ZenistLetters from the desk.
Weekly digests, field notes, and occasional essays.
- October 12, 2026
Two Directions at Once: The Season Opens and Closes
The Theravada world is finishing a season this week while the Zen world commits to beginning one — and a single farm in Marin holds both the long door and the short.
- October 5, 2026
Three Things That Meet This Weekend
A dark moon, World Mental Health Day, and Thich Nhat Hanh's hundredth all land in the same weekend — and a few of this week's sits sit right inside that convergence.
- September 28, 2026
Dwelling Lightly: The Fall Ango Opens
This whole week sits inside a festival of temporary shelters — and the Zen calendar answers with the opposite gesture: settling in for the long season.
- September 14, 2026
Inside the Days of Awe
The column week falls between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — and this week's retreats read like their own kind of accounting.
- September 7, 2026
Rehearsal and the Real Thing
A mountain monastery lost its hall to fire this year, then evacuated for another — which changes how you read a fall retreat schedule.
- September 3, 2026
What the Body Knows First
The equinox is weeks out, but the body registers the turn first — and this week's calendar meets it there, through the body rather than the mind.
- September 3, 2026
What the cushion is for
The contemplative press keeps circling the seam between the hall and the world — and a handful of this week's retreats are built right across it.
- September 3, 2026
Whose Voice Is in the Room
Pema Chödrön turns ninety this year — a good week to notice that some retreats tell you exactly who you'll be sitting under, and some don't.
- August 31, 2026
The threshold the calendar won't give
Labor Day used to mark the end of something; the retreat calendar is where you go to make a threshold on purpose.
- August 24, 2026
Sometimes a battlefield
The contemplative press is growing less starry-eyed about what happens when you sit down and get quiet — and a few of this week's retreats are built for exactly that.
- August 17, 2026
A season, not a weekend
Late August is the year's slack tide — but in the zendo, fall ango is about to open, and a season of practice is a different animal from a weekend sit.
- August 10, 2026
Rest, before the schedule tightens
The culture is reaching outward for cosmic intention this week; the retreat calendar, quietly, is pointed the other way.
- August 3, 2026
Practice with the hands busy
In the hottest stretch of a record summer, the calendar fills not with marathon sesshin but with retreats that put a bow, a dye vat, or a lump of clay in your hands.
- August 3, 2026
Sitting outside, under a new moon
Three of this week's retreats take practice out from under the roof — in the same week the sky goes dark twice.
- July 2, 2026
A day, a week, six weeks
Norman Fischer sits a single day at Green Gulch, Tassajara bends yoga into zazen, and Great Vow opens six weeks of monastic summer — three answers to the same question about time.
- July 2, 2026
A year for a single word
The Dalai Lama's Year of Compassion closes on Monday, and two July retreats named for interdependence take the same insight in opposite directions.
- June 23, 2026
What they built
Robert Thurman died last week in Woodstock. The retreat calendar he helped make possible fills with offerings that would have been unimaginable when he was ordained.
- June 16, 2026
What attention becomes
Jane Hirshfield returns to the monastery where silence first shaped her writing, and a six-day sesshin straddles the solstice with a $10 online track for those sitting at home.
- June 7, 2026
The limit of hearing
A writing retreat at Green Gulch treats the page like a cushion, a day sit in Brooklyn takes up Ambedkar's Buddhism, and Great Vow marks the solstice with a day of zazen in Oregon.
- May 26, 2026
The same water
A Chan teacher arrives at a Soto monastery in Oregon, Denver offers sesshin in three formats at the same price, and a retreat in Minnesota pairs Dogen with Václav Havel.
- May 21, 2026
What listens
Three retreats take practice outside the zendo walls — into birdsong at Green Gulch, into the woods in Worcester, and into the longest light at a solstice arts immersion.
- May 14, 2026
What silence holds
A workshop at Great Vow asks what happens when the teacher-student relationship goes wrong — the same weeks Tassajara sends practitioners into the mountains and Hokyoji strips a retreat to its bones.
- May 5, 2026
The shape of the day
This month's calendar runs from first sesshin at Green Gulch to self-directed practice in the Catskills — the same form, held differently.
- April 28, 2026
The other shore of Zen
A Chan teacher arrives at a Zen monastery in Oregon — and the distinction between the two traditions turns out to matter less than you'd think.
- April 17, 2026
Nothing lacking
SFZC opens a month-long practice period titled after Dogen's most direct teaching — the same week Green Gulch plants trees and a Huayan scholar visits City Center.
- April 17, 2026
The first real question
Three retreats in the next three weeks ask the same question differently — what happens when you stop practicing alone?
- April 14, 2026
Moment to moment
A zazenkai series in New Mexico is recovering the stories of women who shaped modern Zen — this Saturday turns to a Swiss musician who wrote poems after sitting.
- April 7, 2026
What gets passed down
The Denkoroku maps fifty-two transmissions of the light from teacher to student — this month, three retreats carry that impulse forward in different forms.
- March 31, 2026
What words are for
Three retreats this spring circle the old question — what happens when you bring language into silence, or silence into language?
- March 21, 2026
The space between seasons
The equinox passed yesterday. Across the country, zendos are opening their spring practice periods — three sesshins this week sit right on the threshold.