Nature's Place

Drought is no stranger in Oz and it is back with a vengeance. While we usually have the wet season about now it has drizzled and gently rained on a few days out of the last few months and it isn’t looking like getting wet any time soon. The bees, and everything else, are dying for the rain, the monsoon that brings more life than death.

This has significant implications for the wildlife, water being the first requirement of sustainability. But everything gets through, adapts or moves on. As it happens there is one spot that will probably never really dry up as it is an integral part of the drainage system of one of our big shopping centres that flood water from the inland hills must pass through – it was once a part of the natural system that was built over but maintained.

There is always an upside, as far as I am concerned, it’s how I keep going through the brutality of a war zone society often looks to be – and actually is. Yeah, let’s not go into that – you see it or you don’t and that’s enough. Nature is also a war zone, but there’s nobody to suffer emotionally – is there another kind – from it. Optimism has no place but with the pessimist.

So I tend the garden, more of a haven for the little ones this year than last. Some surprises – a new born Emerald Cuckoo Wasp, and some amusement – the bum of a bee sticking up out of a bamboo, looking like it doesn’t realise. And one giant wasp and mate that make good use of some water I leave out – must be over 2” inch long and thick as my little finger – that is well aware of me and to whom I haven’t gotten close, yet – we’ll see. You get the pix I get …

What a shocker nature can be, to the insanity of the emotional thinker, if it can but see … what a wonder, in a sense of the whole where the particular retreats to perspective … and it only lasts the blink of an eye.

The rest is just living; no big deal except it keeps going somehow – by the same singular purpose.

Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab – best in FireFox

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