Exploration and changelessness

I came upon a 2011 piece by Pico Iyer, “Where Silence Is Sacred,” where he talks about growing up in chapels and the importance of stillness.

I especially love this part, with my favorite bits in bold:

I grew up in chapels, at school in England. For all those years of my growing up, we had to go to chapel every morning and to say prayers in a smaller room every evening. Chapel became every­thing we longed to flee; it was where we made faces at one another, doodled in our hymnbooks, sniggered at each other every time we sang about “the bosom of the Lord” or the “breast” of a green hill. All we wanted was open space, mobility, freedom—the California of the soul. But as the years went on, I started to see that no movement made sense unless it had a changelessness beneath it; that all our explorations were only as rich as the still place we brought them back to.

Published by Cheri Lucas Rowlands

I am an editor at Longreads. For over a decade, I've worked on curation, editing, and storytelling projects across Automattic, including WordPress.com.

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