- Hey friends, it's Anne. So I have this persistent fantasy, in which I turn off the news, toss my phone, burn my to-do list, and devote some serious time to remembering, or discovering, who I am without all those things. And maybe you can relate. There is so much that clamors and competes for our attention every day. It can be overwhelming. Well, this time, on "To the Best of Our Knowledge," we talk with people who have really embraced the idea of getting away from it all. Our topic, Retreat From the Day-to-Day Life. Keep listening.
- From WPR.
- It's "To the Best of Our Knowledge." I'm Anne Strainchamps. In 1990, writer Pico Iyer's family lost everything in a wildfire. This was devastating. But it was in the wake of that wildfire that Pico Iyer found his way to a refuge, and a practice, that has sustained him for decades.
- So my family and I lived in the hills of California. And one day, I went upstairs in my family home. And I saw that it was encircled by 70-foot flames. It was the worst fire in California in history at the time. Three hours later, it had burned down our home, and everything in it. For many months after that, I was sleeping on a friend's floor, downtown. And at one point, another friend came there, and he saw me, and he said, "Come on, Pico, you can do better than this." He told me that he took his students, because he was a high school teacher, every spring to a retreat house, three and a half hours up the coast in California. He said that even the most fidgety and distracted and phone-addicted 15-year-old Californian boy only had to spend three days in silence, and something cooled down and cleared out in him to the point where many of his students never wanted to return home. And he said, "Well, if nothing else, you'll have a bed to sleep in, a desk, and a private walled garden overlooking the sea. $30 a night." So I thought, "What is there to lose?" I drove along Highway One in California, which grows ever narrower and emptier till just golden fields on one side and the great blue plate of the Pacific Ocean on the other. And then I came to an even narrower road that snaked for two miles up to the top of a mountain, where this retreat has stood. When I got out of my car, the silence was pulsing. It wasn't just the absence of noise. It was really the presence of something. And maybe just the bird song and the quails and the sunlight that usually I sleepwalk past. So I went into the small cell, as they call it, where I was to sleep. And just at that moment, a rabbit was on my splintered fence. And I looked at that rabbit as if it was something miraculous. And a little later I heard bells tolling behind me. And I really felt as if they were tolling inside of me. Just looking out and seeing the sun burning on the water seemed like a cause for delight. The funny thing was later, I realized that the family home where I'd been staying sits at exactly the same altitude, 1,200 feet over the Pacific, with a beautiful, undistracted view. But of course, at home, I would never have the time, or never think to look at the sun on the water, or to hear bells tolling, if there were bells, or to see a rabbit on my fence. Suddenly it was as if I was out of my head and back in my senses. And that has continued for 33 years now.
- Pico Iyer has made more than 100 retreats to that Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California. He's not a monastic, not even religious, but the ancient practice of taking a periodic retreat from the world has shaped his life. Now this goes against the grain of American culture, right? We are a famously never retreat, never say die nation, always on the go. Which is why producer Shannon Henry Kleiber was so interested in Pico Iyer's new memoir, called "Aflame: Learning from Silence."
- What keeps bringing you back to this? Now you call it really a second home, right?
- Really, yes. I think of it as my secret, deepest home. And the the simple answer might be liberation. Because all these 100 retreats later, I still find that every time I'm driving along the narrow road to the hermitage, there are 1,000 reasons not to go. I'm fretting about leaving my aging mother behind, and I'm worried about my deadlines, my bosses can't get hold of me for 72 hours because there's no cell phone reception or Internet there. I'm really upset I'm missing a friend's birthday party. And then I step out into that silence, and all of that is gone. And I'm just released to the beauty around me. And it's as if little Pico and all his plans and fretful thoughts are left down on the highway. And I'm released thought what feels like a just much truer and more expansive self. And of course, over these 100 retreats, much has changed in my understanding of the monastery, and what I get out of the silence. But that part is constant. And of course, every now and then, I've gone when I'm jet-lagged, and I haven't fully been able to be present as I would like to. And sometimes I've been there when suddenly, torrential winter storms have erupted, and the rain patters on the roof all night, and I can't see a single light across the hillside. And it can be scary. It's really like 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness. But essentially, every time I go there, I remember what I really love, whom I really love, and I also remember what I should be doing with my life. And I find that, as with most people, I think, my regular day is so cut up and caught up with 1,000 distractions, and I'm going from the pharmacy, to the bank, to the supermarket. I never really can have perspective and see what's important. And I never can step back really, to think what should I be doing? And what is the most important thing to me? And I think it's interesting, during the pandemic, when all of us had an enforced retreat in lockdown, I think many of us suddenly began to remember, this is what I care about. My family, my friends, this useful or compassionate pursuit. And so much of the news and other things that distract us really fall away.
