Sparkling Sunshine Night
This little jewel was meandering about in the afternoon and when it came into direct sunlight it took on a magical appearance. It was an ordinary flat blue to the unaided eye but as it passed from the shadow to the light it was brought to life as the stars in the black tropical night.
A wonderful reminder of the connectedness of all things, an ‘insignificant’ little bug and the vast starry night that is the longing of many to reach and the symbol of the spiritual reality behind this one.
No coincidence there, just connections. The ones that keep us going.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Wasp – ed
Still a little life left in this old cam, maybe even a second life – who knows. (:
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Toad Awakening
Primeval nature, looking at me. Waking up from hibernation, with a little disturbance from myself, then went back to sleep. Waking up is hard to do, for some, at different times – no wisdom there.
And even the much maligned Aussie Cane Toad can smile.
Li’l Bee
This fellow is about 4mm long and in the first few pix is collecting resin from a hole in a pine tree. I suspect it is for building material for the nest. There were more than one at the hole but as is often the case only one was at the right angle in the right place for long enough for a shot or two.
These are Australia’s native honey bee, known as sugarbag, and their honey is a luxury given their numbers and size – they don’t make it like the European honey bee that is twenty times its size and more active.
They don’t have a sting either so they are harmless by comparison, and they are too small for me to track back to the hive. That’s their advantage, too small to be threatened.
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Science often tells us how nature is robotic, that the creatures and plant life are no more than the sum of their parts plus function on auto. And it’s true, except for the ‘no more’ bit.
The ‘more’ they are is the same ‘more’ you and I are. It’s the inscrutable intelligence behind the structure of everything.
The unknown, the mystery before knowing is, before you and me.
The mystery, the no-thing, the pre-existent wordlessness before it all begins, and ends. As it is now.
The wonder, the beauty, the colour and light.
The deep, the black, the abyss – inside.
Home.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Damaged Butterfly
She seems to be having trouble with her proboscis, it has some form of growth on it and she was agitated, preoccupied and disinclined to fly far. So it was easy for me to get up close. She struggled with her condition for a while but never really lost her essential integrity, never sank below being what she is. Lucky butterfly.
Lucky because she didn’t have to know the emotion and attendant thinking ‘human’ nature would normally generate in a similar situation. A curse you could say. Or you could say a challenge, to climb, you could. But never mind, all is as it is without mind to darken it.
Beautiful, damaged, butterfly.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Little Blue Bee
I first sighted this one on the flagpole at the edge of the field and coaxed it onto a leaf for placing for a few shots, it’s about 5mm long. It was a cold day and the bee was slow moving. As it looked in need I gave it some honey and it took a little but it seems to have something wrong with its eating gear, it was always out, didn’t retract.
It sat still on the leaf for a while then seemed to get restless, in search of something. Eventually I gave it a warm finger to climb on and it was in heaven. It sped up, wandering all over my hand, and eventually took to snuggling into the warmer sheltered crevices of my curled hand, nose first.
Then, all of a sudden, it climbed to the highest point on my hand, stopped and preened its antennae and fanned its wings a few times, then took to the air on the next leg of its epic journey across the small field of grass.
Who knows what happened next, maybe it got home.
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Well, that’s living isn’t it? From lethargy on a wasteland of cold hard metal on a winter’s day to well fed, warm and groomed. Not dead yet.
Who would have thought a giant would come along and provide for the little one while it recovered enough to be on its way.
What little bee could dream such a thing?
You never know what’s coming.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
The Dark Side
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
Queen of the Bollard – Yellow Ladybug
The bollard is a post of old weathered wood bordering the car park at one of the places I go. It is one of many and all are home to some creatures, such as Grasshoppers, Spiders, Ants and so on. This one is dominated by Ladybugs.
I tracked this one around the wood for a few shots. It shows some character in its activities and postures. The things it does, such as cleaning its forelegs, stretching its wings, sitting still, eating and rearing up for no apparent reason imply an inner life rarely attributed to insects.
But why not? These wonderful colourful animate creatures are no less created than you or I. Just differently so, they don’t think – are not separate from what they are – their psycho physical reality.
Where we differ is in the ability to discern a spiritual reality, an origionating being behind the appearance. Though it doesn’t seem to have served us, the race, at all well. It seems so.
But then the species, the whole lot, doesn’t really flower on this plane of being, in existence, that I can see. This is where we die.
Flowering is for another place, inside, behind sense.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Silver Dancer
I have seen these on many occasions but was never tempted to chase them – having such an erratic flight pattern and seeming never to land for more than an instant – until a few days ago. One stopped again and again, and yesterday another stopped to deposit eggs into a spider nest at the bottom of a shallow hole in the wood.
It happened on an old grey tree stump standing in a field of grass where ants had made their nest and were preparing for new life by prodding and biting the young winged queens to fly off and start a new colony.
The sun was high and warm with just the ants and this beautiful silver Ichneumon Wasp on the stump, and me, standing there. The wasp was hovering and touching the wood without landing until she found what she was looking for.
Somewhere to land where she could do what she was programmed to do, lay her eggs. As the ants were doing what they were programmed to do, reproduce – in their way – frenetic to the eye.
Everything reproduces in its way.
What a wonder she is.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Nature's Place 
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