The Barrage and the Still Point

The news has a particular shape right now — not a single surprise but a steady barrage, a countdown to midterms two-plus weeks out, polls that contradict one another, rallies, a general sense that the future has gone illegible. Even the weather is off its mark: parts of the Midwest may log their warmest October on record, the wind having stripped the color off the trees early. Autumn’s usual cue to slow down arrives this year scrambled.

Pico Iyer put the counterweight plainly. “In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention,” he wrote in The Art of Stillness. “And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.” Both halves land this week.

On the practice side, this is the quiet middle of the fall ango. Great Vow’s autumn practice period and San Francisco Zen Center’s are both running mid-stream — past the opening ceremonies, not yet to the Rohatsu close that caps them in December. The week ends on the Pavarana full moon, the night Theravada communities keep as the formal close of the three-month rains retreat. And over on Tricycle’s calendar, a small, apt event: Miya Ando’s rain drawings open at Sundaram Tagore Gallery on October 22 — visual interpretations drawn, she says, from her dictionary of Japanese words for rain. A lexicon of rain, offered in the week the rains retreat ends. You couldn’t plan it better.

The sits worth naming all run in the opposite register from the countdown.

In the mountains of western North Carolina, Atlanta Soto Zen Center holds a five-day silent sesshin at Watershed, October 21–25 — days built from 25-minute sits and 5-minute walks, meals, and simple work, all of it under silence. Five days is a long time to go quiet in a week this loud.

In Chicago, Ancient Dragon Zen Gate’s one-day Sejiki Sesshin: Attending to the Unsettled Spirit on October 24 reads almost too on the nose for the moment. Sejiki is the late-October ceremony addressed to hungry ghosts — beings of narrow throat and swollen belly whose hunger nothing satisfies, the old image for craving itself. “Attending to the unsettled spirit” is one way to name what a whole country feels like this fortnight. The listing sets a tight registration deadline, so confirm a place before assuming one; it runs in person and through the center’s online zendo, donation-based.

And if you have only the one Saturday, October 24 is dense with day-sits. A full day at Green Gulch Farm, meals taken formally in the zendo. A silent Autumn Zazenkai at Great Vow. And a three-hour Half-Day Sit at Fire Lotus Temple in Brooklyn, framed — the listing’s own words — around “connecting with the still point.” A still point is a modest thing to ask of one Saturday. It may also be the whole proposition.

For anyone already looking past this week: the Rohatsu listings have begun to appear. Austin, Appamada, Great Vow, Mountain Rain, Hokyoji — the December intensives marking the Buddha’s awakening are roughly seven weeks out, which means now is when they fill. Worth holding in the back of the mind while the foreground stays loud.