The Throat That Never Closes

Notes on appetite, airlessness, and what the kitchen staff already knew

Wealth and Spiritual Materialism

The Room

The house was in the Hamptons. Of course it was.

I remember the hedges first—twelve feet tall, the kind that take a team of men to maintain, men who arrive early in unmarked trucks and leave before the guests wake up. The gravel driveway that crunched under tires in a way that was meant to sound expensive. The door opened by someone who was not the owner.

I was there because I had skills they needed. I could make things beautiful. I could point a camera, frame a shot, tell a story that would make the viewer feel something. Which is to say, I was the propaganda arm of an economy I hadn’t yet learned to name. The artist in jeans and a t-shirt, invited to the party the way you invite a musician to play at your wedding: welcome, useful, not quite a guest.

The owners wore designer clothes that looked like they were trying not to look expensive, which is the most expensive look of all. They talked about consciousness. About ayahuasca retreats in Peru. About their guru, their healer, their spiritual practice. The phrase delivered with the same reverence they’d use for a vintage Bordeaux. They were the anointed ones. On a mission.

And in the kitchen, brown people did the work.

I don’t mean this as metaphor. I mean: the catering staff, the cleaners, the woman arranging flowers at six in the morning so the house would look effortless by noon. They were brown. Every one of them. Moving through the rooms with the practiced invisibility of people who understand that their presence is required and their personhood is not.

I stood in that living room with a glass of something organic and biodynamic, surrounded by people discussing the interconnectedness of all beings, and I could not breathe.

Not metaphorically. The air had been consumed. These people—with their beautiful homes and their beautiful language and their beautiful, empty certainty—had sucked all the oxygen out of the universe trying to fill the hole inside them.

I would learn, later, that there’s a name for that hole. An entire cosmology built around it. But standing in that room, all I knew was that my lungs were refusing to cooperate with the evening’s program.

I stayed a week. The bedroom they gave me was larger than the whole house I live in now. It had a wave pool in it. A private garden where I could sit and not be seen. The ocean was right there—I could hear it from the window—but someone had decided they needed a personal, controllable version of it inside the room where they slept. A sea that belonged to no one, made to belong to someone. That’s the appetite I’m trying to describe.

At night, I couldn’t sleep. My body had shifted into hypervigilant mode. The state your nervous system reserves for environments that aren’t safe, though nothing here was physically dangerous. The sheets were Egyptian cotton. The silence was the expensive kind, the kind you buy with acreage. And I lay there, wide awake, watching endless reruns of Law & Order.

I do not know why the hypervigilance. I do not know why Law & Order. Only that my body had registered something my mind hadn’t caught up to. That I was inside a crime scene so large and so beautifully furnished that it didn’t look like one. And I was watching strangers on a screen do what I couldn’t yet do: name the violation, investigate it, hold someone accountable.

Nobody was going to be held accountable. The wave pool would keep running. The flowers would keep being arranged by hands that would never be thanked by name. And I would be chauffeured back to the airport with the windows down, trying to remember what unowned air tasted like.

White as Weather

James Baldwin, who spent his life mapping the architecture of American delusion, said: “White is a metaphor for power.”

Not skin. Not heritage. Not the color of anyone’s actual body. Power. The word names a system, not a people. A machinery of accumulation so thorough, so old, so brilliantly self-concealing that it has convinced most of the world it doesn’t exist. Or that if it does, it’s natural. Inevitable. Just the way things are.

Being white will not gain you automatic membership in the club. This is the part we keep getting wrong. The poor white family in Appalachia, the trailer park, the opioid crisis—they’re not in the club. They never were. They were given a label—white—as a consolation prize, a way of saying: at least you’re not them. The label costs nothing to distribute and pays enormous dividends in compliance.

Only extreme wealth gains admission. And where does that wealth come from? It comes from the kitchen. It always comes from the kitchen.

From every maid who made a bed she’d never sleep in. Every field hand who harvested food he’d never taste. Every garment worker stitching clothes she’d never wear in a factory she can’t afford to leave. The wealth doesn’t generate itself. It is extracted. From labor, from land, from the future of the planet. And the extraction is so normalized we’ve stopped calling it what it is.

We call it the economy. We call it progress. We call it the way things work.

