In the Morning …
I usually get up and do the usual things, usually. Then I go have a look in the garden, especially if the sun isn’t up yet. That’s when the most elusive creatures may be seen. But no guarantees, nature is still in charge.
I just know a thing or two about it, how it works. That most creatures need heat to function properly isn’t generally known, for instance. Though it should be obvious, isn’t the obvious often overlooked?
The garden is nearly ready for the coming heat and rain that brings the small creatures in their numbers. Daisy’s everywhere, and Sunflowers, and too many other plants to know or name.
As long as it provides that is fine. And it sure provides me with a simple pleasure, I trust it does the coming tribes in all their shapes and colours. Still, I have to keep an eye out for those that would eat it all.
It would be nice to have a hand in the garden, another who sees what I see and can partake. But living is perfect at 80 to 90% good. So it’s good the way it is. Still, who knows what is round the corner.
More living for sure, or the inevitable death. The gardener’s ultimate contribution to the earth? Anybody out there not notice the slow breakdown of the sense engine?
Another birth, more like. You just have to see the space in between.
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Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab – best in FireFox
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To Dream a Bee
Sorry, no bees today.
Yesterday while walking about the garden I saw this huge black and yellow bee, black bottom and furry yellow jacket, busy feeding at the still flowering Chia with its little blue flowers. The bee was the size of half my thumb, about 3.5cm long, and I later found out it is a Great Carpenter Bee.
It was the biggest bee I have seen and I didn’t have my camera with me, but she was moving too fast anyway. So I just watched as she flew from flower to flower and then away. It’s not yet spring here so this could be a good sign for the forms of life to come.
The weather is wonderful, bright, sunny and cool and plants are finding their place in the garden, before the spring starts up, to be ready for the hotter summer. I don’t decide where a plant goes, it tells me in no words at all.
It’s a form of communication you just have to be open to, after you’ve given up thinking reason is most important – it’s not, but has its place too.
So what I do is unpredictable, because life is unpredictable. Some would call me slow, I don’t mind, but I say ‘what’s the hurry’.
This afternoon I had to lie down for a while, to recuperate from recent exertions, and I had a dream. I saw a black bee swimming in the water – not an unusual sight throughout the year in the garden – and it was happy, a smiling bee.
Someone put a finger in to tickle it and it climbed out onto the hand and flew away. A wonderful little dream, to be a bee.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab – best in FireFox
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Winter Sun Flowers
And, of course, their visitors. From night and day, they come and go either way.
Beautiful yellow standing tall and shining brightly out for all to see, in our crisp winter sunlight. Any bug in sight of it will have to visit this notable feature of their landscape. A wonderful welcome to any hungry survivor, though few there be, sufficiently.
It has been cold and wet enough for mold or fungus to form on the lower leaves and stems of the few sunflowers I have growing and nature has provided a remedy in the form of a fungus beetle, a yellow and black Ladybug and larva.
There are a few other creatures that visit but the beetle has made a big impression on the fungus and the plants have stood taller since being tended so. They will live longer and healthier for it.
It’s just another one of those relationships that give the lie to the purely rational ‘It’s only what you see’. It is, but not only. There is a wonder and intelligence that I prefer to call love behind the function and intricacies of a nature that is our own. That’s what connects every thing, beneath the apparent discord.
I don’t mean that in any ‘religious’ way. It’s just the spiritual way it is. :)
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab – best in FireFox
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Nesting the Mask
Is that a sensible title? A little cryptic maybe, it does refer somewhat to the bee and its activity.
It’s called a masked bee, probably for the appearance of it with the bright yellow patches, about 15mm long. And she is nesting.
I first saw her a few days ago on the Passion Flower plant, busy blowing a bubble that looks like it contains pollen grains, got a few shots and she was away. Then I saw her at the rose that I had recently pruned, she was digging out the exposed pith at the centre of the stems. She made some impression on around ten stems and excavated a few extensively, deeply.
