Nature's Place

 
It’s called a money tree – the leaves you can see, by someone, way back when I can’t remember. Where the wasp has started building a nest, a paper wasp, a paper nest. She is alone in the endeavour and there are at least three cells of the hive occupied so far. I have seen the little grub she leaves in the cell, a tiny thing about two millimetres long. And she spends a lot of time away from the hive, probably hunting food to put in with her young, her little babies. Food entombed in sensational paralysis to be eaten as needed, alive. My magnificent nature.
 
Whenever I go to have a look at the nest she fronts up and eyeballs me. Stands up tall, spreads her wings and ‘rattles’ her front legs at me. She is serious about her young, and dangerous if disturbed. But she won’t waste the energy harassing me if I don’t give her good cause by disturbing the nest. I wonder if she will get used to me, maybe one of the young will be my friend? I don’t think so somehow. Not these wild creatures, their instinct is too basic, no facility for socialising. But who knows, there are exceptions. Watch this space.
 
Isn’t she magnificent the way she poses in defence of the hive, the beautiful instinctive intelligence to survive in form rendered as a bold defiant stance, against all comers. And that she never has a doubt about what she is doing, no wasted thought, no wasted energy. All her energy going to what she is designed for, to live as wasp and reproduce, against all comers. Magnificent nature.
 
The fact is I see this, perceive this, in me. Inside. I re-cognise this part of my nature represented in the wasp. It is my nature, since I came ‘up’ through the species, the instinctive psychic structure and not just the appearance in sense. And it is still a part of me, a part of my nature now, in my psyche. The beauty of it is in recognising it I see the being of it, me being that, before thought gets in to distort and make something else of it.
 
It is wasp and, as clear as my attention to it is, I am being that, in the moment. When ‘that’ is not I am, being, no problem. The best I can. The same goes for any other nature I cognise, when thought or emotion doesn’t get in the way there is only ‘that’.
 
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge