Reflections on The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer

Though I am focused on traveling and its necessary preparations, I am also reading books about solitude, for example, May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude and Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness.

Questions I am considering? How do I bring a sense of stillness and solitude along on a trip that is anything but stillness and solitude? How do I maintain a sense of stability and centeredness when I am aloft in the skies for a ten-hour stretch of time?

I loved reading Iyer’s book for it reinforced the concept of dual travel, traveling the outer world while also travel within.

Here is information on Iyer’s book.

Articles from Pico Iyer’s website: on travels, the innerworld.

Quotes from the book The Art of Stillness

On travel as perception:

Travel is an exercise in perception, a way of shifting your perspectives; the hope is always that you will have less and less to distract you, even if life presents more and more that confounds you. It’s not a matter of finding answers, in short, but of clarifying the questions—and then finding the courage to live with them. The traveler quickly learns that uncertainty is his home and impermanence his most loyal companion. The layover that is so excruciating for one traveler brings a sanctuary, a way of gathering his thoughts (the better to let them go) to another.

One way to think about plane travel:

Our journeys, the traveler learns, are defined not by their destinations, but by their starting-points, the ways we choose to approach the destination; nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. I once asked Matthieu Ricard, the longtime Tibetan Buddhist monk, how he deals with the incessant travel involved in giving his talks and translating for great Tibetan teachers; he’d taken on robes thirty years before in search of stillness, I assumed.

In his ineffable way, clear-eyed, face shining, he said, more or less, “When I get onto a plane, I am so free. There is nothing I have to do, nothing I have to say. I look out at the clouds, at the ocean below. For ten hours I can just sit and look. It is a kind of meditation. For me, every trip in a plane is like a mini-retreat in the skies.”

On incorporating a still way of seeing:

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

On seeing more deeply:

“Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, 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.”

“One could start just by taking a few minutes out of every day to sit quietly and do nothing, letting what moves one rise to the surface. One could take a few days out of every season to go on retreat or enjoy a long walk in the wilderness, recalling what lies deeper than the moment or the self.”

 

Chiricahua and Beyond – Day 1

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Drive east across southern Arizona
veer southeast at Willcox
and cross the high desert.

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Here are the Chiricahua Mountains, a sky island,
and Chiricahua National Monument.
Begin in the mixed oak and conifer forest and

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ascend 6000 feet, finish amidst the highest rocks,
Chiracahua Peak is 9,759 feet high.
An Apache place name, it  means “a wonderland of rocks”.

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The rocks are rhyolite, volcanic rock,
the trees are juniper, pygmy trees,
and the Chiricahuan Raven calls this mountain his home.

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Return the way one came, descending Bonita Canyon Road,
and return to the high desert.
The tumbleweed blow. A storm approaches.

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Drive east again, towards New Mexico,
the first day of travel nearly done.
The air so dry and hot, the rain evaporates before it reaches the ground.

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Cross country travel. Using iPhone and Hipstamatic app. There is little time to stop for photographs, so these are on-the-road shots.

Driving to the Desert – Arriving Home

 

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1500 miles in the past, 300 miles yet to come.

Driving towards Alamogordo, New Mexico. Clouds hug the mountain ranges.

The snow from the last hundreds of miles has melted and, except for a few puddles, the desert looks like the desert.

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Ready to be home.

The Organ Mountains, one of the newest National Monuments (2014), rise above the clouds.

Warmer air blew in from the west and trapped the cooler air below it. This caused a cloud inversion which pushed clouds low in the canyons of the mountain ranges and exposes the high peaks.

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It was a late and very dark arrival — and included a bonus! A meteor shower through the front windshield as we drove the final 30 miles. Even a green shooting star! What a welcome!

The morning after the late arrival…the sun had yet risen over the Santa Rita mountain range and the clouds were bright with desert glitter sunlight!

And I am home. Home in the desert.

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This is the last of the “every 100 miles” series.

All photos taken using my iPhone and Hipstamatic app with filter set on random. Since time and distance were the priorities, all photos were taken “on the fly” = zipping past at 65-75 miles per hour.

Essence of travel.

Traveling to the Desert – Day 3

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1000 miles done, 800 miles to go.

January 2nd and businesses are open, back to business as usual.

The 6 am crowd, grits and coffee and conversation, at a diner west of Liberal, Kansas.

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Excuse me, you there in the front seat. Can you please tell me…what does “1800 miles” mean again?

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1100 miles done, 700 miles yet to go

Hooker, Oklahoma

“It’s a location, not a vocation.” Town motto.

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Grain elevators…in every town along the way.

I see these elevators as visible symbol of each town we pass through, as a conglomeration of add-on buildings, as central figure in a town or as building on the periphery. But I also see them in an abstract way – composition, light and shadow, and what can I capture instinctively, no time to stop or study. What do I see, where do I focus? Sometimes I like what I see in the many grain elevator photographs I take, sometime I press delete a lot.

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1300 miles in the past, still 500 miles to go

Santa Rosa, New Mexico.  A stop for lunch – complete with a tres leche pudding (not a baked custard, a creamy pudding) which made my sweet tooth happy in a most contented way.

Prickly pear cactus in the snow. The house was abandoned, but the cactus garden was thriving.

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1400 miles done, 400 to go.

A surprise. The remnants from Winter Storm Goliath that covered eastern New Mexico with several feet of snow a week ago.

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Only 5 to 8 inches remained, but the high desert was a winter wonderland. Junipers and cedars still glittered with an icy coating.

Desert shrubs in white.

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I’ve arrived in the desert, but documentation of “every 100 miles” took awhile to process (in between cleaning, getting groceries, and all the other jobs required after a long absence).

Since time and distance were the travel priorities, all photos taken “on the fly” = zipping past at 65-75 miles per hour.

All photos using my iPhone and Hipstamatic app with the filter set on random. Optional post processing.

 

Traveling to the Desert — Day One

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December 31.

Heading west from Wisconsin.

Driving to the desert.

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100 miles done, 1700 to go.

Crossing the Mississippi River at Dubuque, Iowa

River is icy, not frozen.

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200 miles done, 1600 miles to go.

Iowa farm

Minimalist. Lines.

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300 miles done, 1500 miles to go. break in travel for a hometown visit

crossing the Mississippi again, this time into Illinois

river is high on December 31st after unprecedented winter rains

much of Quincy is built high on the bluffs, natural flood protection

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the bridge of my childhood travels

crossing this bridge always meant some version of travel adventure — a visit with family who across the river in Missouri or Iowa, or a weekend trip to St. Louis (the big city)

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Since driving and arriving are the priority for this trip, all photos are drive by. And on the first leg of the journey, all shots are taken through winter-slushed windows.

Hipstamatic filters set on random (but still available for some post processing when desired) and my iPhone add a sense of photo adventure with a modicum of control.