- Yeah, it seems like a practice in some ways, too, that it comes back to you, and then you fall into these routines, but they're beautiful and you've done them for so many times.
- Yes. I think a practice is a beautiful way to put it. So I've never meditated. I don't have a yoga practice. And really, I don't do anything religious as such when I'm on retreat. These are solitary unguided retreats. So I just, I take walks, I read books, I write a lot of letters to friends at night. I just look up at the stars. Often, I do nothing at all, which is exactly what I don't allow myself to do the rest of the time. But I think it is my equivalent to the kind of practices that people maintain, whether it's a running practice, or a swing practice, or a meditation practice. And the other thing that has always hit me, from the first day I arrived, is that I should stress, I'm not a Christian. And yet the Benedictine monks who take me in, 15 other retreatments at a time, are so open-hearted. They know that belief is much less important than something unnameable, within. And I think they have confidence that whoever goes there will find whatever she needs, or whatever is most sustaining to her. So there's no insistence on reading certain texts, or attending the services. They just have this beautiful faith that divinity will come to us, or what we need will come to us in any form.
- I was so interested to hear that it was a Catholic hermitage. I grew up Catholic. I'm Catholic. And I used to go on retreats when I was younger that are Catholic retreats. And I did love them, in many ways. They were an opportunity to be with people, and then be alone. And I'm an only child. I know you're an only child.
- Yes, yes.
- Also. And I did love this opportunity to be alone. So I was wondering how you see being alone and loneliness as different when you're on this retreat?
- You're absolutely right. I'm an only child. And I've chosen to be a writer, which means I spend eight hours a day alone at my desk. So I love being alone. And I think being alone is the opposite of loneliness. I'm one of those people who only feels lonely in a crowd. I could feel lonely at a cocktail party, and I would never feel lonely if I'm just by myself, walking down the street, or left to amuse myself. So as soon as I came to this beautifully solitary place with the most radiant view over the most sparkling coastline I've ever seen, of course, I was in heaven. But I think to me, the surprise, was to realize that being alone was only a gateway to learning how to be better with other people. And of course, the monks in their enclosure, are the opposite of alone. They're spending all their time tending to guests like myself, and looking after one another, and there are days when I stay with the monks in their enclosure, full of busyness, and crowds in some ways. But I think the first part of this was being there, I saw that being alone, in some sense, I was never alone. In other words, I felt very companioned in my little room, if only just by the sense of light and the bells around, and the birdsong in my garden, and the animals going across that fence, which otherwise I would never notice as I say, and I might otherwise feel more alone. And then the other beautiful surprise was that when I would take a walk along the monastery road, I would sometimes pass one of the other people who's staying there. And if we stopped to talk for two or three minutes, I think we would instantly feel like deepest friends. Anyone I met there, I would trust. Because at some level, they were coming there, really for the same reason as I was, in search of silence, in search of something they'd lost, or misplaced inside themselves, in search of whatever beauty they have within them.
- It sounds like even though it's not about the religion, it is in some ways about spirituality there, about deepening your spiritual being. How does being on retreat at the hermitage deepen your spiritual life?
- I think to begin with, it feels like it's revealing to me, a self, and a reality much deeper than the one I know otherwise. And in some ways the opposite, to the ones I know otherwise. T.S. Elliot asked, "Where is the life we have lost in living?" And I think most of us, especially as our life, and our world gets ever more fast and furious, have this sense that there's some deeper part of our lives and deeper self that is getting forgotten in the rush. And I feel that's what I recover there. So in some ways, it's almost like being freed from myself, and opened up to some much larger self. I feel much more a part of some bigger whole, which makes me much less scared of things like death. And it also makes me reorient myself and think very differently about what is success, and what is joy. So when I first went there, I was an essayist for Time magazine. I had quite an exciting job, and I was leading something like the life I might have dreamed of as a little boy. And going there made me think, "Is that really where your fulfillment comes? Or might your fulfillment not come from looking after a family and living much more quietly, and enjoying some kind of radiance every day, instead of running from activity to activity?" And one of the things that I learned soon after I arrived from the writing of the monks there, is just that notion that joy is the happiness that doesn't depend on circumstances. In other words, joy is something that you create within. So even in difficult times, which all of us are going to have to endure and face, there's some strength and confidence there that it's not the end of the world. And that there's some reality larger than this that will sustain you. And you and I were talking before we went on air about the Dalai Lama, or his great friend, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And they're perfect examples of this. Because I don't know anyone who has suffered more than the two of them, and nor do I know anyone who radiates more joy and infectious delight and confidence than the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the more the world speeds up and the more information is flooding in on us, I think the more some of us feel this longing to escape from that.
