Monday, January 3, 2011 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

Bird & Birders, Sunset, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 4, 2010

There's the infamous goose

This picture will give you an idea of the scene at the roosting ponds along the highway through the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge a few miles south of San Antonio NM. This picture was taken about a minute after the Snow Goose series I pulled the picture from for the posts on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Birders gather here to watch the Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese coming to roost at sunset and again in the morning to watch them wake up and take off for their feeding grounds at sunrise.

Night camp

Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
Verizon cell phone - strong signal
Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
Check the weather in Deming NM

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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