Inside the Days of Awe

Rosh Hashanah closed at nightfall on Sunday. Yom Kippur begins at sundown on the 20th. That leaves this week suspended in the ten days between — the Days of Awe, when one tradition asks its people to take stock before the book closes. The Hebrew word for the turning at the center of it is teshuvah, which means return more than repentance. You don’t arrive somewhere new. You come back to where you were supposed to be standing all along.

It’s a useful frame for mid-September, whatever you observe or don’t. The light is going noticeably now, the equinox lands on the 22nd, and the Buddhist world is elegiac this season — mourning Robert Thurman, who died in June, while Lion’s Roar puts out a ninetieth-birthday tribute to Pema Chödrön. Elders passing, elders still teaching. It’s a good stretch to sit with what you’ve been carrying.

The dharma calendar is doing its own version of this. Fall ango — the traditional three-month practice period — opens now across the Zen world, as it has for centuries, carving out a container of sustained attention exactly as the days shorten. Two calendars, two vocabularies, the same instinct: when the year turns down, turn in.

Brooklyn Zen Center’s fall ango begins the 16th, and its theme reads like it was chosen for the week. Fall Ango: Liberating Response runs twelve weeks through mid-December, holding a single question: how what happens on the cushion becomes how you answer suffering — your own, and the world’s. That’s an old tension in socially engaged Zen, and an ango is the right length to actually sit inside it rather than resolve it in a weekend. It’s a season-long commitment, not a retreat you drop into; confirm the weekly schedule and whether newer practitioners can join before you count yourself in.

If the accounting you want is more literal, Oceans of Compassion puts the response first. Great Vow Zen Monastery holds this four-day retreat over International Coastal Cleanup Day weekend at Beverly Beach on the Oregon coast — zazen and dharma talks braided with actual beach cleanup, service treated as practice rather than the thing you do after practice. You camp. Bring layers; the coast in September has its own opinions. Details on lodging and the sitting schedule aren’t posted yet, so ask.

And Fall Roshi Retreat at Watershed takes the accounting into language. Atlanta Soto Zen Center’s five-day retreat in the North Carolina mountains, September 16–20, pairs sitting and walking with writing exercises framed around Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra — the text that reads the natural world itself as teaching. Three forms of attention, held as one. If you’ve sat sesshin, you’ll know the shape; the writing offers a different door in. The daily schedule and what the $240 covers aren’t published, so contact the center first.

Not everyone has a week. Zen Mountain Monastery’s Ancestral Zazenkai on the 19th is a single day — zazen, liturgy, dokusan, a talk, and oryoki lunch — built to serve both experienced sitters and newcomers testing whether they want the longer form. A day is enough to notice what you’d otherwise carry past the deadline.

Jane Hirshfield has a poem, “The Heat of Autumn,” that sets the summer’s heat against the autumn’s and finds the second one deeper, harder to hold, closer to loss. That’s the temperature of this week — a warmth you can feel leaving. The traditions disagree about almost everything except this: the leaving is worth attending to.