Saturday, March 29, 2008 - Mule Creek Road, Guthrie AZ

Camped along Mule Creek Road, Guthrie AZ, March 29, 2008

I'm camped for the night along Mule Creek Road (AZ 78) in the Apache - Sitgreaves National Forest, about 11 miles east of Guthrie AZ and a mile west of the Arizona / New Mexico border.

Primitive camping along Mule Creek Road

After having spent the night in the first rest area west of the New Mexico border when I came through here a couple of weeks ago I discovered the next morning on my journey down off the plateau there are several really nice primitive campgrounds a few miles farther west that I would have preferred to stay at. I'm at one of them now.

Night camp

Primitive campground along Mule Creek Road East of Guthrie AZ

No Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here.
Locate Mule Creek Road 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

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