The first real question

Late April, and the season has made up its mind. The hesitation is over — in the Northeast the forsythia is finishing, in Austin the live oaks have fully leafed out, in Vancouver the cherry blossoms along the seawall are at peak or just past. This is the week when spring stops being a promise and becomes a fact.

It’s also the week when summer retreat planning gets real. Registration windows are open. Practice periods have started or are starting. If you’ve been sitting alone through the winter — morning zazen in a cold room, the space heater clicking — the question shifts from am I practicing? to who am I practicing with?

Martin Buber, who wasn’t a Buddhist but understood encounter as well as anyone who was, wrote in I and Thou that all actual life is meeting. Not the idea of meeting — the event of it. Two presences in a room, and something happens that neither could produce alone. He was writing about the divine, mostly, but the insight maps onto the zendo with precision: we sit together not for accountability or atmosphere but because the encounter itself is the practice.

Three retreats in the next three weeks carry that insight into different rooms.

Appamada’s Spring Integrated Intensive: Not Two: Encounter begins April 26 in Austin — seven days of residential practice with Peg Syverson, Joel Barna, and Flint Sparks exploring authentic encounter and relationship. The retreat asks how zazen prepares us for genuine connection with others, which is a deceptively simple question until you sit with it for a week. Appamada’s integrated intensives aren’t standard silent sesshin; they weave extended sitting with dharma talks and group inquiry, treating contemplative depth and relational engagement as a single activity. The center runs one residential a year. The title — “Not Two” — is Zen shorthand for nonduality, but paired with “Encounter” it becomes something more specific: the meeting that arises when the habit of separation thins.

Two weeks later, Norman Fischer leads a weekend sesshin at Mountain Rain Zen Community in Vancouver, May 9-11. Fischer is a former abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, a poet with more than a dozen collections, and the founder of Everyday Zen — one of the few teachers whose work moves between dharma and verse without announcing the border crossing. When he travels north to teach, the encounter goes both ways: the visiting teacher shaped by the host sangha’s rhythm, the community hearing familiar teachings in an unfamiliar voice. Mountain Rain practices in the Soto Zen tradition at the University of British Columbia. A weekend sesshin with Fischer at the edge of the continent, where the Pacific fills every gap in the schedule, is a particular kind of meeting.

And for those encountering formal Zen practice for the first time, the Introduction to Zen Training Weekend at Zen Mountain Monastery runs May 1-3 in the Catskills. Three days with Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Danica Shoan Ankele, and Gokan Bonebakker. You’ll learn to sit, to walk in kinhin, to eat in the formal oryoki style, to enter the teacher’s room for dokusan — that strange, intimate format where you sit face to face with someone whose only interest is your direct experience. The schedule runs early mornings through evening, noble silence throughout. Three hundred dollars covers lodging and meals. If you’ve been circling the idea of sesshin, wondering what it actually involves, this is the door.

What connects these three isn’t tradition or format but a shared premise: that practice done in the company of others is not the same practice done alone, however similar the posture looks. The cushion faces the wall, and the room is full. Buber wrote that in the beginning is relation — not the individual, not the idea, but the space between. Late April is a good time to test that. The registration forms are open. The trees, depending on your latitude, are blooming or done blooming or about to. Somewhere in Austin or Vancouver or the Catskills, a room is being prepared — cushions set out in rows, a bell on the altar, the silence not yet occupied.