What the breath leaves behind
My thoughts return to the breath. With the new year just a few days away, I found myself attending an intensive meditation retreat last week, something I’d long wanted to take on, an event whose timing, falling in the small crevice between Christmas and New Year’s Day, felt almost too magical to be true. And yet, starting last Wednesday morning I found myself sitting on a cushion each morning at the Shambala Center in the West Loop, there to still my mind and learn some of the Buddha’s key teachings that aim to alleviate suffering on this earth.
How often do you hear your own breath? It’s a question that almost feels silly to ask: something so intimate, so foundational to the act of being alive, is surely something we all know rather well. Yet as the basic philosophy of meditation suggests, we are all too often so far from our own breath, that persistent animating force which allows animal life to continue through each moment, always arising, a sturdy reminder of the reality of the now. If you’ve ever tried meditating, one painful truth comes to pass almost as soon as you sit down – try as you might to exist only with the breath, to still all thoughts and abide entirely within this moment, our brains are ready to run away elsewhere, brought to silence only with incredible discipline.
I have gained much through meditation over the past eight-odd years, though this is the first time I’ve engaged in a sustained way with the teachings of the Buddha, at least in a group context. It’s been a unique challenge, and something that feels urgently necessary in this moment. The focus of the retreat emphasized Buddhism’s emphasis on social transformation, and over the course of five days, we spoke about human suffering, the stories we tell ourselves that often lead us astray, and how we might use this practice to play some small role in making the world something better.
Even before the retreat, I found myself thinking a lot about breath, in particular the difficulty of sharing breath in crowded spaces in a time of pandemic. It’s hard to say exactly how many people are sick right now, given the atrophied tools available to everyday people to test themselves, but evidence from wastewater data suggests that infection rates across the country and worldwide have spiked in the last few weeks, making this one of the worst surges we’ve encountered thus far. This comes as no surprise: holiday travel, New Year’s Eve festivities, and more activities shifting indoors during the colder months make us all more vulnerable to infection. Yet just as I know that the virus (and countless other illnesses) run rampant right now, it’s also hard to escape the desire to be with others in this moment, to turn to the traditions that bring us together as we say goodbye to one year and greet another.
This was my first year (outside of 2020) not spent in Colorado at Christmas. Instead, I traveled with Elise to visit their family in Baltimore, to see the John Waters Christmas show (incredible!), and to drive up to Pittsburgh to visit their grandparents. On Christmas Eve, we found ourselves at Elise’s aunt and uncle’s house, there for a sprawling party. I was grateful for just enough December warmth and a well-placed heater to spend a fair amount of time outside; otherwise, I found myself the only person inside wearing a mask. I do not begrudge anyone else for foregoing the mask – to be at a party amongst family and friends, something so natural just four years ago, is an easy place to not want to mask up, even for those who might do so in many other settings. I was thankful that nobody made me feel weird for my decision, and as we were about to leave, I chatted with Morgan, a cousin of Elise’s who works as a nurse, who told me that she appreciated seeing me wear it. She then shared a piece of advice her brother Jake offered early in the pandemic, simple wisdom that still resonates, as she said, “You do the best you can in the moment.”
In her book On Immunity: An Inoculation, Eula Biss writes, “Our bodies may belong to us, but we ourselves belong to a greater body composed of many bodies. We are, bodily, both independent and dependent.” I finished the book just before Christmas, and it has stayed close with me throughout the last few weeks. Another key tenant of Buddhism, taught as part of the Four Immeasurables, states, “May all beings be free from suffering and the root of suffering.” The suffering experienced through Covid-19 and other airborne illnesses, passed along from body to body in the act of creating shared space, is perhaps the most painful reminder of how bound together we are, for good and ill, the need for communion itself a key factor in why we cannot shake this deadly pandemic. It’s a contradictory feeling almost too painful to handle, yet one that I try to let hover in meditation, wishing that each indrawn breath could somehow cleanse the surrounding air, another intention we practiced during the retreat.
Meditating at home last night, I found myself listening to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final album, 12, released last January 17th, the artist’s 71st birthday, just two months before he passed away. In many ways, 12 is perhaps Sakamoto’s most straightforward record. The album consists largely of unadorned piano tracks, each titled only by the date of their recording, all made in full awareness that he would soon leave this mortal coil. Yet if piano is the only instrument in many songs, there’s something else you hear on these tracks, an inescapable presence the artist left behind: the sound of his breathing, labored and patient, resting atop each recording. The sound is unmistakable, its impact gut-wrenching. Even after a career spent conjuring timeless sounds that will reverberate eternally, Sakamoto’s final missive offers us perhaps the most intimate experience, the breath itself, there to linger on any time we might want to hear it.
In every moment, the breath is all we have. Every external factor, all the thoughts and emotions that run through us, each force that drives us to distraction, to rumination on what might have been, can be brought to silence with enough intention. It’s not an easy act, but one that I am excited to give more time to in these fallow winter months, a perfect moment to retreat and worry less about the external world.
If the breath is all that remains with us from moment to moment, what about after we’re gone? After all, most of us aren’t world-renowned composers, able to make an album where our own determined breathing can live on in this way. How the body carries on beyond death, how we find ways of continuing our existence in the great beyond, is the kind of thought that can linger, even while sitting quietly. In this question, my mind returned to an exhibit by Daniel Goldstein called The Marks We Left Behind, on view at Wrightwood 659 through the end of the month. The works, while conceptually and physically straightforward, are nonetheless disarming: Goldstein preserved a series of pieces of leather from Muscle Systems, a gym frequented by gay men in 1980s San Francisco. Upon these skeins once rested the bodies of countless queer men, huffing and puffing through workouts, in many cases within bodies that would soon wither away from AIDS, their cumulative impact enough to leave ghostly traces upon each piece.
The dematerialized spirit of each body that once found itself upon the leather remains today, just as we are left with Sakamoto’s spirit in his songs. During the retreat, we were asked to practice compassionate abiding, in which we noticed the stories that arose while sitting, quieting these narrations while letting the underlying emotional sensation linger. My writer’s mind makes meditation difficult – indeed, as I realized that I’d be writing these words, they began coming to me unbidden, not patient enough to wait until this moment. Still, when I push myself to quiet the words, to feel only the physical sensations of where I’ve set my mind to rest in silence, I am grateful to sense these specters in the room with me, offering companionable silence and a faint trace of what’s come before.
Meanwhile, at Wrightwood, the only other work that shares space with Goldstein’s leather imprints is a smiling Buddha, attending in spirit to those alive and not, there to remind us only to breathe.