Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer, known as Pico Iyer, is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian origin, best known for his travel writing. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionWriter
CountryIndia
turning-your-back and-love world
Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.
rain sleep autumn
I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.
buddhist heart acknowledge
The Dalai Lama acknowledges that he's met Westerners who to some extent are clearly Easterners at heart, and he would never want them not to become Buddhists just because they happened to be born in California.
song home thinking
For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, Wheres your home? I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.
different sanctuary findings
Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.
travel heart eye
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
thinking mind dalai
I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would.
motivational book feel-better
Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.
perspective movement stillness
Movement is only as good as the sense of stillness that you can bring to it to put it into perspective.
book heart glasses
What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady. To be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together, and they would not trust or want to listen to one another; but each is a piece of a stained-glass whole without which I couldn’t make sense to myself, or to the world outside.
spiritual moving thinking
Unlike many spiritual leaders, Dalai Lama is never been in a position to just sit on a mountain top handing out wisdom. He's had to live out his principles in the middle of this very complex situation, every day for sixty years or more. I think it's something that moves many people about his example.
like-love wonder midst
All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
lonely loneliness people
So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.
choices mind small-moments
Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?