Support for on-being with Krista Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.

Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives,

a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship

with ourselves, others, and the natural world.

Learn more by visiting fetzer.org. Pico Ayer is not a spiritual teacher or even he says a spiritual person per se.

But he has become one of our most beloved and eloquent translators

of the modern rediscovery of inner life.

As a journalist and novelist, he travels the globe

from Ethiopia to North Korea, and he lives in Japan.

But he also experiences a remote Benedict and hermitage as his second home

retreating there many times each year.

In this intimate conversation, we explore the art of stillness he practices, not in order to enrich

the mountaintop, he writes, but to bring calm into the motion of the world.

I got out of my car at this monastery and the air was pulsing.

It was very silent, but really the silence wasn't the absence of noise.

It was almost a presence of these transparent walls that I think the monks had worked very very hard

to make available to us in the world.

And somehow, almost immediately, it was as if a huge heaviness fell away for me and the lens cap came off my eyes.

Really almost instantaneously I felt I've stepped into a richer, deeper life, a real life that died half forgotten had existed.

I'm Krista Tippett and this is on being.

Pico Iyer studied at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard.

He had an early successful career as a journalist with Time magazine in New York City.

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