After a 1990 wildfire destroyed his home and possessions, Iyer started over. The loss led him to a Benedictine monastery, where he found comfort and compassion in solitude. His new memoir is Aflame.

These days, I can’t stop thinking about the hazy morning in June 1990, when I walked all the way up our narrow mountain road in Santa Barbara, Calif., past exhausted firemen, past houses reduced to cinders and the skeletons of abandoned cars, until I reached the spot in the hills where our home was a pile of debris.

Pico Iyer, in Aflame, reflects on solitude, gratitude, the necessity of silence, and interconnectedness, promoting a compassionate approach to life.

How to Listen. For decades, starting in 1991 after his house in Santa Barbara burned to the ground, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer

We’re surrounded by ever more New Age sanctuaries, retreat-centres and yoga-inflected spas, yet what will be lost if formal monasteries and convents based on lifelong commitments close down?

Pico Iyer has visited a small, Benedictine hermitage in California more than 100 times in the last 30 years. He isn't religious, but his life has been transformed by these times spent in silence.

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How can silence teach us more than any words, and offer us a common space in an ever more divided and despairing world? Pico Iyer discusses his latest book, Aflame, "a transfixing mix of meditation and storytelling," with William Green. Please join Asia ...

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