Nature's Place

 
I can walk again in the nearby Billinudgel NR. It’s a swamp really that has been impassable in many places for a long time now with all the rain, but the cold has killed off most of the mozzies. And those there are don’t seem to have the strength for biting too much.

I discovered a bee hive today and thought ‘what an opportunity’ until one blundered into the back of my neck. I swished it away and ran for cover just in case he was focused on me. He wasn’t and a few seconds later I went back but stayed out of the flight path this time, close to the ground and to the side, live and learn – once more.

It was getting late, the sun was high and the entrance to the hive was on the shaded side of a dead tree trunk so the camera wasn’t able to get the action very well. I took many pix but only one was any good. I might go there early some morning to catch them coming out.

Most of my photographic subjects are from the plot of land where I live in Wooyung. And though the flowers are of what is generally considered a weed and often very small, they are beautiful.
 
Beauty, the re – cognizance of a place inside, in the psyche, manifests as the nature all around me. I only have to look and taking photo’s is one way of doing it, a good way to acknowledge that which is without the considerations of mind – the so called worldly stuff.

The effect of this over time is the worldly stuff fades to its proper perspective. As something to be attended to as a matter of fact, as needs be. While the nature, the beauty of it, fills the space left by the diminishing stuff of mind.

It has to be done to be appreciated. Done to be realised. The flip side is what stuff of mind that lingers has to be let go and often it doesn’t want to go since it is in, or is, the habit of repeating itself. So perseverance is required. And right action.
 
Not unlike the way a seed perseveres on its journey to the light. It first needs to sense the potential of life as water or it won’t even begin. Then it has to break out of its usually hard shell and spread its first leaves to the light to get the energy to grow roots to take sustenance from the earth to support its growing body. One thing at a time.

It’s a balancing act, one action sustaining the other. Too much reaching for the light and it lacks the strength of stem and root to reach on with any reliability. Too much root will die back for lack of light coming through the leaves. Each unbalancing causing its own particular problems.

Thankfully nature usually takes care of the balancing act. The only place it can really be disturbed is in man as he is now, often focused in the emotional and mental, where energy can be unnecessarily lost to the condition of mind. Energy that is needed for the balancing.

Only man is unbalanced because we have largely left nature out of our lives as a conscious acknowledgment – not knowing what we are doing.

The beauty of it is no matter how unbalanced we get it is possible to return to equilibrium – knowing what we are doing.

There is no perfection here, only the best I can do. Which, by doing it, can get better.
 
Copyright Reserved / Mark Berkery