A year for a single word

The country is under a heat dome this week — most of it, anyway, the South and the Midwest and up the East Coast, temperatures in the high nineties and past. It’s the kind of week when stillness stops being an idea and becomes a physical necessity: the shade, the early morning before the air thickens, the instinct to stop moving. The long holiday weekend arrives into all of it.

Something quieter closes on Monday. The Dalai Lama’s Year of Compassion — declared by the Central Tibetan Administration to run from July 6, 2025 to July 6, 2026 — ends on his birthday, as he turns ninety. A year given a single word. It’s worth asking what a designated year of anything actually leaves behind, and the honest answer is: whatever people practiced during it. Lion’s Roar’s July issue has Tara Brach on exactly this — a tender, inclusive awareness of our shared humanity — which is compassion described from the inside, before it hardens into a slogan.

This is also ango season. The summer practice period — literally “peaceful dwelling” — is the monastic tradition of settling in for the hot months, and centers from Houston to Sonoma Mountain are opening theirs now. The rhythm is inward and stationary, which suits the weather. So does the long weekend: for many people, this is the first real window since spring to sit for more than an hour.

Two of the July retreats worth watching share a word. Both are named for interdependence — which is where compassion resolves, in Buddhist terms, once it stops being a feeling and becomes a description of how things actually are.

Brooklyn Zen Center’s Day of Remembering Our Interdependence, on July 12, takes the practice out of the meditation hall entirely. It’s a walking pilgrimage across the city — chanting and sitting through New York’s streets, ending at the African Burial Ground National Monument in lower Manhattan, where the remains of thousands of enslaved and free Africans lie beneath the financial district. The walk draws on the Buddhist monks’ 2,300-mile Walk for Peace. It’s free, it’s interfaith, and it’s a long day in July heat, so bring water. Practice here means moving through history rather than away from it.

Its opposite number is Zen Mountain Monastery’s Interdependence Sesshin, July 20–26 — six days of silence in the Catskills, seven to ten hours of zazen a day, led by Jody Hojin Kimmel and Danica Shoan Ankele. Same insight, inverted container. One walks through the city’s memory; the other stops moving entirely and lets the mind settle until interdependence isn’t a concept you’re remembering but something you can feel in the room. A tradition can hold both. The walking and the sitting turn out to be the same practice.

If you have the whole summer, Great Vow’s Summer Residency opens July 7 in rural Oregon — six weeks of monastic life, embedded sesshins, oryoki, temple work, for $300. That figure is not a typo. It’s what practice costs when a monastery decides access matters more than revenue. Six weeks is a long time to give to anything. It’s also the length at which the schedule stops being something you endure and becomes, simply, how you live.

Tricycle this week is running the scholar Sarah Shaw on seclusion and stillness as the precondition for depth — the old, unfashionable idea that you have to withdraw before anything happens. In a week this loud and this hot, that isn’t renunciation. It’s just shade.