Jumper …
So named for their ability to leap a good distance with some accuracy these spiders are the cuddly arachnids. They display a curiosity and fearlessness I would only expect to find in a pet or otherwise domesticated creature.
This one, a male with his punk hair-do, was on the door handle and I caught him just as he fell as I touched it. So I put him on a flower where he sat, maybe to catch something to eat …
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If pix or text don’t appear as normal that’s because I am using a different computer and having to improvise on what software I use on elements. It’s a different screen too, so can’t tell if pix look what I am used to.
My computer crashed and I haven’t been able to get it fixed, it may just be dead and gone. I should be able to recover files eventually but I’m not in any hurry, as long as there are bugs in the garden to photograph.
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Sometimes it’s a ‘blessing in disguise’ to lose what has grown over a period of years, a form of surgery. An opportunity to start again, at least to keep it simpler.
If I learn anything by experience it’s that, complicated fills the space reserved for peace – of mind.
And we do according to our … capacity or willingness to see through the imagery.
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Advertising …
Everything’s an ad, symbolises or points to something else. Can’t get away from it, in relationship – existence.
This spider was waving to another spider across the way, part of the mating ritual I believe – having seen other spiders do similar that was obviously ritual.
Some are very demonstrative, colourful, eager. Others wary, reticent, indifferent. People can be emotional too, carrying the weight of particular past, as we tend to.
No matter, we do our best to transcend the robotic and all’s equal in the end. The end being the absence of all that existential commotion.
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Gardening …
… in the mind too.
Spring time and all the forms of nature are on the rise. These flies, Doli for short, emerged around one particular plant and I got some shots in the early morning. Have tried getting some shots of the adults but they are flash sensitive and are gone on the pre-flash. It’s rare they stay for a shot.
Occasionally it occurs to me how I started doing macro. After I got a camera and was spending time in nature it became obvious my attraction was to the small creatures at my feet rather than big creatures over there or broad landscapes.
The nearer the better it seems soon took my energies and it was 2 or 3 years of application before I was really any good. It was a process of elimination, of what didn’t work, to reveal what works.
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Someone started me on it, photography. I don’t remember exactly how but do remember C had some influence. He was a friend in his way. I say ‘his’ way since he was a friend and then one day he just stopped communicating.
Don’t know what happened but I am grateful for the small things. From seed big trees grow, and die.
All the best C old friend, wherever thee may be.
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Little Heart, Big Hearted …
Mother Carpenter Bee making the nest early 2013 – a rare appearance as she tossed debris
Male Carpenter Bee feeding on nearby flowers
The best I could get – he’s big and fast – I was lucky
It’s a male Carpenter Bee, I think. It has been occupying the nest excavated in 2013 by the female/mother – I believe – Carpenter Bee. The nest is in a two inch thick stick I had to secure to a metal rod after it rotted in the ground – soft wood.
Then I built the no-till garden beds and recently, a week or so ago, sowed some seed that needed shade from the hot sun, and the shade got in the bees way of returning home – that I noticed one day, having already missed it.
So I remedied the situation, I thought, only to find something else had acted to block the nest for a short while. And no bee to be seen for days now. I wonder if it has another nest somewhere …
I doubt its little heart could survive the rigours of homelessness for long, not like people do. People, it seems, can adapt to almost anything … almost.
We can usually retreat, recover and renew – if the situation allows.
*And just after posting this he returned to the nest.
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Sense and Sensation
The local stingless bees are well fed the mornings here. Salad plants, started as seedlings meant to be eaten, gone to seed and now 4 foot tall with white and yellow flowers are their source of nourishment, for now – with much to come if seed cast and sown is viable, with some already visible.
They are gone by early afternoon, back to do hive work. Lots of coming and going in the garden, not a lot for me to shoot though – too small or fast.
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The pure sensation, a simple tingling inside once you get down to it. A sense upon which the mind is ever trying to create ‘something’, as thought and emotion. The exercise is to resist the pull of the mind to think by focusing on the sensation.
And this occurs in space, the sense of it inside. The more it’s done, the greater the realisation. It takes time, and there is no failure – just the endeavour.
It really is that simple … and a couple more things. :-)
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Gone …
… I was thinking last week I would offer to teach meditation once more and then, out of the blue, one lady who had been before rang to ask if she could come along, saying she saw my current ad in the local paper.
Thing is I don’t have a current ad, or didn’t when she rang. So I took the cue and will start teaching next week – if anyone wants to come along …
All are welcome, especially any who already recognise the need for peace of mind.
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Meditation is the beginning of the end of the mind as a problem. It naturally leads to the practise of being and both are done alone.
There is another realisation of space and sensation that can be called love that is done in partnership.
A rare event … one foot in front of the other.
© Mark Berkery … Click on any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Disguised
Tending to the compost bin recently I noticed what looked like a bee come to investigate. It looked and flew like a bee in that its path was cautious, slow and deliberate as it entered the open drum and made its way around inside.
When it stopped on the plastic rim of the entrance I got a few shots and it became apparent it was a fly, by the eyes and other parts, to me.
A bee mimicking fly, must afford it some advantage. Difficult to see past the disguise in motion.
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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The Dead of …
Male and Female Lynx spiders
… winter, if that it be.
Sun shines so much I don’t know you see.
But the absence of little ones is telling to me.
Time spent in the garden used mostly to pee.
So no pix to post on this dark wintry night.
Crows only about that do take to flight.
Maybe a pic from the past is aright.
One from a world that can afright.
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Time ebbs and flows, form comes and goes, how hard it sticks depends on a coupla tricks.
Tricks as in feeling for the bottom to clear out the mud, looking not thinking that settles the water, reaching with seeing to the emptiness above and beyond. Where there’s nothing to take or to give. Til the nothing I am in all things is all there is left, until …
Time ebbs and flows, form comes and goes …
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© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Night Fly
Not much to report from the wilds, in fact the garden has the feel of stasis due to the recent cold. But there’s never really nothing, is there … So I do the rounds of the various nooks and crannies and what do I find but one of the great survivors, the garden fly.
This one, and a couple others, was making his bed in the flowers, literally. At sundown I would find it down on the flower’s centre while the petals would close up around it, to keep the cold and wind off. Not an unintelligent action at all.
In fact it isn’t hard to see the intelligence in any part of nature, the power animating and giving function to the form so that all the parts fit together to make the whole, of nature. It only requires the surrender of prejudice, thought.
Nature, what we are in existence, is represented by the planet and all its parts, the night sky full of stars too, and looks like it never ends, ‘out there’.
Intelligence, what we are before nature, ‘inside’, that gives rise to the appearance things are, can only be a mystery, to a fly resting on a flower.
Being, the silence upon which it is all drawn, endless and endlessly.
What is endless upon which nothing is written?
I’ll have the endless please …
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Nature's Place 
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