Leonard Cohen had come to this Old World redoubt to make a life - an art - out of stillness. Iyer reflects on CohenвЂ™s particular impulse and what it reveals about our shared yearning: I could hardly believe that this rabbinical-seeming gentleman in wire-rimmed glasses and wool cap was in truth the singer and poet whoвЂ™d been renowned for thirty years as an international heartthrob, a constant traveler, and an Armani-clad man of the world.Д¬ohen, who once described the hubbub of his ordinary state of mind as вЂњvery much like the waiting room at the DMV,вЂќ had sought in the sequestered Zen community a more extreme, more committed version of a respite most of us long for in the midst of modern life - at least at times, at least on some level, and often wholeheartedly, achingly. IвЂ™d come up here in order to write about my hostвЂ™s near-silent, anonymous life on the mountain, but for the moment I lost all sense of where I was. 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 вЂњsilence.вЂќ

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. In 1994, shortly after the most revealing interview he ever gave, Cohen had moved to the Mt. 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. 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) - a beautifully argued case for the unexpected pleasures of вЂњsitting still as a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it,вЂќ revealed through one manвЂ™s sincere record of learning to вЂњtake care of his loved ones, do his job, and hold on to some direction in a madly accelerating world.вЂќ

Wilson, the poet Robert Hass described beauty as a вЂњparadox of stillness and motion.вЂќ But in our Productivity Age of perpetual motion, itвЂ™s increasingly hard - yet increasingly imperative - to honor stillness, to build pockets of it into our lives, so that our faith in beauty doesnвЂ™t become half-hearted, lopsided, crippled. вЂњFaith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments,вЂќ Alan Lightman wrote in his sublime meditation on science and spirituality, вЂњand at others to ride the passion and exuberance.вЂќ In his conversation with E.O.

The art of stillness pdf free