Dwelling Lightly: The Fall Ango Opens

This whole week falls inside Sukkot. From sundown last Friday, observant households have been eating and sometimes sleeping in the sukkah — a hut built deliberately flimsy, roofed with cut branches loose enough to let the rain in and the stars through. The point is the fragility. You dwell lightly, on purpose, for a week, and the festival ends this weekend not in solemnity but in the unguarded circling of Simchat Torah.

The Zen calendar, this same week, makes almost the opposite gesture. The harvest moon is waning toward its last quarter on Saturday. The equinox turned the light six days ago, and the coverage everywhere is about recalibrating — earlier sunsets, morning light, routines to reset. And the practice halls are settling in. Fall ango has begun, or is about to, at monasteries across the country: not a week of dwelling lightly but a season of dwelling deliberately, with Rohatsu — the December sesshin marking the Buddha’s awakening — as the far shore you can just make out from here.

That tension is worth sitting with. Both traditions are teaching something about shelter. One asks you to feel how little holds you up. The other asks you to build a container solid enough to stay inside for months.

Entering the season

San Francisco Zen Center’s Fall Practice Period opens Tuesday and runs eight weeks, organized around the Six Paramitas — generosity, ethical conduct, patience, diligence, concentration, wisdom. The subtitle is “Bodhisattva Practices for an Uncertain World,” which is either boilerplate or exactly the point, depending on how you read it. The listing offers residential, commuter, and online tracks; the online and commuter option names Abbot Tenzen David Zimmerman leading the weekly classes, which the in-person residential listing, oddly, does not. If the teacher matters to you — it should — that’s where to look.

At the other coast of the country and the other end of the intensity spectrum, Great Vow’s Autumn Ango is a full ten-week residency, October through late December. The center calls the baseline “light” — five and a half hours of daily zazen in continuous silence — but embeds three longer sesshins inside it, including a ten-day opener and a seven-day Rohatsu. That opener, October Sesshin: The Ancient Way, stands on its own if the residency is more than you can give.

Not a solitary thing

What strikes me about Great Vow’s ango opening is the Hearthstones: small groups that meet through the whole period, so you enter the season attached to a few named people rather than alone in a crowd. Tricycle ran an interview with Bhante Buddharakkhita last week under the title “You Must Have Friends,” pressing kalyana-mittata — spiritual friendship — as the twin of formal practice, not a nicety beside it. A practice period is the built form of that idea. You don’t clear the soot alone.

One quieter note for the weekend, when Sukkot ends and the blessing-of-the-animals season begins around the Feast of St. Francis. Green Gulch holds a family Ancestors’ Ritual on October 4 — a Sejiki ceremony for the dead that explicitly includes beloved pets. Metta extended past the human, grief held in a room full of children. Not a silent sit. A different shape of shelter.

David Whyte, from “The Journey”: “Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart.” The autumn sky is doing its part. The rest is where you decide to sit under it.