Monday, February 11, 2008 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM
< previous day | archives | next day >
Line cabin, Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico, February 2, 2008
The line cabin is built against a rock
What a clever idea. And what a great rock for the purpose. See how economically the builders of this little cabin set it right up against the flat side of that big rock? Most likely the work of building the cabin was done entirely by hand and those guys must have jumped at the chance to carry 25% fewer stones over here and fit them into place.
That rock probably has a moderating influence on the daily temperature extremes down here in this defile too. I don't know if that's helpful in the extreme summer heat but it should help keep the cabin warm during those cold winter nights after the sun goes down even though the sun doesn't reach this rock until late in the day during the winter months. If it reaches the rock at all in mid winter - it was mid day when I took this picture and as you can see the sun still hasn't quite reached the rock and I didn't stick around to see if the sun touched it later in the day.
Working on website
Today I started tweaking this website a bit to see if I can archive these Travels pages in a way that will make them easier to navigate. The Yesterday and Tomorrow links at the bottom of the pages are fine for linear reading but just don't cut it for finding older stuff. It wouldn't hurt if I managed to make some improvements to the whole site for that matter but I don't know if I can keep my attention trained on the project long enough to make a difference. We'll see.
Night camp
Site 29 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - good signal
- Go to the Pancho Villa State Park website
- Locate Pancho Villa State Park 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