Robert Julius

Noble Silence

This body will become a corpse. This body will become a corpse. This body will become a corpse. This was the mantra we chanted as we walked around the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, a Tibetan-style structure which is said to “liberate upon seeing.” Nestled in a snow-covered meadow, the Great Stupa is the crown jewel of Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. Close by are steep cliffs and the promontory known as Marpa Point, a tower of land so high that one can see the entirety of the Shambhala campus from its peak. Just a few days earlier, my boyfriend and I had flown from Orange County to Denver to partake in a ten-day Tibetan Buddhist meditation retreat offered as a real, credited course by my university. It was late January. The Rocky Mountains were in a deep freeze. As the bus made its way up the mountainside, tires skidding along in the snowpack, Daniel looked at me with all the wonder of someone who had never seen the quiet beauty of snow before.

“Even the rocks look like they’re meditating,” he said. I agreed with him. The boulders in the Rocky Mountains were larger than any of those I had seen before, even in my neck of the woods in Pennsylvania. Sitting beneath the tall pines, the boulders seemed just as alive as the towering evergreen giants. With this sense of wonder already beginning to permeate our minds, I looked forward to arriving at the main campus and learning proper meditation. I had been practicing meditation-lite for the past few years, and I had wanted to train under the guidance of a guru, a true teacher, to deepen my practice. This was that opportunity, a way for me to practice being more present in the world. Sitting with some thirty students from our university, Daniel and I intertwined our fingers as the cellular reception gave way to an inner reception, something that would be signal boosted in the days to come.

When we finally arrived at the main campus, the bus had to stop some fifty yards away from the buildings because of the thick ice that had built up on the road. The walk to Shotoku—the student lodge—would be even farther, about two hundred yards away. We deboarded the bus with our suitcases and began making our way up the icy road, dragging the heavy luggage behind us. Some of these Orange County kids had never seen snow before and had a hard time balancing themselves on the slick surface. I had the advantage of being hardened by many Pennsylvania winters, having walked to work in waist-deep snow on a couple occasions. Many students scrambled to dig out their coats from their suitcases, covering up the clothing that was more suited for the temperate Southern Californian winter. “The air is thinner up here,” our instructor, Professor McGrane (or as we learned to call him in the next few days, Barney) reminded us as we set off for the student lodge.

When we finally arrived, I was disappointed to see how sparse the accommodations were. There were two separate rooms, each with about fifteen stiff-looking mattresses and a total of two bathrooms. Disappointed, and then ashamed of my judgment, I reminded myself that this wasn’t a resort; it was a retreat. Still, never having gone to camp as a child, I wasn’t exactly welcoming to the idea of sharing a room with fifteen other men. Plus, my boyfriend had come along with me. What would the others think of two guys sleeping next to one another? Daniel and I made our way to a corner near a window and pushed two of the mattresses closer together. We looked at each other and shrugged. 

                                                                             #

“They can’t turn off the music,” my dad whispers to me. 

Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” is hauntingly gaudy next to my mother’s dying body. Why can’t they just turn off the music? It doesn’t seem like an absurd request to me, but the way my father shrugs it off tells me that no one else is bothered by it, so why should it make me unhappy? Eventually, “Teenage Dream” gives way to Sam Smith’s “Stay with Me,” and as the doctor disconnects my mother from the machines that are keeping her body alive, I know the song will be forever associated with her passing. 

As I sit with my mother, I keep thinking about how just a year earlier, I couldn’t bear to go with my family to watch our dog being put down. She had been completely incapacitated by cancer, and one large tumor on her leg had finally ruptured. Still, that day: how she radiated a profound joy, how she played in the backyard as if oblivious to her fate. My mother had wrapped duct tape around the dog’s leg to prevent any further bleeding. Home repair or a dog’s leg, there’s nothing my mother couldn’t fix with duct tape. Only we can’t duct tape death. There’s no duct tape strong enough to hold a failing body together. We sat with the dog, alive and still joyful under the June sun, a beautiful summer day in rural Pennsylvania, until my parents agreed it was time. My brother Scott and I stayed behind. We didn’t think we could bear seeing her euthanized. My youngest brother Dan went with my parents to the veterinarian. Within an hour, they returned, solemn and silent. My father dug a deep grave in the backyard and we laid her to rest. In a couple of years, patches of red clover would grow at the site where we buried her.

