Two Directions at Once: The Season Opens and Closes

Mid-October, and the light has gone slant and thin. In the Theravada world the rains retreat is in its last stretch — the three months of Vassa that monastics entered back in July close at the full Hunter’s Moon on October 26, with Pavarana, the ceremony of mutual invitation, and the Kathina robe-offering season that follows into November. A practice season ends by being finished well, in company, with the community turning to one another and asking to be corrected.

The Zen calendar this same week is pointed the other way. The autumn practice periods that have been gathering since September move into full swing, and a new one opens. On October 14, Green Gulch Farm begins its nine-week Fall Practice Period, running clear through December 15 and culminating, as fall periods do, in a seven-day Rohatsu sesshin. Nine weeks of residential life — daily zazen, work practice, study, a tangaryo to settle in at the start — is a serious door to walk through. The listing itself calls it intense, welcomes beginners as readily as seasoned sitters, and notes the registration link points to a waitlist, so it may already be fuller than it looks.

David Whyte has a line that belongs next to an announcement like this one. “Sometimes it takes / darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness,” he writes in “Sweet Darkness,” “to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.” Nine weeks is a long time to find out what’s too small for you. The commitment is more likely to be the two months of calendar than the sitting.

What makes this week worth watching is that Green Gulch opens the long door and a scattering of short ones in the same seven days. On October 17 the farm hosts One Breath, One Brushstroke, a two-and-a-half-hour session of intuitive painting framed as a meditation on watching your thoughts arrive — and, that same day and the next, two beginner half-day sittings that start from zero: instruction in zazen and kinhin, alternating short periods, tea and cookies and conversation with the teacher. One center, one week, the full spectrum of how a person comes in. Some arrive for an afternoon with a paintbrush. Some arrive for nine weeks and don’t surface until after the solstice.

Down in Austin, Appamada offers its own version of the short door on the 17th: contemplative flower arranging drawn from Ikebana, the practice treated not as decoration but as a way of placing attention through the placing of blooms. It’s a two-hour afternoon, open to anyone, and it asks nothing except that you look at where things go.

And in Brooklyn the same Saturday, the Zen Center of New York City holds its Radiant BIAPOC Zazenkai, a one-day sit led by Hojin Sensei for Black, Indigenous, Asian, and People of Color practitioners. The format is traditional — zazen, kinhin, oryoki, chanting, face-to-face teaching — and the framing is deliberate: a day built for both experienced students and those using it to prepare for a longer sesshin. At $25, it’s a doorway that keeps itself open.

The week ends on a quarter-moon uposatha, October 18 — the old lunar observance day that treats practice as a rhythm rather than an event. Which is the thread, maybe: one tradition completing a season, another entering one, the moon keeping its own time underneath both. You don’t have to choose the nine-week door to be inside the turn. You only have to notice which door is yours.