Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - Capitol Reef National Park, Torrey UT
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Fruita Orchards, Capitol Reef National Park, Torrey UT, April 20, 2011
Fruita orchards
The 2,000 trees in the old orchards in Fruita are in pretty good shape, bearing apricots, apples, plums, etc available to the public in season. The campground is set amidst the orchards, horses are in the paddocks. Cool.
Night camp
Site 7 - Fruita Campground, Capitol Reef National Park, Torrey UT
- No Verizon cell phone service is available here - and no broadband.
- Locate 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