Three Things That Meet This Weekend

The prizes arrive one a day this week — medicine already to the optogenetics pioneers, the literary world holding its breath for Thursday. Public attention is fixed outward, on whoever gets crowned. Meanwhile the sky is quietly emptying. By Saturday the moon goes dark.

Writing in Emergence about the restlessness of fall migration — that Zugunruhe that moves through birds before they leave — the poet and ornithologist J. Drew Lanham offers a line that could double as practice instruction: “Let your vision blur a bit to see more clearly.” The birds go before we do. Attention, he suggests, is the whole of it.

And then a convergence worth noticing. Saturday, October 10, is World Mental Health Day, and it falls on the new moon — the darkest sky of the month. Sunday, October 11, would have been Thich Nhat Hanh’s hundredth birthday; his community doesn’t call it that. They call it his continuation day. Darkness, inner life, and a centenary, folded into a single weekend.

A few of this week’s sits sit right inside it.

Caregivers’ Sitting at San Francisco Zen Center’s City Center is a half-day on October 11, built for one audience: people who spend most of themselves looking after someone else. The listing uses the word refuge, and means it practically — sitting, walking, a short talk, one-on-one instruction. That it lands on the continuation day of a teacher who spent his last years writing about healing the inner child, and on the weekend the WHO asks everyone to look inward, is the kind of timing you don’t engineer. It’s a small commitment — a morning, not a week. For the person who is usually the one holding the room, that may be the point.

Everyday Zen’s All-Day Sitting runs October 10 — the new moon, the Mental Health Day — at Green Gulch Farm, with Norman Fischer leading and a parallel option on Zoom. Nine in the morning to four-thirty, the full arc of a day: orientation, alternating sits and walking, a service before lunch, the Pali refuges at the close. The in-person seats are limited and tend to go, but the online door stays open, suggested donation thirty dollars, no one turned away. A whole day of sitting under an empty sky is its own kind of answer to a week spent watching the world hand out medals.

Looking a week out, the Radiant BIAPOC Zazenkai at Fire Lotus Temple in Brooklyn, October 17, is led by Hojin Sensei — zazen, kinhin, oryoki, chanting, face-to-face teaching, a dedicated day for Black, Indigenous, Asian, and People of Color practitioners. Twenty-five dollars. It’s structured to hold both seasoned students and those using the day to find their legs before a longer sesshin.

Behind all of this the ango season has already settled in. The practice periods opened last week; now they deepen. Great Vow’s ten-day Walking the Ancient Way sesshin begins October 8, running the length of the fall residency’s first stretch in silence — the long form, for those ready to disappear into it while the rest of us are refreshing the Nobel feed.

The horoscope columns are asking whether this is the worst Mercury retrograde in memory. The contemplative press is speaking almost entirely in the vocabulary of healing and mortality — inner child, trauma, death, the onion that is always a new onion. The mood is late-year serious. People aren’t looking for escape; they’re looking for something that holds weight. A dark moon is a fair place to start. You sit down, you let the vision blur, and you see what’s actually there.