The same water

Tricycle’s summer issue profiles Anne Waldman at eighty-one — six decades of Buddhist practice, sixty-some books, and a conviction that poetry and meditation are not parallel activities but the same one. Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa with Allen Ginsberg in the seventies, back when the idea of a Buddhist-inspired university in Boulder seemed either visionary or absurd. The profile by Jenn Pelly treats Waldman’s poetry as something performed and embodied, not read from a page. It’s a useful frame for the weeks ahead: what does a practice look like when it refuses to stay on the cushion?

Memorial Day weekend. The unofficial start of summer, the last long pause before the calendar opens into June’s sesshins and residencies. If you sit in a sangha with a spring ango, this is the final stretch — the schedule no longer a discipline but a habit, the way water finds its channel. And in the retreat listings, the season’s deeper offerings are starting to appear.

The most notable is Five-Day Silent Chan Retreat Led by Guo Gu at Great Vow Zen Monastery, June 23–27. I mentioned this in passing a month ago, but it deserves a closer look. Guo Gu is a dharma heir of the late Chan Master Sheng Yen and author of Silent Illumination, a book that does the rare work of making a medieval Chinese meditation method feel immediate. Silent illumination — mozhao — is sitting without fixing the mind on anything, resting in awareness itself. The other stream he teaches, huatou, uses a critical phrase to cut through conceptual thinking. These are the two rivers of Chan meditation that became, in Japan, shikantaza and koan practice. When Guo Gu teaches at Great Vow, a Soto Zen monastery in the Oregon countryside, you hear the source language inside the inherited dialect. Five days residential, with daily dokusan, dharma talks, and the full monastic schedule. He’s also teaching at Nalandabodhi in Seattle the following weekend and at Zen Mountain Monastery in July — a summer teaching arc worth tracking if Chan practice interests you.

A different kind of accessibility. Summer Sesshin at the Zen Center of Denver, June 8–13, runs five days led by Cathy Seizan Wright and Geoff Baoku Keeton. What makes this one unusual is the format: residential, commuter, or online via Zoom, all at the same price. That’s a deliberate choice. Most centers price online lower, treating it as a lesser experience. Denver is saying the container is the same regardless of where you sleep — the schedule, the teachers, the commitment. Twenty residential beds, so register early if you want to stay overnight. The sesshin includes zazen, dokusan, teisho, chanting, and oryoki. By application, with scholarships available through the Mary Mich fund. $225 members, $275 non-members. Registration closed May 18, but contact the center — late spots sometimes open.

Then something I haven’t seen elsewhere this season. Practicing the Way Retreat at Hokyoji Zen Practice Community in Minnesota’s Driftless Region, June 17–21. Four days co-led by Rev. Onryu Kennedy and Rev. Musho Darin Podulke-Smith, exploring what Dogen called Buddha activity — awakening as it manifests in ordinary action, not as something deferred to a future state. What caught my attention is the reading list: alongside Dogen’s essays, the retreat assigns Václav Havel and Martin Luther King Jr. This isn’t a retreat that treats justice and zazen as separate concerns. It’s asking how sitting becomes action and whether the distinction was ever real. Hybrid format — attend in person at Hokyoji or join online. Dana-based for teacher compensation, which means you contribute what you can. The bluffs above the Root River in late June, the light lasting past nine.

For those earlier in their practice: Introduction to Zen Training Weekend at Zen Mountain Monastery, June 5–7, with Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Danica Shoan Ankele, and Gokan Bonebakker. Three days in the Catskills learning the whole form — zazen, kinhin, dokusan, chanting, communal meals. It’s introductory in the sense that someone will show you where to put your hands and when to bow. It is not introductory in the sense of being easy. The schedule starts early and the silence holds. $300, residential. If you’ve been circling the question of what sesshin actually involves, this is the answer.

Waldman, asked once about the relationship between poetry and Buddhism, said she didn’t see one — they were the same activity, the same attention turned toward different material. Late May, turning toward June, the practice calendar says something similar. Chan at a Soto monastery. Sesshin in your living room at the same price as sesshin in the zendo. Dogen and Havel in the same reading list. The forms keep branching. The water is the same.