- There's so much noise now, right? There's just so much noise, so many distractions, the news, the technology, everything that is being thrown at us. I personally have a hard time detaching my to-do list and my kids and my job and all these kinds of things. And I do think of these distractions as being not the time to think about other things. And as you're talking, I'm thinking about Pico Iyer as these two different people. One in the real world, and one, you're in this wonderful hermitage world. How do you come back to your real, I'm gonna say, they're both real worlds in many ways, but your maybe your day-to-day world, and merge those two selves?
- Such a good question, Shannon. And I think in some ways, going there tells me what is real, and reminds me that what I see is the real world when I'm caught up in the middle of it may not be the whole story and may be just the performance as it were, and there's a backstage that's much realer. But you're absolutely right. If you're guessing that every time I return from a three-day retreat, for about one day, I'm walking on clouds, and I'm radiating joy at everyone I meet. And within three days, I'm back fretting about my income tax return, and why has my editor not got back to me? So the spell doesn't last very long, but I think some residue remains there. And as I'm back in my regular life, some part of me knows, "Don't take this too seriously. There's something much deeper that is part of every life and that you can't afford to forget." And it almost puts a frame around my daily life so that I can see everything that's around it, which is much more significant. I remember soon after I began going there, a very kind friend said to me, "Isn't it selfish to leave your loved ones behind and leave all your responsibilities behind for three days, or sometimes two weeks?" And I said to her, "I think it's actually the only way I can be a little less selfish." And so as I worry about leaving my aging mother behind, whenever I go there, as soon as I arrive, I realize it's only by going there, I'll have anything really joyful and fresh and exciting to share with my mother. And of course, in the space of three days, she hasn't really missed me. She can get on perfectly well without me. And she is so delighted that the person who comes back through her front door is so much more the son she wishes she would always see. Not distracted, not saying, "Catch your later," not racing off downstairs to take care of the next thing on his to-do list. And I sometimes think it's almost like knowing that there's medicine nearby. And as the world gets very difficult, and we all go through innumerable challenges, just knowing that there's a sanctuary and an almost a kind of answer to many of my problems puts everything in perspective.
- I'm hearing what you're saying about those practices seem like joy to me, that you were finding joy. And that sometimes we don't allow ourselves, we don't have time for joy, we don't deserve joy. That it's vital really to have joy in our lives.
- Yes. Because unless we do, we can't really do justice to anything else. We're not a great blessing to our friends and family and colleagues, and least of all to ourselves. So you're absolutely right. And that's why every time I go on retreat, I'm well aware that I'm a very fortunate person to be able to afford the time and the money to take three days off. And I'm also aware that it can seem like an indulgence. But apart from being an indulgence, it seems to me the best and most important investment I can make. Because I suppose my question for myself always is, "What can I bring to the ICU?" All of us at many times in our lives, are suddenly going to have to walk into a very difficult life-and-death situation involving ourselves or other people. And what is going to help us in that situation? So over the time that I'd been on retreat, my 13-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer, had to live in a hospital for a year, my mother was widowed, all kinds of things were happening. And I remember once I was sitting here in this apartment, and I got a call in the middle of the night, telling me that my mother had just been rushed into the hospital in California after a major stroke, and I'm her only living relative. So I flew back and I had to spend 35 days with her in the ICU as she was wavering between life and death. And as I was sitting by her bedside, I thought, "Really, my bank account isn't a huge help in this situation." And all the books I've written and all the things I've accumulated on my resume are totally beside the point. The only thing I could bring to my mother, and the only thing that I could bring to myself in that difficult situation, was probably such clarity and calm as I had gathered mostly by being quiet, or especially by being silent. And not all the time I'd spent rushing around. Again, would be no help in that situation. It was just the moments when I've touched something deeper than my regular life, and I've had the sense of a larger picture that would be able to help me, and would be able to help my mother. And since every one of us is pretty much guaranteed to go through such moments more than once, I think that savings account, that invisible inner savings account, is really one that needs to be attended to. We all have to make a living, but we also have to make a life. And it's that life and it's that secret deposit that's all that we have to draw upon when reality makes a house call.
