The space between seasons

The equinox passed yesterday, that brief arithmetic of equal light and dark. Already it’s tipping. In Portland, the cherry blossoms along the Willamette are a week from peak. In the Catskills, the ground is still hard. Spring arrives unevenly, and the practice calendar knows it — this is the week when ango periods open, sesshins fill, and centers shift from the inward hush of winter toward something more porous.

The current issue of Tricycle carries a conversation between poet Ada Limon and Sharon Salzberg in which Limon says something that’s been sitting with me: “Poetry, at its core, is about paying attention… when you’re deeply looking at something, you’re loving it.” She’s talking about writing, but she could be describing the first morning of a sesshin — the moment when you stop trying to get somewhere and the room sharpens around you.

That quality of attention is what these next ten days are asking for.

Ancient Dragon Zen Gate in Chicago opens its Spring Practice Period tomorrow with a daylong sesshin led by Hogetsu Laurie Belzer. The eight-week ango that follows is themed “Buddhist Practices for Caring for All Beings.” The opening sesshin runs Saturday evening through Sunday afternoon and is available hybrid, in person at the Lincoln Square Zendo or online. Partial attendance is welcome, which matters: not everyone can give a full day, and Ancient Dragon doesn’t pretend otherwise. Dana-based, $75 suggested.

Also starting tomorrow, San Francisco Zen Center’s “Buddha Body, Buddha Mind” sesshin runs six days at SFZC’s City Center with Kikū Christina Lehnherr. This one explicitly accommodates physical and emotional limits — you can substitute walking meditation or light work for sitting periods without apology. That flexibility is unusual in traditional sesshin, where the schedule tends to be the schedule. Six days of zazen, kinhin, oryoki meals, and dokusan in the Soto Zen form, $185 residential. Lehnherr is a senior teacher at SFZC, and the urban setting means you’re sitting in the middle of San Francisco, traffic audible through the walls.

On Monday, Fire Lotus Temple’s Founding Sesshin begins in Mount Tremper — six days, 7-10 hours of zazen daily, four teachers including Geoffrey Shugen Arnold and Jody Hojin Kimmel. This is the Mountains and Rivers Order, founded by John Daido Loori in the Maezumi lineage, where koan work and shikantaza sit side by side. If SFZC’s sesshin makes room for the body’s limits, this one asks you to meet them. Noble silence throughout, oryoki meals, dokusan. The kind of retreat where by day three you’ve forgotten what day it is — which is the point.

Dale Wright, writing in Tricycle this month, traces how Buddhism evolved from seeking liberation from impermanence toward finding liberation within it. He cites Susan Murphy’s phrase — “the sacred order of things manifests not in some safe elsewhere but in impermanence itself” — and it lands differently when you’re sitting through an equinox week, three sesshins deep into the calendar. Not balance as a permanent state, but balance as something you pass through on the way to the next imbalance.

The days are getting longer. Practice periods are opening. There’s time to sit.