What is the merit of practice, of discipline?
Choosing to accept the invitation, the opportunity,
this one rose early and joined the monks at the neighboring Zendo
for the morning zazen sitting.

Waking and walking the body on frigid winter mornings is definitely good for it,
as is also sitting it on a cushion facing a wall for an hour.
Hooking the mind chatter onto breathwaves is calming, clarifying, and insightful...
just as chanting monotone recitations of ancestral masters
extends my sense of the living interconnected presence into distant past vastness,
naturally deepening the awareness of just how infinite
the life I exist within actually is.

But the simple act of bowing is particularly potent.
Why? Perhaps it is just the simplicity of recognizing,
in such an act,
the absolute equality of each and every form of beingness.

I am given to see that such equality is truly the essence of Love.