- And that's a thought worth sitting with. Shannon Henry Kleiber is talking with writer, Pico Iyer, about his longtime practice of taking silent retreats. And we'll hear the rest of their conversation after this, on "To the Best of Our Knowledge," from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. How do you sustain an inner life in the face of everything that pulls us into the shallows? Well, let's go back to Shannon Henry Kleieber's conversation with Pico Iyer.
- Do you think that retreat and silence and working on your inner life is preparing you for your own death?
- Absolutely. And I think once you see something that doesn't seem constantly to change, it makes you much less scared of change, and of death. And of course, every time I go on retreat to that same hermitage, it's a little different, in that people who are living there are coming and going. And the sea isn't quite the same sea that I looked at three months ago. But by and large, it represents relative permanence in a world of constant flux. And by comparison, my daily life, where everything is moving all the time, it represents a kind of stability. And therefore, I remember actually when my father died, and it was a very busy time, 'cause I was looking after my mother, and taking care of all the practical arrangements, I realized that the only way I could meet that situation was by driving one morning, four hours up to the same hermitage, just sitting on a bench overlooking the sea for two hours, listening to the bells, hearing the birds, looking at the ocean that never seemed to move, and then drive four hours back. And somehow seeing that vision of permanence really helped me to deal with the impermanence of everyday life. So I suppose, I mean, I haven't thought of this before, but this is a long-winded way of saying that going on a retreat teaches me what's essential, and then trains me to prepare myself for what is the essential stuff of life, such as death, which otherwise I would always tell myself, I don't have time to think about in my regular life, till suddenly it comes upon me, and ambushes me with some sudden drama.
- Wow, your book is called "Aflame." And fire plays such an important part in your life. Your mother's house, the burning, and what does fire have to do with silence, and how you create your inner life?
- I think silence is where we really kindle, and keep burning, the most important part of ourselves. Within whether it's devotion or concern or conscience. Not long ago I read that Carl Jung said at one point, "The difference between a good life and a bad life is measured by how we walk through the fire." And insofar as we're living in a world on fire, and on a house on fire, nowadays, I think there's an ever more literal truth to that. So it's another way of saying, "How do we keep hope alive, when there's so much natural disaster that strips us of all hope?" We've never known as many extreme climate events as are now happening in every corner of the world, in every form. And yet, in the face of wildfires and tsunamis and hurricanes and flash floods, we can't afford to let some flame within us die out. Silence, deep down, is the best thing we can share with our friends when it's an understood shared silence. And any pair of lovers knows this. They share something when no words were exchanged, that is far deeper than anything they could share in conversation. As you know, because I write about lots of monks in this book, one of the ones I write about is Leonard Cohen, the great singer and poet.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And he was, without question, the most spell-binding and articulate writer I've ever met.
- Tell me about your relationship with Leonard Cohen. I was really interested in hearing more about that.
- So by chance, I'd been a fan of his since I was a teenager. And without knowing that, an editor set me up to spend three days with Leonard Cohen when he was living full-time for five and a half years as a Zen monk in a monastery in the high, cold, dark mountains behind Los Angeles. So I first got to know him during his own monastic retreat. And then for the next 20 years, we would often be in touch, and became friends of a kind. And what really struck me, as I say, he was such an eloquent person, and everybody who knows his songs, or has listened to his interviews knows what a wizard he was with words. When I would visit him in the little house that he shared with his daughter in a very unfashionable part of Los Angeles, we'd often have lunch, and we'd talk a little. And then at the end of the lunch, he would pick up two folding chairs, and take them out to the little garden in front of his house, in front of a flower bed, on this quiet residential street. And I remember the first time this happened, I sat down next to him. And I sat there. And I sat there, and I sat there. And he said nothing. And after quite a few minutes I thought, "Well, maybe this is a gentle hint." So I said, "Oh, you must be busy. I should leave you alone." And he turned around, and he looked at me, beseeching, he said, "Please, don't go." And I realized that though nobody I knew used words more beautifully than he, silence was the best thing that we could share. And in fact, the name that his teacher had given him in the monastery was "Jikan," which refers to the silence between two thoughts. And perhaps the teacher knew that as a man of beautiful words, Leonard most perhaps had to go to the place beyond words. And maybe that is something of what he had to renounce. It just reminded me that silence was the ultimate gift of friendship. And by inviting me to sit next to him in silence, he was inviting me into something much deeper and richer than if we just continued with chitchat over the lunch table. It came to seem the most generous thing that he could offer to me. So it was a small example of how, in the right circumstance, silence can actually bring you together, even as words are likely to push us apart. And I think one reason I wrote my book about silence and the monks now is I've never seen the world as divided, as well as,
- Yeah.