In the hospital, my father squeezes my neck too hard trying to comfort me and in doing so makes his grief palpable. My brothers and I stare at our mother, helpless and unconscious in her final moments. I don’t know how to be with a dying person. I try to keep myself composed when I feel like I’m falling apart. Though the moment seems to extend infinitely, there is also a certain rush to the whole process. The constant in and out of the doctor. Nurses checking in on this or that. A priest comes in to read the last rites. The big moment is about to come. The doctor tells us that once she’s off life support, she could die soon after or it could take an hour, sometimes even more. It takes less than one minute. Then, there is barely any time to sit with the body. I don’t know how to ask for more time, if it’s appropriate to just sit. I think I would have wanted to just sit.

                                                                             #

The sun was already starting to set, casting the entirety of the campus in a brilliant blue light. We had dinner in the cafeteria followed by a ceremony in the shrine room to surrender our connection to the outside world. One by one, we offered up our cell phones, some of us snapping one final selfie to commemorate the moment. For some, this was probably as hard as surrendering their right arm, but I wasn’t afraid of giving up my cell phone for ten days. If anything, I was looking forward to it, as I knew I had a manic relationship with my phone. Good riddance, I thought, as I offered mine to the bowl of black mirrors. After the phones had been surrendered, Barney told us to get some rest because tomorrow would be a long day. We made our way back to Shotoku, where I had no trouble sleeping, despite my qualms about the communal arrangements and the mountain wind rattling the windows.

The following morning, we woke to a chorus of alarms. We had all been instructed to pack digital alarms since we would not have access to our phones, and we quickly learned who was hard to wake by how long his alarm had been sounding. Slowly, the mass started to rise, and eventually groups of people sat in the foyer to lace up their boots. By the end of our stay, this task would become a kind of meditation on its own, as it never stopped snowing. 

On this first day, Daniel and I made our way to the communal showers, a trek that took about ten minutes through the snow. After that, we had just enough time to grab a bowl of Cheerios before heading to the shrine room, where the main course of instruction was to take place. When we entered the shrine room building, we were told to take off our boots immediately. In our socks, we tiptoed our way across the hardwood floor and into the spacious room.

Sprawled across the floor were thirty meditation cushions, or zafu, seated on their own flat cushions, called zafuton. At eight a.m., Barney entered, and after he had taken his place at the front of the room, the rest of us sat down. Barney’s zafu was placed beside the altar on which various sacred objects had been placed. A bowl of water, orchids, and incense. Above the altar hung portraits of Chögyam Trungpa and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, father and son. In our assigned reading, we had learned that Chögyam Trungpa was largely responsible for bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West.  Between the two portraits of the masters was a traditional Tibetan painting of the Buddha in all his glory. The entire display cast an aura of wisdom and austerity in the shrine room.

Barney began by ringing the Tibetan singing bowl whose chime reverberated throughout the room. This was the signal to quiet our minds and give attention to our teacher. Barney explained the essence of samatha, a type of mindfulness meditation, and how we were to practice it alongside Zen walking meditation. After this brief lesson, we dove right in, alternating between sitting and walking for three long hours. The sitting meditation was hard on my back. There were moments during which I felt relaxed and at ease—my mind observing the thoughts in my head and labeling them as “thinking,” before letting it pass. In this meditation, the eyes are meant to be left open. I found this strange, as I had been meditating for the past five years with my eyes closed. Barney explained that with the eyes opened, it was harder to fall asleep—and given the long and early hours that samatha meditation took place, this made sense. When Barney struck the singing bowl, we did walking meditation around the shrine room in a long line, drawing our attention to each footstep. It was a nice break from sitting.

What I didn’t know then that I know now is this: what happened in the shrine room was a slow and subtle kind of transformation, taking place over the course of ten days, a slow-crawling change of a nearly imperceptible nature. It couldn’t be pinned down, at least not then, but it’s what held the entire experience together.

