Saturday, November 13, 2010 - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO
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Suspended Animation, Spider Egg Sac, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, July 20, 2010
Time for a break
Spending so many hours traveling and thinking about traveling gets old after a few days. St Louis and the Mississippi are behind me. This is a nice park. It's quiet here. The sun is shining. The river is running. I think I'll stay an extra night and settle some mud.
Night camp
Site 45C - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO
- The Missouri State Parks website introduces the park with: "The beauty of the Meramec River and its surrounding bluffs, caves and forests have pleased visitors since the park opened in 1927. In 1933, the craftsmen of the Civilian Conservation Corps began blending a variety of visitor facilities into the park's rugged landscape."
- Verizon cell phone is weak.
- Verizon Broadband service is available here with an amplifier.
- Locate Meramec State Park on my Night Camps map
- 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