- As despairing as it is now. And in this time of division, I feel that silence is what exists on the far side of our ideologies and our theories and our words, and all of us know, if you share a moment of silence with 100 people, nothing brings you closer together. As soon as you're talking again, you're divided. But the silence creates a kind of beautiful circle around you, and you're part of some wonderful whole.
- Yeah. Oh, that's beautiful. I wanted to ask you about another friend. I don't know if that's the right word, but your friendship with the Dalai Lama. How that came about? And how he has come to have silence in his life with you in your interactions?
- Yes, so I've been very lucky, that as soon as the Dalai Lama came into exile in India in 1959, my father, who was a philosopher, and realized this great treasury of Buddhist wisdom was available to the world for the first time, sent a letter to the Dalai Lama, asking if they could meet, and sailed all the way from England, where we were living to India, and was one of the relatively first people to meet the Dalai Lama. And the Dalai Lama has a remarkable memory, and he always remembered that early meeting with my father. So I first went to visit the Dalai Lama in his home when I was 17, 50 years ago. And for 50 years, we've been regularly traveling together, and talking together. And he's an interesting contrast, of course, with Leonard Cohen. Because Leonard Cohen is the ultimate man of the world, who chose to retreat into silence and become a monk. And I think of the Dalai Lama, who's been a monk since the age of four, as one of the great blessings to the world, because he hasn't lived on top of a mountain, or in a monastery most of his life. He's actually in the White House, or on the streets of New York City, or on the streets of Jerusalem or Belfast, where there's such a crying need for somebody like him. And so, in some ways, he's brought his monastic practice into the thick of what we regard as real life, into Times Square, and into the European Parliament. And I used to travel with the Dalai Lama, and be with him every minute of his working day for 10 straight years when he came to visit Japan. And every day at the end of those days, I would be exhausted just from watching him go through eight hours of uninterrupted conversation. And I'm 22 years younger than the Dalai Lama, and I would just be wiped out. And then I realized the reason that he could be so present and so alive to every last person he met for eight hours every day in his late 70s or early 80s was that every morning, while I was enjoying my beauty sleep, and then a large buffet breakfast in the hotel dining room, he was spending his first four hours every day meditating. And it's a very particular kind of meditation he practices and he listens to the BBC World Service, and maybe "To the Best of Our Knowledge" also, but he listens to the radio, some of it, to keep up with the news because his position and job requires that. But nonetheless, the first four hours of every day, even when he is traveling, are devoted to meditation. And then other times, later in the day too. And it sometimes shook me up, and it made me think, "Well, if the busiest person I know can devote four hours every morning before he even comes out into the world to meditating, I could probably afford to use 20 minutes just sitting quietly without my devices or collecting myself or just trying to remain calm for the day that follows." So in that sense, although we don't witness that so often, there's this huge reservoir of silence that he is adding to every single day of his life. The founder of the Camaldolese order, St. Romuald, has a little statement that is in every cell that says, "Sit in your cell as if in paradise." Just empty yourself out, and let yourself get filled by something more. And one of the monks described to me that that's another way of saying, "Sit in your self as if in paradise." In other words, just be quiet and confident enough to sit where you are. This is all I have. As they say in Buddhist traditions, as long as you empty yourself of yourself, you can be filled with everything else. So empty yourself out, and then all kinds of much richer things can fill yourself up.
- Pico, that's beautiful. Thank you. This is very inspiring. And I just love talking with you. Thank you so much.
- Of course. No, what a joy it's been to talk to you.
- Thanks to Shannon Henry Kleiber for a wonderful conversation with Pico Iyer, the author of more than a dozen books, including "Aflame: Learning From Silence." He lives in Japan and California. So some retreats offer gentle restoration. And some strip participants to the bones.
- So it was total sensory deprivation.
- Yeah.
- How are you saying people use this as a punishment?
- I know.
- The CIA tries to break people at black sites!
- I'm unbreakable. No, I would not recommend this to anyone.
- Scientist Monica Gagliano's story of her epic darkness retreat, next. I'm Ann Strainchamps. And this is "To the Best of Our Knowledge," from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. A retreat can offer a break from daily life, a chance to restore or recenter yourself. But the practice also has a more radical history. Medieval Christian Anchorites used to wall themselves up alive. The desert fathers of the early church emulated Jesus 40 days and 40 nights, fasting in the wilderness. To this day, there are Buddhist monks and nuns who spend years living alone in caves. I think of people like this as explorers of interior wilderness. They're willing to endure real physical and psychological hardship if it means breaking into new terrain, discovering non-ordinary states of being. And you and I might not wanna do what they do, but we can learn from the doors they open. So I was in Italy recently, at a new think tank, when I met the plant scientist, Monica Gagliano, who had one of these experiences. What's happened for you since your last book came out?
