Thursday, January 8, 2009 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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Dawn at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, January 8, 2009
It's up!
I wake up in the middle of the night and my eye catches a reflected blinking green light on the ceiling. That's the indicator light on the USB720 modem - indicating data is moving. I have a connection!
The race is on... to get to the laptop, connect to a couple of banks and credit card accounts and get my online banking done before the the signal drops again...
Success! Phew! That takes the pressure off for a while.
By breakfast time the signal has disappeared again. Could a pattern be developing here where there is night time access for some reason? That would be better than nothing and might be enough to keep me from leaving the park in search of better access. I really don't feel like moving. We'll see.
Night camp
Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps 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