PASADENA, Calif. – On a quiet summer evening in June 1990, Pico Iyer sat in his family home in Santa Barbara, California, when suddenly, he was surrounded by walls of flames five stories high.
Thirty-four years after that conflagration turned his life upside down, Iyer returned to Southern California to share how it transformed his life, nudging him toward what he now values — simplicity, silence, solitude and love. The novelist and essayist addressed about 80 people Tuesday at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, the very community devastated by the deadly Eaton Fire earlier this month.
Now intimately familiar with a wildfire’s destructive powers, many who came to hear Iyer speak clutched his book with a fiery orange cover titled “Aflame: Learning from Silence.”
During his hour-long conversation with violinist and social justice advocate Vijay Gupta, Iyer admitted that soon after the fire, all he could see was loss. But now, he says, he sees “all those doors that have gradually opened.” As they conversed, a poster for Octavia Butler’s novel ”Parable of the Sower,” considered prophetic by some in its depiction of a dystopian future where Los Angeles is ravaged by climate change among other ills, graced the background.
Iyer said the fire “liberated” him in many ways.
“To write a different way, to live more simply, to remember what is really important in life. Today, I wouldn’t say it was a calamity, but a dramatic wake-up call for me.”
Iyer’s story resonated with Jeremy Hunter, an Altadena resident whose historic home burned in the Eaton Fire. His feelings after the blaze are mixed: purified and liberated by losing his possessions, but also grieved. Hunter said listening to Iyer has inspired him to figure out his family’s next act.
“I guess the key is to let that pain pass through you,” he said. “That way, you’re less afraid of the pain.”
In 1990, Iyer, then 33, an author and columnist for Time magazine, grabbed his mother’s aging cat and his latest manuscript, jumped in his car and tried to flee the fire. But, he was trapped in the area for three hours, watching, as it turned everything in his childhood home to ash — furniture, stuffed toys, notes for his next three books. Iyer escaped thanks to a Good Samaritan with a water truck.
Safe but shaken, he wrote an essay that night. It appeared in Time magazine with the title “California: In the Blazing Eye of the Inferno.” He ended it with a poem by the 17th century Japanese poet, Mizuta Masahide, describing how destruction can sometimes bring clarity:
My house burned down.
Now I can better see
The rising moon.
Eight months after the fire, Iyer took his friend’s suggestion to stay for a few days at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Benedictine monastery nestled in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Big Sur, California. The Catholic order, founded by St. Romuald in the late 10th century, is known globally for its austere way of life and keenness to engage in interfaith and ecumenical dialogue. At the hermitage, Iyer paid $30 a day for a room, shower, food — and so much more.
The tranquility of the grounds with its tolling bells, lavender-covered hills, panoramic ocean views, and the compassion of the monks, eventually, proved life changing. The silence and solitude gave him clarity to make sense of his life and work.
A repeated visitor to this spiritual oasis, Iyer says the hermitage helps him remember what he loves and what matters the most. One of his 100 or so visits motivated him to get married and move into a small, two-room apartment with his wife in Nara, Japan, where he still resides, splitting his time between that country and California.
And somehow, he lives without a cell phone.
The monks helped him understand “how luxury is defined not by what you have but what you don’t need.”
“Moving into that tiny apartment didn’t seem like a hardship and being without a car and cell phone actually seems like a luxury,” Iyer said.
The hermitage has become a kind of soul-sustaining medicine, even though he says he is not religious. He was born into a Hindu family, and his parents were Indian immigrants, both professors and followers of the Theosophical movement, which combines Eastern and Western beliefs. In the book, Iyer also speaks about his close relationship with the Dalai Lama and singer Leonard Cohen who lived for several years as a Zen Buddhist monk.
While he has grown spiritually thanks to them, Iyer says his Benedictine brothers — and fire itself — have helped him understand how to cope with death and impermanence. Just like his family home, his happy place in Big Sur is also vulnerable to wildfires.
“There is no safe place in this world that is immune to impermanence or reality,” Iyer said. “The fact that these monks live unflinchingly in the midst of that acute vulnerability and go about their regular business even as they are encircled by flames, is powerful to witness.”
His book’s title comes from a quote by Abba Joseph, an early Christian hermit who told a young monk as they traversed the Egyptian desert: “If you will, you can become all aflame.” The hermit meant that fully committing to a spiritual life would mean being completely consumed by God’s love and transformed to a state of radiant holiness.
“It’s about kindling the internal fires as a response to the external fires,” Iyer said. “My monk friends see fire as an act of God, which is not something they quarrel with, but simply act with.”
Iyer still turns away when he sees footage of wildfires on television.
“Being stuck in that fire for three hours, I had a visceral sense of how powerful those flames were. But then, coming that close to losing my life made losing my possessions much easier.”
He said several who stood in line at Vroman’s to get his book signed talked about their recent loss. The Eaton Fire killed at least 17 people, destroyed thousands of structures and scorched over 14,000 acres. Iyer said he started to write a “bright message” for one woman who appeared positive and smiling when she told him: “Oh, I just lost everything I had.”
“I was taken aback and as we continued the conversation, she seemed so strong, clear and unrattled,” he said. “I was touched and inspired by her presence.”
This week’s book event was already scheduled when the Eaton Fire started burning. The timing was uncanny for some, including Suzanne McDonnell, a Glendale resident whose friends lost their homes in the recent fires.
“I thought it was providential,” she said about Iyer’s talk. “There can be so much hope, even in suffering.”
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