I saw the extraction up close once, years before the Hamptons. A documentary shoot in the Central Valley. Strawberry fields in July, the heat so thick it had texture. The workers moved through the rows bent at the waist, a posture the body is not designed to hold for ten hours. Their hands were fast and precise and red from the juice and the thorns. The foreman’s truck idled at the edge of the field with the air conditioning running.

What I remember most is the lunchbreak. The workers sat in a strip of shade along a concrete irrigation ditch, eating food they’d brought from home in plastic bags. One woman had a thermos of soup and she poured a cup for the man beside her without being asked. He nodded. She nodded. A small economy of care, conducted in the shade of a $200 million agricultural operation that would sell those strawberries with a label showing a happy farm and green hills.

What colonialism took was not just land and labor. It took the knowledge that we belong to each other. It replaced an operating system of interdependence—one that had sustained human communities for millennia—with a virus called individual accumulation. And the virus was so successful that we now mistake it for human nature. We look at competition and think: biology. We look at greed and think: inevitable. We look at loneliness and think: personal failure.

But in that strip of shade, along that ditch, the old operating system was still running. The woman with the thermos wasn’t performing generosity. She was just living inside a reality the system hadn’t managed to reach—the reality where you pour soup for the person beside you because that’s what you do with soup.

The loneliness most of us carry is not personal. It is manufactured. The most profitable product ever made.

The Realm of Hungry Ghosts

In Buddhist cosmology, there are six realms of existence. Not places you go after death. Places you inhabit right now, moment by moment, depending on what’s driving you. The God Realm of complacent bliss. The Jealous God Realm of constant comparison. The Animal Realm of instinct without reflection. The Hell Realm of inescapable torment. The Human Realm, with its unique capacity for awakening.

And then there’s the Preta Realm. The Hungry Ghosts.

The pretas are depicted with enormous, distended stomachs and throats so narrow that almost nothing can pass through. They are surrounded by abundance—food, water, beauty—but they cannot take it in. Every attempt to consume turns to fire in their mouths. They eat and eat and eat and are never fed.

I think about the Hamptons.

I think about the man who owned that house—four houses, actually, I learned later—who stood in his living room discussing the liberation of consciousness while the woman who cleaned his toilets waited in the kitchen for permission to go home. His stomach was enormous. His throat never closed. He consumed experiences, teachings, spiritual traditions, other people’s cultures. Ayahuasca from Peru, meditation from Tibet, yoga from India. And none of it could fill him. None of it could fill any of them.

They weren’t evil. That’s the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that makes this harder than a polemic. They were trapped. Imprisoned in a realm of infinite appetite and zero nourishment. Their suffering happened to be catastrophic to everything around it. To the planet, to the people in the kitchen, to the oxygen in the room. But it was still suffering. Still a kind of hell.

You cannot hate a hungry ghost. You can only see what drives it and grieve for what it destroys.

What They Colonized Last

They took the land first. Then the labor. Then the languages, the ceremonies, the children from their mothers. This is documented history. Every continent, every century, the same pattern repeating with bureaucratic precision.

But the final colonization was the most complete: they colonized wanting.

They colonized what we desire. What we aspire to. What we dream about when we’re honest with ourselves at 3 AM. The house. The security. The accumulation that promises—falsely, always falsely—to make the anxiety stop.

I catch myself in it. Everyone does, if they’re honest. The part of me that sees the beautiful house and wants it. The part that calculates net worth and feels the old mammalian pull toward more. The part that knows, intellectually, that accumulation is a trap. And still feels its gravity.

That wanting is the colonization working from the inside. It’s the most brilliant part of the machine: you don’t need to force people to participate in their own extraction if you can make them want to. Make the prison beautiful enough and the inmates will defend the walls.

The indigenous cultures that were destroyed—and are still being destroyed—understood something we’ve been made to forget. That wealth is not what you accumulate but what you circulate. That the land does not belong to you; you belong to it. That the measure of a society is not its gross product but its net generosity. What flows between people, not what pools at the top.

We know this. Somewhere beneath the programming, we know this. The grief we carry but can’t name. The loneliness, the dislocation, the sense that something fundamental is missing. That’s the body remembering what the mind has been taught to forget.

And this is where it gets personal. Because that wanting—the part of me calculating, measuring, coveting the Hamptons life I claimed to reject—was running on exactly the same operating system as my spiritual practice.

