Thursday, February 5, 2009 - Rockhound State Park, Deming NM

Yikes!, Rockhound State Park, Deming, New Mexico, February 5, 2009

We do like hookups in the winter

For the electricity mainly. Electric heat is much pleasanter than propane. And propane can be a real headache to find sometimes. Not here, I know where to find propane in Deming but in general. Plus one has to break camp to go get the tank refilled. I only have a ten gallon tank on this rig and that's only enough to heat the rig for four or five nights in the 30 degree weather we are getting here.

Night camp

Site 27 - Rockhound State Park, Deming NM

Verizon cell phone service - good signal
Verizon EVDO service - good signal
Find other references to Rockhound on this website
List the nights I've camped here
Go to the Rockhound State Park website
Get a Google map of this area
Check the weather here

Emptiness

Emptiness shouldn't be thought of as a negative. A lot of people misconstrue that as meaning the opposite of something is nothing. But this is something slightly different. I don't want to get into comparative religious things because that's a complicated topic. But if we were to think about it, the problem of life and death has to do with what comes in between, and what comes in between is an awful lot of suffering. We're not just talking about the pain of suffering, we're talking about suffering. Our common everyday parlance it's called stress. That's a kind of suffering and we die from this. From the standpoint of Zen Buddhism this life isn't some sort of stage mock-up for something else that comes after this. This is what we have. We're right here and we're being in this present moment. What you want to think about when you think about emptiness is a way in which to stay present. Just as, in a way, in a very strange kind of concept, there really is no such thing as time. There's no dress rehersal for anything.

The Artful Mind, Reverend Sohaku Flagg, Rinzai Buddhist priest, in an interview with Nanci Race, Jan/Feb 2003

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