Then it rained and she disappeared, when it stopped she came back, a day or so later. Then it rained again and she was flooded out, she had been occupying one stem and had entered head first, from top down. I rigged a roof for her but it was too late, she was discouraged from the location it seems, as she hasn’t been back for a while now.
However, she reminded me to use the stems of the Chia plants that had run their course, grown tall, flowered, gone to seed and had more or less dried out standing in the garden. I cut them down, spreading the seed that remained, and cut them to lengths, bundled them and placed them around the garden.
They have openings at each end that very small creatures can use for shelter and nesting and when it warms up again, soon, I’ll see how that has worked. I will do the same with some wild bamboo I collected last year, for the larger creatures such as the native bees that visit the garden and sometimes find a nesting site, as one Leafcutter bee did in a rag left rolled up on the table.
This nature of ours takes what opportunity presents, according to its instinctive need, and moves on when it wears out, or is washed out. It’s all a matter of timing, but instinctual, without conscious calculation.
Nature has no use for a watch, though it helps to be able to read the weather – inside and out.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab – best viewed in FireFox, as I do.
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Daisy – Oh Dai-i-aisy!
I never before realised how abundantly the common, and not so common, daisy caters to the need for pollen and nectar of the many small flying creatures in the garden. Not until I got a few and took the time to see.
Now I have four different kinds in the garden, one really finding its feet after transplanting a little while ago spreads and hangs over the sides of the pot, another pops up around the garden at will – its,The Will, and two more recent residents – one just doesn’t stop flowering in a ball of colour and nourishment, the other just starting out has two budding threads reaching for the light, one just opened today.
It’s nearly time to find a spot in the ground for the ball of flowers; it needs a secure home that isn’t dependent on my daily attention. And the one reaching will need moving to a bigger pot, for now.
I do enjoy these simple pleasures.
The Bees and Flies, and other visitors, are never far from the flowers and with the sun shining more now I expect more visitors in the relative heat of the day. As long as it isn’t too cold at night.
The garden ebbs and flows, ripples and eddies as much as the tides, but you need to be in daily attendance to notice.
It is music to the senses. Take the time to listen, even play along. Move that one to the sun, a little water there, repot, replant, nourish and tend them as if they were children – as they are …
It’s a different kind of prayer.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab
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Passion Fruit …
Or the fruit of a passion?
A passion beyond understanding, but not beyond seeing, intimating – to get a sense of.
Can you see the passion, or love for the activity and intelligence it would take to create a little wonder such as this small yellow wasp?
It’s in and behind the fact, when the fiction of mind such as prejudice – pre-judgment – is left out. Not an easy thing to do.
No such thing as ‘just’ a bug, or ‘just’ anything else of our created nature. That would be a great injustice, to your own divine being.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab
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Lady of the Morning
With a clear night sky and moisture in the air she attracts the dewdrops of a morning. Not yet warm enough to evaporate, maybe not at all today.
She is a Potter Wasp, or a Mud Dauber, I am no expert on naming – waking up in the field of bees. The sense is enough for me, no need for interpretations to muddy the view.
She is a lovely shape and colours, and gentle as can be. She’ll sit in my hand but I don’t post the same picture twice so you’ll have to take my word for it, if you give her due respect she will return it handsomely.
That’s the simple pleasure of being with the wild things, too simple for the mind to slow up for. It’s really gotta be worked at, this stillness that lies at the bottom of the well. See it down there, when the shapes and colours pass on by, as you go to sleep?
It’s really that simple, when you don’t ‘fall’ asleep.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab
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Ant Queen …
… Warrior of her kind.
With such a world of beautiful earthly creatures at our feet it’s hard to see why we got caught up in the world of mind, except it is a seductive world of emotional excitation and identification with form. Thinking is habit forming, is addictive.
That’s the way it is. And only appropriate experience is going to change it for real – for real being for enough so it doesn’t have to be any more.
When you tend the garden for long enough you see the most extraordinary things – nothing to get excited about, because I don’t get excited. Lately I have noticed little heaps of light brown clay building up on the dark brown clay around the garden, only a couple inches high and the same wide with a hole in the middle.
