Our Unseen Sanctuary

IT was pitch-black on the mountain road through Yemen, and the driver and I had just survived a swarm of teenage boys crowding round us while waving assault rifles.

- Pico Iyer

The rain was coming down hard and the car was swerving towards a sheer precipice. Around the next corner there were more shouting boys, more guns, more roadblocks and I had to recall—again and again—that a traditional source of revenue in these highlands is the kidnapping of foreigners. Hostages are most often released, but they can be held, sometimes for weeks, until their embassies part with a hefty ransom.

The six-hour drive across the war-torn country seemed never to end, and I soon realised that all my credit cards were worthless here. My resume was beside the point. Every one of the books I'd written was of no use at all. The only thing I had to steady myself with was whatever resources I'd gathered within.

At moments I thought back to the day when I'd stepped out onto a sunlit terrace outside the Potala Palace in Lhasa. The sky was a startling cobalt above, the snowcaps gleamed in the distance and I felt, as never before, how much I had inside me, in what felt like a space that was flooded with light with no roof to keep it from the heavens. In both instances, I'd been brought back, shockingly, to what lies beneath our external world and to an inner place that was threatened in Yemen and restored in Tibet. The imaginary place I can’t live without is, in fact, real, and is a treasure-house within I might call our Unseen Sanctuary.

This hidden space is the place where we go to calm ourselves in adversity, the place that, in good ways and bad, lies behind our many doings. It’s the chapel that belongs not to some AI future but right now, right here, though how we name or explain it may be the least important thing about it. It’s not exactly what Orhan Pamuk called his Museum of Innocence but it contains memories of some other, unfallen world we sensed in the purity of childhood. Perhaps it’s best described, seven centuries ago, by the German mystic Meister Eckhart as “the place where one has not been wounded.”