk of being stranded here for days? … I have that article to transmit, that lecture to give. My mother, alone in the large house she’s rebuilt halfway up the mountains. The world to which I owe obligations.
Thinking about tomorrow will only take me out of paradise. I sit where I am and face a truth that can’t be outrun.
All night, the rain. The wind howling in an extravagance of pain. Branches banging against the roof. A ceaseless drumming on the tiles; drip-drip-drip from every eave. A sigh and a cry as the windows shake and the bones of the old structure ache and groan. Near where I shiver, the heater stutters. The rage subsides and the silence is absolute. Then the downpour resumes and the heater sputters once more against the chill.
When I emerge, hours later, it’s to find the sky rinsed clean. Panels of turquoise, aquamarine, azure down below. “We are never tired,” Emerson reminds me, “so long as we can see far enough.” *
I’m singing to myself when I walk out again, toward the farthest bench. Repeating, under my breath, the one phrase that keeps coming to me here: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I used to think that the act of prayer was about saying, “Please.”'
* Ralph Waldo Emerson, in chapter 1 of his acclaimed essay from 1836, 'Nature'.
Monday 16th February, 2026
Pico Iyer, Learning from Silence: Lessons from More Than 100 Retreats (Cornerstone, 2025), 141.
Image: Eric Black unsplash.com/@ericdblack
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 42-43 of Pico Iyer's book. To read more about his book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
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Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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'My last day in the enclosure, at lunch, I find myself next to the old woman who’s been living on the property for as long as I’ve been coming, more than twenty years now. We’ve never spoken before, but it’s hard to miss the playful sparkle with which she observes the world around her.
“How are you?” I ask.
“I am well enough. You know I am the oldest person on this mountain?”
“Really?”
“Eighty-seven. And last year a tornado came and blew down seven of my trees.” Thérèse sips at her water. “You have to take care of beauty, to make the most of it, because so soon it is gone.”
Two years ago, she continues, her husband died, his heart giving out during a sudden fire evacuation. “So that gave me the blessing of great silence and solitude. And silence, it is the greatest blessing. When you are old, devotions, rituals, icons, they fall away; you go straight to the heart.”
Her eyes are red, but there’s no hesitation in her voice.
“Of course, spirituality is horizontal, not just vertical. You have to be with other human beings; it’s not about just getting things for yourself. But you come to see that when things are taken away from you, it is to make room for higher purp—no, higher understanding.”
“As with your trees?”
“Exactly! It gives you more room to see. When I woke up and found the storm had taken away two sycamore’s, I thought, ‘My friends!’ But now I have a wider view. It is much better.”'
Monday 23rd February, 2026
Pico Iyer, Learning from Silence: Lessons from More Than 100 Retreats (Cornerstone, 2025), 50.
Image: Zoltan Tasi, unsplash.com/@zoltantasi
The last week of each month offers some questions to help you reflect further on its quotations and images, and how they resonate with your own spiritual journey and relationship with God.
You can engage with these using the written or audio versions of the questions, below.
You can engage with these using the written or audio versions of the questions, below.
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Listen to the reflection questions:
To listen to the reflection questions, below, being read, click the play button on the 'Reflect ...' image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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Reflection questions:
Before reflecting on this month's quotes and images, take time to re-ground yourself in your body.
Perhaps take a few slow breaths, feel your feet on the floor and be aware of how your body feels in this moment.
1) Read back over or listen again to this month's quotes and spend time looking at their associated images. As you do so, note a phrase or image that draws your attention. If this is a phrase, you might like to write this out in a journal or on a piece of paper where you will see it regularly. Consider reading aloud several times what you have written to help the words sink more deeply into your heart. If an image resonates with you, let your gaze rest lightly on it for a couple of minutes, allowing it to speak to your heart. Consider using it as a screensaver for a while, or perhaps print it out and place it somewhere that you will see it often.
2) What emerges as you sit with the phrase or image that attracted your attention? Does a new insight or a question, emotion or sensation arise? Take some time to write down and ponder on whatever you notice.
3) Where can you see hope in the midst of what is emerging in you, for yourself, your neighbour, your community, or the planet? How might this impact your daily life and those with whom you share it?
4) In the days and weeks to come, how can you stay open to what you have discovered from your reflections?
Take some time to give thanks for the hope that you have found in this month's quotes and images.