The Vow in the Kitchen

I took Refuge vows years before that party. The formal kind. The ceremony, the teacher, the recitation of the Three Jewels. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.

I thought I understood what that meant. Retreats. Cushions. Teachings from qualified masters in rooms that smelled like incense and good intentions. The dharma as something you go to, the way you go to church or therapy or the gym. A scheduled appointment with your own awakening.

Another form of accumulation. Another appetite dressed up as aspiration. I was collecting spiritual experiences the way the man in the Hamptons collected them—ayahuasca, meditation, yoga—stacking retreats like credits toward a degree in transcendence. The currency was different. The hunger was the same.

The Hamptons cured me of that.

Because those people were doing exactly what I was doing. They had the retreats, the teachers, the cushions. Probably better cushions, organic buckwheat, hand-stitched by monks. They had the vocabulary, the reading lists, the spiritual credentials. And they could not see the woman in their kitchen.

Could I? If I’m honest—really honest, the kind of honest that makes your hands shake—could I see the woman in my own kitchen? The people whose labor made my contemplative life possible? The invisible infrastructure of convenience that allowed me the luxury of sitting on a cushion and examining my suffering?

That’s when the vows cracked open and became something else. Something less comfortable and more useful.

If refuge means anything, it cannot mean retreating to a cushion while the world burns in the next room. It cannot mean discussing interconnectedness while the interconnected people who make your life possible stand invisible at the edges. Refuge is not a place you go. It is a direction you face.

And the direction, I realized, was toward the kitchen. Toward the people the system renders invisible. The brown people, the black people, the red people left in poverty on reservations. The ones doing the work that holds everything together while the owners discuss the nature of consciousness over biodynamic wine.

That’s where I went. That’s where I’ve been. Not as a savior. The white savior is just another hungry ghost in disguise, consuming other people’s suffering to fill its own emptiness. But as a witness. Camera in hand, shaking behind it. Sitting with people whose steady voices made my own trembling more honest.

The AIDS wards. The addiction clinics. The refugee camps. The communities that the comfortable world would rather not film because the footage doesn’t sell. These became my refuge. Not because suffering is noble—it isn’t—but because the people inside it had not lost what the Hamptons crowd was desperately trying to buy back.

Connection. Reciprocity. The understanding that you survive by belonging to each other, not by accumulating enough to need no one.

What the Kitchen Staff Already Knew

Last month, our post mistress died.

I live in a very small, very remote, very poor community. The kind of place that doesn’t appear on most maps and wouldn’t interest the people in the Hamptons. The kind of place where the post office is not a government building but a social institution. Where a woman behind a counter can, by the simple practice of greeting people with a sincere smile and always having time for conversation, become the connective tissue of an entire community.

For years, that’s what she was. The person who saw you. Not in the spiritual sense the Hamptons crowd liked to discuss over wine. In the actual sense. She saw you come in. She knew your name. She asked about your kids, your back, your dog. For isolated people living miles from their nearest neighbor, she was sometimes the only face that was genuinely glad to see theirs.

When she died suddenly, the community went into shock. And then it did what it has always done, what it knows how to do the way the body knows how to breathe: it came together. People who are poor—genuinely poor, not downsizing-the-beach-house poor—donated thousands of dollars in bits and pieces to help her husband and son. Twenties and tens and fives, pulled from budgets that don’t have slack in them. From people who understand that money given away when you don’t have it means something different than money given away when you do.

This is interconnectedness. Not the kind you discuss at a retreat. The kind that lives in a community too small, too remote, too poor to have ever been seduced by the alternative. The wealth never came to rewire them. The virus of individual accumulation never reached this far. And so the original human operating system—the one that says we survive by belonging to each other—is still running. Not as philosophy. As fact.

This is what the kitchen staff already knew. What the indigenous cultures knew before the colonizers arrived with their ledgers and their fences. What the woman arranging flowers at 6 AM in the Hamptons knew, even if the knowledge lived in her hands rather than her language: that wealth is what you give, not what you keep. That the post office matters more than the wave pool. That a sincere smile from someone who knows your name is worth more than four houses and a private ocean.

The hungry ghosts in the living room had everything and could feel nothing. The people in my community have almost nothing and can feel everything.

