Bee On My Finger
When I get up, usually sometime in the morning, I have in mind to take a look around the garden. Not only because gardens require some tending, more that the sense of nature is soothing to the psyche and when put first, the sense, it has the effect of diminishing the mentality, the thinking and emotionality engendered by modern living.
It’s a good way to start the day. It helps resolve any lingering dream. And when I have been quiet enough for long enough I can come to things, inside, that nag at me to do something about it – whatever it is. It is tempting to gloss over what hasn’t been resolved, comfortable even, but that is not the way to peace of mind. It’s got to be about peace of mind first …
***
On the way around I check the water buckets, where I let it sit to evaporate off the chlorine. I check for trapped or drowning creatures that don’t need to be so, and amongst the others there was a honey bee on its last legs. I lifted it out by putting my finger under it and raising it out of the water, as I do with them all, and I could see by some small movement it was still alive.
It had been raining for days, and cold, so I left it on my finger to warm up and dry out. It didn’t seem to be in any hurry so I got the camera and performed a few contortions to get a few shots. Eventually it woke enough and I put it down in a sheltered spot to gather its strength, fed it a little sugar water and next morning it was gone – back home or back to the hive, who knows. But not yet time to die.
***
Did it succumb overnight to a creeping cold malaise or return to its vital instinctive self, given enough life left in it to do so. You just never know, and that state of not knowing is one of the beauties of truth. Because truth, or love – that beautiful state of bee-ing, is beyond the knowing mind.
Nature can be reflective … of the low and the high.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
*
Residents of a Certain Nature
The garden is ripe with flowers for the visitors to feed on and some are taking up residence, as if it might be a place to fulfill their instinctive little lives, to do all the seemingly insignificant things they do, and reproduce.
That seems to be the fundament of existence, reproduction. Every thing and body does it one way or another, from the repetition of a single thought form, through the species, to the rotation of the planet around the sun, the sun around the galaxy. Everything that grows does so on a preceding cycle of events, from the small to the large.
The thing is we have to be more intelligent than merely instinctive, significant and intelligent as that is. We need to be able to step, by an act of cognition, out of the machine of repeating parts. Cause, if you look around you, we can’t go on reproducing – thought, emotion and things or bodies – in a finite world. Not if we want to enjoy peace of mind.
Peace of mind, from mind, such a simple though elusive state of being. It’s easy enough to make a start, when enough inner conflict has been experienced. It’s another thing to realise it and keep it real.
That’s all that really matters to me, and it’s done in all the ordinary ways of living a life – each a unique expression, then meditation – to start with.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
*
Golden Eye
Walking in the nearby woods recently I saw a fly that wasn’t inclined to take off. I don’t know why, maybe age or injury, but anything is possible within the gamut of experience.
I took some time to get a few shots while the fly moved this way and that, sometimes sitting still long enough for me to take my time, sometimes not.
You never know when your number is up until it’s already called, though you can sense it coming, the signs are unmistakeable.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
*
Be – Jewelled
I’ll add the rest of this series so they are on site for future posting.
***
As I daily pass along the garden’s various coloured inhabitants I often notice the visitors. They can stand out and are sometimes camouflaged. It’s only when I get down to them do I really see what it is – another wonder of the earth.
It was late afternoon and this was the only one of its kind about so I took a chance and picked the leaf it was on and brought it to some more interesting background/s, to show it off – as it should be in these times of ignorance, of our beautiful nature.
The ‘trick’ to seeing the beauty of our nature is to spend time in and about it. That way its true nature grows inside while the other stuff dies off, fades away. It’s a matter of value, whether simple beauty or mental emotional activity is attended – because one is surely not the other, and two things can’t occupy the same space.
A jewel lingering in the minds eye, or repetitive mundane intellectual activity. It’s a choice, when it is.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
*
A Hunting We Will Go …
With the spiders having lasted the winter so well they are now set up in the garden to reap an early explosion of tiny life – the small forms upon which the bigger are built.
That’s the way it is here, everything feeds off something else, so everybody dies – imagine if they didn’t … And life goes on, in another form, endlessly – our infinitude.
At present the warmed morning air is filled with miniscule flying creatures and the webs are everywhere, apparently strategically set up to make the most of it.
I am often tempted to interfere and rescue a bee, though rarely see one caught, or destroy a web if it gets too big – but I don’t. Everything needs its time.
Time to move on, always moving on … in the endless work of learning to fly.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
*
A Little Sunshine
No matter how dark the clouds or hard it rains the sun always comes out, in time …
This little bee made it to the next act in the play of its life, to fly and eat and do what bees do untroubled in my garden.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
*
In Limbo …
… the bugs, that is. The sun is shining, the climate is mild and getting warmer, the garden is in flower and still all I find is spiders. Nothing wrong with spiders, but they are not bees.
So I dug one up, out of the bowels of the computer. One I haven’t posted before, from a time I had a good session of shooting – because I was present to do so and nature presented, the two are not exclusive.
It’s the same bee as this one – https://beingmark.com/2013/06/15/bee-odyssey/ – that had moved about in the heat of the sun and stranded where it landed if the sun went in or shadow overtook it. That’s what happens when cold, they stop.
Much like us if we were subject to the same relative conditions, except the bees never complain or blame, never feel hopeless nor despair. It’s their nature, instinctively bearing all that comes their way, not a thought for why but just to get on with what they do.
It’s their intelligence, their being a bee, in its perfect place …
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
*
They come, They go …
Over the year the visitors to the garden vary according to the season, the weather, heat, rain, food, shelter, breeding cycle and probably other conditions we can’t know or measure – we don’t know it all, that’s for sure.
So I spend time in the garden tending the plants – which is its own practical value for peace of mind – and often I will come across a little wonder of nature, our nature. These are just a few.
And it only happens because I am present to see – and can still get back up off the ground where I usually shoot them, everything else is imagination.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
*
Spider Me Blue
Or what colour suits you, catch one or two … It’s not so difficult, ladies and gentlemen, elegant too. They sit in their web and nothing disturbs them except by accident, the spider’s boon.
Watching one floating in the sunshine as the breeze caused it to breathe, in and out, into it flew a fly, of some sort. Straight onto it she was, from a standing start in the cold air to the centre of the web and something to eat – gone.
Fingers on every thread that matters, she knows her way, her home. She knows her stuff, her job, and don’t go falling into her tricksy web or walk into her on a flower or you’ll never get out. She is made for catching things, gripped in her thorny embrace, bit by long fangs a-dripping.
Paralysed, liquefied and drank all in. Nothing but a husk to show where you’d been. That’s her way, to waste not of the bounty that fills her, makes her grow and mate to fill her need for little ones – instinctively you could say, intelligently nevertheless. That’s our nature, my nature, like it or not, come what may.
Mark Berkery ……. Don’t forget to CLICK on any picture to enlarge it in a new tab – best in FireFox – for me
*
Nature's Place 
51 comments