                                                                             #

This body will become a corpse. It felt bizarre to chant and march around the Great Stupa with my peers, college students who had been partying only a few days before back in Orange County. The course took place at the end of interterm, an accelerated semester that took place in January between the fall and spring semesters. For students who stayed on campus during interterm, it meant less class and more partying. For us, of course, it meant a trip to the Rocky Mountains. It meant contemplating our own mortality with a Zen practitioner. We were told about a meditation that involved visualizing the decomposition of one’s own body. Death had been on my mind a lot since my mother’s passing, and this was my opportunity to stare into the eyes of my own oblivion. I joked to Daniel about how odd this scene would be if it were transplanted to the plaza of our university. It’s not a part of American culture to consider death so openly, to really meditate on the concept and not brush it off with a nervous giggle. 

After we finished chanting around the Great Stupa, Daniel and I wandered off to the cliffs where some of Allen Ginsberg’s ashes are kept. We found them next to a small memorial, sealed in a rusted tin can. We had brought a collection of his poetry for this occasion. Daniel and I took turns reading from his poem “Sunflower Sutra.” We were surrounded by snow-topped mountains for an audience. In paying my respects to Ginsberg’s ashes, I thought of my mother’s ashes, and whether or not I should spread some of them back in California. She had always wanted to see the Pacific. Or maybe I should have taken some to Colorado, for in the back of my mind was a John Denver song, John Denver whom I used to hate as a child because my mother got drunk and cried to his music. John Denver singing “Annie’s Song,” a song I find so wonderful now because it reminds me of my mother in all her beauty and failure, her in her wholeness.

I didn’t have my phone to listen to that song on the mountaintop, but I didn’t need it. The mountains had a soul of their own, and in this moment they were like a vessel carrying the spirit of my mother. The vessel spilled out music, overflowing in nature, and I could hear the song in the wind. Words from my mother from another time. Words to cherish in the now.

                                                                             #

After my mother passes, my dad drives my brothers and me from Pittsburgh back to our house in rural Pennsylvania. The drive is quiet. I want to be back in California with my boyfriend, to be comforted in the way that only he knows how to do. When we get back to our house, the dogs are overjoyed. They haven’t been tended to in days. They were the only ones at home when my mother collapsed. She managed to call my father before she lost consciousness, and he called an ambulance. It didn’t get there in time, though. The paramedics found her unconscious. She never woke. Her brain had been without oxygen for too long.

At the house, I look at the dogs and wish they could tell me what they know, transfer their memories to me. Wondering about my mother’s final moments haunts me and keeps me up for most of that first night. That’s a large part of grief—obsessing over the situation and trying to figure out how it could have been prevented. I take the dogs to bed with me, and around one a.m., I smell the familiar odor of Marlboro 100’s. The superstitious side of me thinks that this must be a sign from my mother. If she could send a message, I think—and it almost makes me laugh—it would be through a medium like this. A pack a day for twenty-five years: there’s no quicker way to make me think of her. I fall asleep with a little peace of mind. The next day, though, I’ll find a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in my dad’s pickup truck. He had quit for five years, but grief caused him to pick up the habit again. Maybe they make him feel closer to her. I don’t ask him. 

But I feel stupid for thinking that the dead can speak to us.

                                                                             #

If I could, I would speak only in silence.

My favorite days at Shambhala were the days when we enacted noble silence, a period during which we were forbidden to speak to anyone. If we needed to communicate, we could do so with gestures, or, if it was urgent, pass a note. Noble silence gave us time to pause and reflect, to check in with ourselves and be at peace with our present state. It gave us the opportunity to reflect on sangha, our spiritual community, and the role that others served in our practice. For some, noble silence was torturous. Some just couldn’t stick to it and talked anyways. For the more introverted students, like me, noble silence was a blessing. It was time all to myself, and when among the group, there was finally no need to try and speak. I could relax in the state of quiet and be at ease with the loss of language.

