Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO
Camped at Beymer Water Recreation Park, Lakin KS, May 4, 2010
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
Nights I've camped here
- Sunday, November 14, 2010 - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO
- You'd recognize this Common Selfheal as a lawn weed if you saw it but I just had to mess with this one. It's that pesky little square stemmed perennial with the cylindrical terminal spikes of purple to blue flowers. After flowering the stems elongate and hold the dead terminal spikes waving aloft for the kid to come by to shoot the cat with the little missiles. Image: Common Selfheal, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, July 17, 2010.
- Saturday, November 13, 2010 - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO
- 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. Image: Suspended Animation, Spider Egg Sac, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, July 20, 2010.
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