- Whoo! Quite a few things have happened. And quite a few big changes have happened. I ended up doing 39 days retreat in complete darkness.
- Oh my gosh, you did?
- Mm hmm.
- I've read about those.
- And that was a very, how to say, it was a death, and a birth. The person that walked into that room, which is also the scientist that people have known from before, is not the same one that walked out. So the one that walked out is someone else that looks like me, and maybe more or less thinks like me, but it wasn't the same one. It took me six years, five years, to integrate that retreat.
- I was really not expecting this story. I mean, Monica Gagliano is a scientist, not a mystic. Or I guess a better way to frame it is that she's a scientist and a mystic. Maybe they don't have to be mutually exclusive. As a researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia, Gagliano did a series of groundbreaking experiments that suggest plants have the capacity to learn, to remember, and to make choices. She became a public figure in the new field of plant intelligence, and then she wrote a book called, "Thus Spoke the Plant," in which she was upfront about her belief that plants can communicate to humans. She wrote about getting instructions from them, sometimes in dreams, sometimes through shamanic work. But she hasn't talked, until now, about the leap of faith she took when a plant told her to go on a darkness retreat for 39 days.
- Until I was 21, I was totally afraid of the dark.
- Really?
- So for me to then go and do this long extended retreat in complete darkness is not natural. And yet it was like, "Ah, yeah, yeah. There is a part of me that knows that this is the right direction."
- Where did you go? How do you do a darkness retreat?
- So I looked online and I said, "Okay, darkness." And then I ended up finding this, it's like a retreat, meditation center. And they also had this little room dedicated for darkness retreat. So I contacted them, and I told them exactly what I needed to do, and they were like, "Hmm, have you ever done anything like this?" It's like, "No." "So maybe, how about you start with 10 days?" And I was like, "No, no, no. My instructions are very clear. It has to be 39 days, or I'm gonna go and look somewhere else." At the time, I had a very strong practice, both meditative practice, as well as I was doing a lot of martial arts, and my entire physical, mental, emotional, spiritual bodies were like peak. And so I went in and and did it.
- And what do you do? You just...
- You sit in the dark for a long time.
- I mean, do you ever leave?
- No.
- So they must bring you your food.
- Yeah, this room was set up so that there was a window outside, and a little window inside. They would knock from the outside, put the food in the little space between the two windows, so the space of the wall.
- So you didn't, right. So you never saw any light, even when they put your food in.
- It was actually a wild experience. You eat this food, which you know is stuff that you have eaten before. But I remember tasting, tasting, I was like, "What is this thing?" I know it. There is something about this that is familiar. I stop using the fork, and I put my fingers in it to feel the textures. I can't get my head around this. When it clicked, it's hummus! I was like, "Amazing. This is extraordinary! It's just hummus!" And just realizing how much of our visual world, yeah.
- Could you have visitors? Did you talk to anybody?
- No. No.
- You were just in silence, the whole time? And you couldn't read?
- No, of course not.
- Did you listen to music?
- Mm mm.
- So it was total sensory deprivation.
- Yeah.
- How are you sane? People use this as a punishment!
- I know.
- The CIA tries to break people at black sites.
- I'm unbreakable. No, I would not recommend this to anyone. For me, it was an incredible experience, and I think I was ready, and it was just meant to be along my path. But it's not something like, "Oh, everyone should do this!" It is a practice that has been present across the Egyptian to the Christian Romans, the Buddhist, yeah. But it's a practice that is only done, you, as the student don't choose. Now I'm gonna do the darkness retreat. It's usually the teacher that recognizes if, and when, the students can do that. And in some cases, you'll never do it, because it's not on your path.
- Were there emotional effects?
- Mm. I cried a lot. I think it was an emotional cleansing. And then at one point, I heard this horrible noise. It was like a low humming, but very disturbing sound. It started and then I went to sleep, and it was still there. I put earplugs on and it could go through and still there. And it was driving me crazy. And I said, "What is this sound? What is this sound?" And I started like a mad woman. I remember like checking the walls and dragging my hands along the walls of the room to see if there was something, something. And then at one point, I realized that there was a air conditioner in the room and it got into a stuck mode, because as I dragged my hand around, it was frozen. A block of ice.
