Moment to moment

Mid-April. The longer evenings have arrived — light after dinner, warm enough to sit outside without a blanket in most of the country. The trees are past first leaf and into real canopy. Tax day tomorrow, which creates its own strange silence: everyone indoors with paperwork, the streets briefly empty.

Florence Caplow and Susan Moon’s The Hidden Lamp collected a hundred koans from women across twenty-five centuries of Buddhist practice — stories that had always existed, buried in the margins of anthologies that centered men. The project wasn’t archaeology. It was attention.

That work continues at Mountain Cloud Zen Center outside Santa Fe. Associate Zen Master Valerie Forstman is leading a yearlong zazenkai series on modern women ancestors — the teachers who shaped contemporary Zen and whose names most practitioners wouldn’t recognize. The 2025 series covered women of the distant past. This year turns to recent history: Blanche Hartman, Katherine Thanas, Silvia Ostertag, Joan Rieck, Elaine McInnes.

This Saturday’s daylong focuses on Silvia Ostertag Roshi, a Swiss-born musician who trained in the Sanbo Zen lineage, founded a meditation center near Cologne, and framed each day with zazen. After sitting, she often wrote a poem to guide her students. One of them — “Earth Gratitude” — opens the day. Ostertag’s core teaching was direct: moment to moment, not the slightest separation, and right in the midst, nothing lacking. She died of cancer. The teaching held.

The zazenkai runs 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Mountain Time, in person or online. Sixty dollars on site, thirty via Zoom, scholarships available. Mountain Cloud sits at 7,000 feet in the high desert — the kind of quiet where the land does half the work. If you want to extend the day, the center offers personal retreat stays with lodging and optional one-on-one guidance from teacher Scott Thornton.

Two other offerings worth noting before their registration windows close.

Everyday Zen’s annual Bay Area Sesshin runs May 18–24 at Villa Maria del Mar in Santa Cruz, overlooking Monterey Bay — six days led by Zoketsu Norman Fischer. In-person registration has closed, but online registration opens this Saturday, April 18, announced through the Everyday Zen mailing list. Fischer’s teaching carries a poet’s instinct for what silence makes room for, and this coastal setting — where the Pacific fills the gaps between sitting periods — is where that teaching lands at full depth.

In early June, Zen Center of Denver’s Summer Sesshin (June 8–13) offers five days with Cathy Seizan Wright and Geoff Baoku Keeton in three formats — residential, commuter, or online — all at the same price. The parity is a quiet statement about what matters: the practice, not the logistics. Two hundred twenty-five dollars for members, two-seventy-five for non-members. Partial scholarships through the Mary Mich fund. Registration closes May 18, and new participants need to apply — the teachers review all applications.

The women Forstman is bringing forward — Ostertag, Hartman, Thanas — didn’t build the institutions that get named in lineage charts. They held a quality of attention that could pass from one person to the next in a small room. A poem written after zazen. A center near Cologne. A practice period that most American students will never hear about. The record of practice was always wider than the record we kept. What Forstman is doing, daylong by daylong, is narrowing the gap.