Bows and Vows

What are we bowing toward and what are we vowing or declaring ourselves about? So we routinely see people bowing to this, bowing to that.

It's easy to do it in kind of a perfunctory way as a simple show of respect.

Okay, that's fine.

And I wanted to explore with you more deeply, what are you bowing toward in two regards? First, as an expression of thankfulness or respect, pardon me, appreciation.

You know, do you appreciate a friend? Can you bow in that direction? Can you appreciate the efforts that you've made already in your life? And can you therefore bow gratefully to previous versions of yourself? That is a very powerful kind of bow.

As you go through your day thinking about great teachers who talk about gratitude, can you bow in the direction, you know, of the flowers, the little flower that is blooming up through a crack in the sidewalk? You know, can you bow with gratitude to people who are taking care of the world? So many people maintaining streets, you know, building infrastructure, teaching children, doing the little things that keep the world going.

Can you bow in those directions? So I wondered right now if you would care to ask yourself kind of experientially, what do you bow toward? What are you thankful for? And how might it serve you in your practice to be more mindful and deliberate about to, to name what you bow to, to bow in the direction of what you're thankful for? What are some of the things that you bow toward and how do you do that? I'll give you two personal examples.

One is that quite often at a meal, I will take a few moments and look at the lettuce on the plate or the tomato or something else there, and I'll consider how did that tomato get there.

Wow, tomato.

[laughs] Thank you, tomato.

Right? And I think, well, let's see, we got it at a store down the street from where I live.

We didn't grow it in our backyard.

Okay.

How did that tomato get there? Well, people brought it there.

It got set out on a shelf.

Many hands touched it.

You know, it grew in a field somewhere.

Someone took care of that tomato plant so that the causes and conditions were cultivated to develop a tomato.

And then nerd that I am, I think back on the domestication of plants.

You know, thirty thousand years ago, there weren't really ripe, luscious, modern tomatoes.

There's, those have been gradually domesticated over thousands of years.

Oh, thank you all those people who did all those things to bring that tomato to my plate.

Think of the systems.

You know, maybe those systems are fraught and complicated, like transportation systems that use fossil fuels to bring tomatoes from the field to one, one's plate in our modern lives.

Okay.