- Literally frozen?
- Yeah, a block of ice on top of it. And the entire machine kind of got stuck in that like, "Mmm." So here I go, basically it's like, "I hate you!" Like this. And I had the fork from my lunch, and like a crazy mad woman, stabbing the block of ice. "You had to stop. You had to stop!" And I drove myself so insane, really, that I think I simply passed out.
- Oh my gosh.
- And I passed out. Before passing out, I vomited and, expelled in all possible ways, all at the same time. And so it was one of those like, "I feel very sorry for myself. I'm in pain inside and out." Like that. And then when I passed out, that was it. I have no idea how long I was passed out for. I know that they had brought my food, and I didn't take it. And then there was like the next meal and I didn't take it. And,
- Did they come check on you?
- I think that they knew that there was something going on, but of course, unless you send a message saying like, "I need help," they will let the process go. So eventually, I found bits and pieces and recovered myself and the first thing that I noticed was silence, inside my head, outside. And I remember looking into the darkness of the room, and what before was just this nightmare of noise and pain, suddenly it was like, nothing.
- Wow.
- It just looked like it had the same calm feeling of the night, star, sky, like beautiful, dark, shiny dots here and there. And it was quiet inside, you know? So it was like quiet outside, quiet inside. And then at one point, a thought arise, and a little cloud appeared in the sky of my vision. And then the thought passed, the cloud passed, the thought disappeared, the cloud went. And I was like, "Oh, I see! I'm just watching my mind, painted outside of me into this space of darkness." And from that point, I don't know how long, or how far into the retreat that was, but from that point on, I spent days I guess, in this, ah, silence.
- Sounds like a kind of deep peace.
- Uh huh. And it was like, "Wow, okay, thank you."
- What was it like to come out?
- It was, I had a very deep experience of birthing, which was full of excitement, recognizing that I've done this before. And it's like, "Oh, I'm ready, I'm ready." And it was literally like, I think just a few days, or maybe even like two days before I physically came out, but this experience,
- So nobody said, "You're gonna come out in two days or whatever."
- No.
- You just somehow, your state changed.
- That's right.
- You began getting excited or agitated.
- And I had a full on experience of time and space. But then I felt this physical turning, as if I was suspended in space and I was physically turned. And in that moment it's almost like I recognize, "Ah! The baby is being turned. It's getting ready to.."
- Mm hmm.
- And that's when I was like, "Oh, that's why 39." 'Cause the perfect pregnancy's 39 weeks.
- Oh my gosh, it' 39 weeks.
- And when I came out, yeah, there was this excitement of like, "Oh my God, we're gonna go out again!" And the first thing that I realized when I came out, aside from the fact that I came out in the middle of the night, and they do it on purpose that way so that you don't get the full impact of the sun immediately. And the stars were like so bright and I was like, "I can't, I can't watch you. It hurts my eyes." And I was already thinking like, "These are only the stars at night. Can you imagine what the sun is gonna do?" And then your eyes slowly readjust. But it took several weeks for reentering into this form and,
- Yeah, you must have felt like a newborn.
- Yeah, and to reenter and feel totally embodied again, I learned to appreciate, in a totally new way, being physically embodied, and what it meant for my own nervous system and my sanity, and very grateful, and yeah. And there were so many other things that happened that I could get on and on with this because it was such a big thing. But you can imagine then, how do you go from this, to like, "Oh, now I just go back in the lab, and do your little silly experiment of plant learning." Yeah, and then became very clear that it was harder and harder to try to do normal science when I wasn't that scientist anymore. And then exactly a year ago, I was like, "Okay, I think I am ready to let this go."
- So it was after that that you quit your job?
- It took me a while because it took me five years.
- Yeah.
- Yeah. I have made space. I'm not in academia anymore. I don't actually have a home, a job, nothing. So there is completely,
- You gave up your home and so you left academia.
- Yeah.
- You gave up your home as well?
- I didn't really have a home. I was paying rent, and without a job I couldn't afford, I still can't afford to pay rent, so... But there was like this empty space my car broke down, which was my home for a little while. It was a van like this small.
- You were living in your van?
- Yeah, for a little while. And then it broke down. I was saying, "Not you too." But then I realized, okay, life is really stripping to the basics, to see like, when you make such a big space, empty space, there's like the only thing to look is like, "Okay, so what's here?"
