Nature's Place

Sometimes, when no small creatures are showing up, I go searching. This day I thought I’d look in the un-usual places, the dark places that I love to look into – that every boy delights in. Don’t they? Where dangerous creatures live.

I’d lift a fallen log from the forest floor, damp earth smell – rotting wood – life at work, and some-thing would run for cover. Little black bugs, jumpers of some kind too small for me to make out, worms and things.

What is harder to notice is what doesn’t move, the more advanced evolutionary types that know the value of stillness. They know movement is a ‘dead’ giveaway. You need the instincts of a predator to know the need of stillness.

And that’s the trick, stillness. They were still, but I was stiller, and I saw them – a change in the pattern. So I moved in for the shot, carefully. Very careful not to disturb the ground, the air, the creature – by any way or sense.

Here live hunters, the Huntsman and Mouse spiders, and the Centipede. Each brings swift death to their prey, each venomous in their way. So I was careful not to act as a predator, aggressively or intrusive, and gave their due respect.

It’s important to understand the instincts of a predator, and to convey that understanding, in the stillness of being. And so, encounters can be communications between beings of different forms of the same life realised, the same nature.

Nature, one nature, not many.

© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge