Crucified …
A kind of Beetle only found on the pink Crucifix Orchid, so far. Surveying her domain.
*Click the pictures to see bigger version.
She loves a good feed of the freshest buds, both with a colourful heart.
Aware too of the photographer, just doesn’t know me by name.
Disappearing for days at a time she comes and goes by her own nature’s design.
Looking good in her yellow jacket, a warning to some perhaps. Pretty on pink …
Always climbing back up towards the light, where the freshest buds are found.
The rain came followed by a cold snap, here in a sub tropical Brisbane winter, and must have driven all the small creatures into the depths for survival. Those it didn’t kill.
Such is nature, everything in constant flux, no rest in any condition for too long. And of course the weather can be reflective of what’s inside, if you can see it.
Rain to wash away the dust of seasons past, cold to wake you up or knock you down. Nature doesn’t care one way or another, or cares for all the same.
So, Beetle or man, you shake it off or take it on, rise up and start another day.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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The Last Bee
Before : resting undisturbed.
Click on the pix …
Bigger than she looks.
Not a comfortable mouthful for a night-time predator.
And after : back to sleep.
Definitely the last Blue Banded Bee for this year. I have been trying to provide enough for her to survive but I think the cold may get her in the end. I even have a white bowl out with a blue sponge in the middle of it soaked in sugar solution, like a giant flower, so she doesn’t have to fly far first thing on a cold morning to fuel up – haven’t seen her take it yet.
The shots were taken in the dead of a cold night with a reflector under her, so there was less shadow below. It was just a piece of paper attached to the lens by elastic, a bit clumsy really but it worked to a point. I bumped her with it and she protested by spreading her legs that way, as if to say ‘I’m a bigger mouthful than I first looked, and you could choke on my sharp pointy bits’.
They do that when disturbed at night, if it’s cold enough that they don’t fly off to the light, make themselves look bigger. Many creatures do it, cause themselves to appear bigger than they are, or an uncomfortable mouthful, until the threat is gone.
It’s a working strategy people also employ when feeling threatened. Nature … it’s our nature after all.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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The Three Hombres …
The Three Hombres … A post here wouldn’t be complete without pictures.
Some of the latest visitors to the garden, a trio of beetles on the pink Crucifix Orchid. They aren’t found anywhere else in the garden, that I can reach.
It just shows, there is a place and time for everything. In the garden, or the field, there are tides of things, living and dead, the coming and the going of the forms of life.
Within the tides there are eddies and currents, splashes and sprays. It’s a wonderful thing, not knowing what’s coming on the next wave.
Out of the mystery she flows …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click those pictures for a closer look
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What A Feast …
… the garden is. In more ways than one, I know.
To the senses a delight, of colour and form, scent and texture. Then just a little closer and …
… nature knows no pity, no sentimentality, just survival and reproduction. Only the fittest, the fastest, the craftiest endure.
And the wild formless intelligence behind it cannot be denied, while no thing, no body, lasts longer than its time.
I had a dream … that turned out to be a nightmare.
Now I don’t dream any more.
And the dream goes on.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Spring Time
Plants in the garden are reaching for the sky, and in every other direction. Small creatures are reaching for the plants, from every direction. And spring has only just begun.
Ride that falling leaf and see the earth … from one perspective anyway.
It’s time for the new.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Pretty On Pink
A Green Shield Bug flits from place to place around the garden. If it doesn’t find what it wants in one place off it goes to another. But what does a bug want? Food, shelter and a mate, what else …
It doesn’t know to want anything it doesn’t need. Could it possibly just enjoy the colour in the sunshine, playing in the garden. As many other garden dwellers can be seen or seem to do.
Is there any conscious self awareness in a bug, or is it an instinctive organic robot. Maybe a messenger of a greater intelligence, the earth perhaps.
And anything born has the potential of its mother, and more.
Let’s not dismiss the little things.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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And Now …
… for a little light entertainment from the wilds.
The simple elegance and beauty in the form and being of … a beetle.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on a picture for a closer look.
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A Shooting Star
Click the picture for a bigger version.
A crop of above, for the unbelievers … :-)
Was this Jewel Bug blessed by a shooting star, or was it the photographer or the reader of this, or was it the earth it passed over? Does it matter … all that perceive are affected, by the perceived and the perception, nothing stays the same after the cosmic touch. It matters …
In ancient days, when we were less rigidly rational and perhaps more intuitively romantic, we saw significance in small things. The flight of a bird, the twist of a gust of wind or a falling star. Everything has meaning if you can read it, and it helps to know what others have seen.
What it means is subjective, personal, a matter of context. Such things as shooting stars are universal and as old as the sky above our heads and their meaning has been intuited in various ways, divined in a mind as clear and magnificent as the night sky. Your mind …
So reading the universal is aided and coloured by the context of the reader. I looked up where in our culture the shooting star has occurred and the instance that spoke was this : ‘And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.’
Looking down, or up, within, see that ancient sky and all it contains now, as clear as mind can be. … are you a shooting star burning up with a flash of mystical purpose, or a rational meteorite.
Mystical purpose is a burning meteor, you wouldn’t know it to look at.
Cosmic symbolism in the ordinary life … nothing too serious.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Dragon Days
Still, in the heat of the day, overseeing its territory from rest, no less dangerous for that, to the other airborne creatures hereabouts – the vast canyons of bright empty space surrounded by deep wells of dark shadow.
To the Dragon I was invisible, a trick of being, not being anything a Dragon would fear. In the ever moving colour and form of the psyche everything is connected, and when ‘the time is right’ one thing knows another, inside.
The smaller the creature, the more distant the relationship, the less direct or immediate the connection. But the Dragon knew me, like Dragon knows Dragon, nothing to reflect on. Nothing to resist, no separation.
In being. In form it’s another matter, everything going its own way, clashing and thrashing, killing and dying, as some thing, Dragon or man.
The trick, or knack, is to slow down enough inside to slip into nowhere, as no-thing, at will, and still function some where, as some thing, outside.
A life’s work, for a man. Dragon does it naturally.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Nature's Place 
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