- Yeah. So what precipitated all of this goes back further to you opening up a dialogue with the plants that you work with. 'Cause you didn't start out that way. You haven't been talking to plants since you were a child. I'm thinking when you describe what plants will say to you, they sound like teachers. Like you have your own spiritual teachers, guides. How does it work? How did it even happen in the first place?
- I don't know. And it's funny that you are talking about plants as teachers because that's exactly how they have been. They are still for a while, has been exactly how I would call them. And I had a beautiful Indigenous friend who passed a year ago as well. And with him, I had so many times, I had this conversation about like, "Nobody has recognized me. Nobody is initiating me into this. So I feel like a fraud. I feel like I'm an imposter. Maybe I'm not really talking to plants. Maybe I'm making it all up. Maybe I'm convincing myself that this is happening but it's not happening."
- That's what I would be saying to myself.
- That's right!
- I would be saying, "Come on, it's your subconscious, or it's active imagination." It's beautiful.
- Yeah.
- But it's not the plant.
- That's right, that's right.
- That's what I would be saying.
- And I was like, I would talk to him, and say like, "If this was really happening, some people thinking like some wise elder would see this, and like, 'Oh yeah, she is talking to plants, and I'm recognizing this in you.'"
- It'd be a little validation.
- Exactly! I want my validation. And he would, I don't know how many times sitting around the fire, just me and him, in the evening, and we would just laugh and say like, "But you got the best teachers ever. The plants chose you and they're talking to you. So why would you need a human to validate something that is already happening?" And like, "Yeah, it's easy for you to say. You're Indigenous!" That was the thing is like, by default, you are already like validated, like,
- Oh, you already totally believe that the plants can talk you. You don't have the part of your brain that says, "Are you insane?"
- That's right.
- Yeah.
- And also, there was another layer for me was like, "You as the White woman born in a western country do not have the right.
- Yeah.
- To this communication. Which is, of course, ridiculous. But it was very much there.
- I've kept you a really long time.
- It's okay.
- And yeah, thank you, but can I just ask, so many of us would love to figure out how to have a closer relationship to plants, how to, if it's possible, how to communicate. You probably have plenty of friends who've said, "Monica, teach me."
- Mm.
- How do I do this? What do you say to people?
- I say, "I'm not a good teacher."
- Cop out.
- It's true though, I'm not very good at teaching. But I had actually an experience with a woman that then became a friend, about a year ago. And we were together in this retreat for 10 days, and she actually came to me in tears, and said, "Monica, I really want to talk to my plants, but I really can't." And I said to her, "Well, just pick one, and sit with it, and be quiet and see what happens." Don't go with any expectation, just like empty. So she actually did. And she came back to me, and again, almost like it didn't work. "I sat there, I didn't hear anything. All I felt was like a warm feeling around my heart, but no, nothing." And I was like, "So, wait. You are deciding apparently, that a plant need to talk to you in terms of words, as we are speaking? And if those words don't come, they're not communicating with you?" And she was like, "Well, I guess." This feeling's like a big feeling around your heart is like, I think there is already a big feeling there. So then I said like, "I would go back and continue the conversation." And so she did for the entire time that we were there. And then, yeah, she was so happy, because like, "I think it's talking to me. I think they're doing stuff to me, to my body, so it was like the feelings and then yeah, little thoughts that you know are not yours."
- It's like we're walking around in the world, kind of like you and your darkness retreat. It's like we're walking around the world, blind and deaf. While the rest of the natural world is communicating.
- We've been talking about epistemological humility. I think we are in desperate need of that.
- Yeah.
- And then we will start also asking different questions, or maybe even stop asking stupid questions like,
- And just start listening.
- That's right.
- Thank you so much. What a pleasure to talk with you.
- Mm mm. Thank you. Monica Gagliano is an evolutionary ecologist, and author of "Thus Spoke The Plant." She and I met at the Island of Knowledge, which is a new think tank in Tuscany, bringing scientists, artists, and public intellectuals to talk about human and planetary flourishing. You'll be hearing more conversations recorded there in the months to come. "To the Best of Our Knowledge" is produced in Madison, Wisconsin, at Wisconsin Public Radio by Shannon Henry Kleiber, Charles Monroe-Kane and Angelo Bautista. Our technical director is Joe Hardtke, with help from Sarah Hopefl. And additional music this week comes from Maholisna, Julian Winter, Johann Johannsson, Alexander Lavoie, Martin Shelicans, the Ure, Nicholas Bernier, and Simon Trottier. Steve Folsom is our Executive Producer and I'm Anne Strainchamps. And thanks to you for being with us.