One day during noble silence, we sat meditating in the shrine room. It was a splendid day in the mountains. The snow had ceased, making space for ample rays of sunlight that illuminated the polished wood floor of the shrine room. Outside in the bushes, a songbird caught my attention, interrupting my meditative focus. The image that most people in the West have of Buddhists is of zenned out, hippie folks. A lot of people think that meditation is peaceful or joyous, and while, yes, meditation can be those things, devout practitioners know that meditation is actually difficult, even physically painful. The backaches. The legs go numb. And then there’s the mind, the beautiful, chaotic mind. Mine, for example, has the habit of being neurotic, and so when I meditate, I spend most of the time sitting with my anxiety in a state of dread. For most of my meditation at Shambhala, I felt nothing but an overwhelming desire to run away, to get as far away from myself as possible. I wanted to run away from my grief, the pressing need to have my mother returned to me. Normally, all of these thoughts go unchecked, but in meditation, we make the habit of being mindful of them. We learn to sit with the feelings that terrify us. We try and observe them from a point of non-judgment. We sit through them until they pass. We listen for the gap between thoughts. We come back, again and again, to the constant of our breath.

Over a lifetime, this practice will make a warrior out of a worrier, and this is really what the Shambhala lineage of Buddhism is all about. After my meditation, I decided to go for a solitary hike. Nature has been my refuge since I was young, and I was not about to miss out on the rolling hills and craggy peaks all around me. I hiked past The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, all the way up to the base of the promontory known as Marpa Point. Just a few days earlier, I had conquered the vertical climb with Daniel and some friends. Now, as I climbed it all alone, the summit seemed even higher than I had remembered.

In that moment, my fears came rushing back to me. I was afraid of being alone up in the mountains. What had I been thinking, going by myself? A spiral of anxious thoughts came crashing down—I could die, I thought. I could fall from this cliff and be paralyzed out here in the cold. There was so much that I was fearful of with my mother gone from the world. I thought about going back, but I needed to know that I could do this on my own. I climbed up carefully, being sure that I set each foot down just right, with a hold on something solid. When I finally reached the top, it felt like being in the center of a bowl, surrounded by mountains on all sides. Beside me, tattered prayer flags rattled in the wind. I had done this on my own. I’d made it. I was here. From this height, the campus looked like a scene inside of a snow globe. Endless mountains, snowy pines, an open, blank state of sky that held anything and everything and nothing at all. This view could heal my grief, I think. I could leave it all behind, bury it beneath the snow.

Everything contained, everything making perfect sense.

                                                                             #

At the time of my mother’s unexpected death, she was estranged from her brothers and sisters. The death of my grandparents had left them all angry at one another. My mother was also a drinker, and she was the firecracker of the family, so it’s not impossible to understand why she had made enemies out of her former loved ones. She’d made it clear to my father that if she were to die, she did not want a funeral, a viewing, or any kind of service. “If they won’t see me when I’m alive, why should they come see me when I’m dead?” She wanted to be cremated and put on the mantle, she said. 

When my mother passes, my father respects her final wishes, though my aunts and uncles choose to throw a small celebration of their sister’s life. My father, brothers, and I attend, even though it feels awkward to be among relatives to whom we haven’t spoken in a few years. Still, I do my best to make conversation, to share memories and talk about the times when the family wasn’t fighting.

At the end of the wake, one of my aunts passes out balloons and permanent markers to all of the guests. We are supposed to write a message to the departed. It’s a cheesy gesture, I think, but as I stare at the bright yellow surface of my balloon, I realize that I can think of nothing that would be worth writing. It’s not like me to be at a loss for words when handed a pen and something to write on, but for once I feel truly speechless. All around me, I hear the squeak of markers against rubber. Everyone except me, the poet, has some last message for my mother. When we release the balloons, I let go of mine without writing a word. We all watch as the sky swallows up the balloons on an unusually warm October day.

For a long time after the wake, I convince myself that this silence represents some inability to move on, or a fear that if I were to pen some final words to my mother, they would be inadequate, or worse, that they would somehow finalize my grief, wrap it up with a neat bow and send it off. Why wasn’t I able to write something beautiful for my mother? I’m a writer, for God’s sake, and when the time came, I choked and let go of an ordinary yellow balloon. 

For a long time, that yellow balloon represented my regrets about my mother. I regretted moving across the country to be away from her and her alcoholism. I regretted not making sure she followed up with her doctor after surgery. Now, when I think of the pure yellow surface of that balloon, like a perfect golden sunflower, I know that I didn’t have to write anything. I’m happy with my unmarked balloon, like coming out of noble silence for the first time at Shambhala Mountain Center. There’s nothing that needs to be said so urgently, nothing that can’t be contained in the vast expanse of quiet.