Pico Iyer Made His Name Traveling. Now He Explores Inner Landscapes.

Pico Iyer seems to have spent his life in motion, shuttling between homes in Japan and the United States, not to mention journeys to Ethiopia, Tibet, Cuba and beyond. But there’s one place he’s gone to seek out stillness ever since he was young: the Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple.

Perched in the hills above his childhood home, the temple offers sweeping views of the bucolic California town and the ocean shimmering in the distance, and it provided Iyer with an early sense of refuge, he said.

“I think we’re all seeking out places of quiet, to retrieve something we’ve lost,” Iyer said, sitting in the temple gardens in late October, not far from where, as a teenager, he heard Christopher Isherwood lecture on Hinduism. “Even as a kid, when all I wanted was action and excitement, something brought me here, to the quietest place I knew.”

If Iyer’s career has been built on a restless investigation of far-flung corners of the globe, this is the perfect spot to pause and reflect on his new work, “Aflame: Learning From Silence,” an examination of arrival — not departure — and the art of sitting still.

“Aflame” recounts Iyer’s experiences at another place central to his quest for tranquillity: a silent Benedictine retreat in Big Sur, just up the California coast, which he has visited repeatedly over the past three decades. Together with Japan, he calls it “the single most important destination of my life.” He first went there in 1991, after his house in Santa Barbara burned to the ground, along with all the handwritten pages for a book on Cuba.

The fire left him homeless, but also, in some ways, liberated, he said. The monastery provided a roof and a bed, and a new perspective on the truths of life, love and death. From the monks, he writes, he learned about “companionship, compassion — about living with impermanence, and even dying.”