How We Become Them

Here’s the part I’d rather not write.

I know the pull. I’ve felt it. Standing in that living room, part of me—the part trained by a lifetime of manufactured wanting—was calculating. Not rejecting the wealth but measuring the distance between it and me. Part of me was already furnishing the house I didn’t want with the life I didn’t want inside it.

I stayed a week, remember. I didn’t leave after the first night, when my lungs told me something was wrong. I didn’t leave after the second, when the Law & Order reruns became a nightly ritual of surrogate justice. I stayed because the bed was soft and the garden was private and the wave pool made a sound like the ocean but more obedient. I stayed because comfort is a kind of gravity, and I am not exempt from physics.

That’s what I need to say, clearly, without the buffer of critique: I liked parts of it. The silence you can buy with acreage. The way someone else’s wealth temporarily suspends the friction of ordinary life—no parking, no groceries, no broken dishwasher. For a week, the machinery of extraction was working on my behalf, and part of me—the part I write essays to keep honest—did not mind.

The seduction of power is not that it makes you cruel. It’s that it makes you comfortable. And comfort, as Atisha knew when he hired his Bengali tea boy, is the most dangerous spiritual condition there is. Not because comfort is inherently wrong, but because it makes you stop noticing. Stop seeing the kitchen. Stop feeling the airlessness. Stop registering that the oxygen you’re breathing was extracted from someone else’s atmosphere.

Every one of us is one windfall, one inheritance, one lucky break away from becoming the person in the Hamptons living room. The hungry ghost realm is not a permanent address. It’s a gravitational field, and we are all within its pull.

This is why the essay can’t be us versus them. Because them is a label, and labels are the master’s tools. The moment I divide the world into the good people who see clearly and the bad people who consume blindly, I’ve built another Hamptons. Just one with better politics and worse appetizers.

The Way Home

So where do we go?

Not to a retreat center. Not to a cushion. Not to the moral high ground, which is just another gated community with a better view.

We go toward each other. That’s it. That’s the whole teaching.

The alienation is manufactured. Which means the connection is real. Older than the system that severed it, more durable than the economy that profits from its absence. The loneliness we carry is not a personal failing. It’s an artifact of a machine designed to keep us separate, because separate people are easier to extract from.

What my community teaches me—what thirty years of documentary work has taught me—is that interdependence isn’t a Buddhist concept. It’s a human fact that Buddhism happens to have good language for. The indigenous cultures knew it without the Sanskrit. The post mistress practiced it without the philosophy degree.

Restoring what was taken doesn’t require a revolution, though it might include one. It requires the slower, less dramatic work of turning toward the people the system has turned us away from. Of showing up at the counter with time for conversation. Of refusing to discuss the interconnectedness of all beings while the interconnected beings in the next room wait for permission to go home.

It requires, most of all, the willingness to feel the airlessness and name it. Not as someone else’s problem. As the atmosphere we all share.

Still Breathing

I think about that party more than I should. The hedges, the gravel, the organic wine. The man who owned four houses and couldn’t feel any of them. The woman in the kitchen who knew more about refuge than everyone in the living room combined, though no one would ever think to ask her.

They did me a favor, those hungry ghosts. They showed me what emptiness actually looks like. Not the Buddhist kind, not śūnyatā, not the liberating recognition that nothing stands alone. The other kind. The howling vacuum at the center of a life organized around appetite. The throat that never closes because it has never been fed by anything real.

I was chauffeured to the airport from that house with the windows down. I remember the air coming in. Ordinary air, highway air, tinged with exhaust and cut grass and someone’s barbecue. I breathed it in like a person surfacing.

That air didn’t belong to anyone. It was just there, moving through the open window, shared with everyone on the road—the trucks, the commuters, the families headed somewhere ordinary. Nobody owned it. Nobody could.

That’s the teaching. That’s what the kitchen staff already knew.

The things that sustain us cannot be accumulated. They can only be shared. The breath, the bread, the moment of genuine seeing between two people who have stopped pretending they don’t need each other.

The hungry ghosts will keep consuming. The throat never closes. The machine keeps extracting, keeps manufacturing loneliness, keeps colonizing our wanting.

But the air is still here. Between the hedges, beneath the labels, behind the locked doors of the gated communities of the mind.

The air is still here.

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©2026 Gael MacLean