The threshold the calendar won't give

Labor Day is supposed to be a hinge — the unofficial end of summer, the last drive to the lake, the Sunday you finally close the pool. But the marker has come loose. Most schools started weeks ago; the flights this weekend cost a little more than last year and land you somewhere that already smells like fall. The threshold is still printed on the calendar. It just doesn’t cross anything anymore.

Which may be part of why people go looking for one. Pico Iyer, in The Art of Stillness, suggests taking “a few days out of every season to go on retreat” — not as escape but as punctuation, a way of marking time that the year no longer marks for you. A sesshin is a threshold you build by hand.

Across the country, fall ango is just settling in — the monasteries adding an hour of zazen and pointing, slowly, toward Rohatsu in December. But you don’t need three months to cross into something. This week the calendar offers thresholds at several scales.

The most literal one this weekend is Zen Mountain Monastery’s Introduction to Zen Training Weekend, September 4–6 in Mount Tremper. It’s built for people who have never sat a formal retreat: zazen instruction, liturgy, work practice, and a first dokusan — the private, face-to-face meeting newcomers often walk in expecting to be an interview and walk out understanding as something else entirely. Led by Geoffrey Shugen Arnold with Danica Shoan Ankele and Gokan Bonebakker. A long weekend is about enough time to find out whether the form fits.

At Green Gulch Farm, Satori and Salutations (September 2–6) takes that same beginner’s posture and makes it the whole subject. The five days pair zazen with yoga — asana, pranayama, yoga nidra — around Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the book that gave American practice its most durable line: in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind few. Meeting the body and the cushion without preconception turns out to be harder than it sounds, and worth five days of attention.

For those already across the line, the sit that opens as you read this: Compassionate Ocean Sesshin at Hokyoji, in the driftless country of southeastern Minnesota, running August 31 through September 6. Seven days of silence. The center hasn’t said much about it beyond the name, which may be the point — a week is a long time to sit inside a phrase like that.

A week later, at Great Vow in rural Oregon, Jizo Sesshin (September 8–13) gathers six days of practice around Jizo, the bodhisattva who guards what emerges from the earth — crops, children, travelers, the lost. A fitting figure for the turn of the season, when everything above ground begins its long return downward. The sesshin folds art-making into the schedule, so the qualities it names — fearlessness, benevolence, the plain stubbornness of vow — get worked with the hands rather than only contemplated.

The equinox is three weeks out, the Harvest Moon a night behind it. The year will hand you its thresholds eventually, on its own schedule. These are the ones you can choose.