They are made by these tiny ants that I hadn’t seen before in the garden and I wondered what they were about, why the excavations, it being so cold and wet. Then these few winged creatures started appearing on the passion fruit leaves.
When I got up close it became apparent they were ants, queen ants. Only the queen has wings, as far as I know, to get to another place to start another colony of ants. So they can get on with the business of looking after the land, what ants do in Oz.
They are tiny, about 12mm long and difficult to get enough in focus but one good one is enough. The digital age has given me the option of throwing away what doesn’t work, not that I throw anything away anyway but I don’t have to spend money I don’t have finding the good ones – is the point.
Photography was once the preserve of the well off, who could afford the money and time. How times change. Times change in such ways that what was once difficult is now easy, or easier for many more than once was. The same goes for everything, not least the art of knowing my self.
It’s not that this has become easier but that more can do it now. I suppose that means it is easier for many but there are still the few who break the ceiling, tear the envelope, crack the code, for those who follow.
Does it look like anything has really changed? Is human nature more compassionate or intelligent today than a thousand years ago? I don’t think so.
What has changed is the appearance of things in the world, material things; we have progressed from the spear to the bomb, from the hole in the ground to the fridge. And the flip side, the inside, is a paradoxical increase in real intelligence.
Not the intelligence of remembering and composing the bits, but the intelligence required to be still. Test it, you are intelligent – can do all sorts of things that are recognised to require intelligence.
Can you still the mind, stop thinking, long enough to see past it, long enough to know peace of mind? Or is that just not one of the actions of intelligence recognised?
I had a dream, now I think I’m going to have to write the book. :)
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab
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The End …
“… Is nigh! Repent your sins! Or else!” Read the sea of gently waving placards.
Or is it already too late and we are doomed to repeat what can’t be repeated, the unrepeatable?
* All Snapshots of this vicious beastie by our own fearless reporter, Mark Berkery, at great risk to life and limb. (Archives)
“Giant Snail sighted tearing up the New York Business district, and more are expected in the very near future. Scientists are saying this is a last ditch attempt by the Snail elite to reclaim territory lost in the last great Snail wars.” Intoned the newsreader in his ‘business as usual’ manner.
A spokesnail said in interview; “All we want is a little more lettuce and a bit less salt, is that too much to ask?”
“Bugger off, back to where you came from!” Retorted the spokesperson for the first global civilisation with a snigger, hand over mouth, and due lack of consideration for what s/he actually meant – or so it appeared.
And so negotiations broke down and hostilities broke out.
* Yum!
Anyway, I was going to write something on the end of our civilisation but I don’t think it necessary with all the well placed ‘doom and gloom’ being reported today, with some very astute – even esoteric – perceptions being articulated by a few. Most notably BL, who is also dead – to the hostilities.
And so I write about my world, which has little to no hostilities in it save that which arises of familiarity – the unwillingness, or reduced speed of consciousness unable to be present, be now – and misunderstanding or presumption, hearing what is not said – that beset the human psyche, which is only momentary to practiced negation.
Some insist that is another way of saying ‘stupid’, but that is a judgment and symptomatic of that reduced speed itself – not the truth, but it can’t be told.
Or, all is well as can be. And who could ask for more? Snails it seems, whingers and whiners all.
No, not true at all, mostly. It’s just my disposition to be contrary but I finally have to come out on the side of sanity. Sanity? What’s that?
Snails are gentle creatures, so slow and gracefully they move, never a harm for anything – even the lettuce loves Snails and Snail loves Death, fulfilling their lifelong purpose – to be returned to the Earth in ethereal form, to repeat or evolve according to the Will.
And so it is for every living thing, fundamentally – meaning some don’t realise it. But that’s ok, the sun shines, the rain falls, and all things turn in time – and return to the timeless that makes it all possible.
I have often seen it asked; “Would you change anything if you could go back?” And the usual answer is in the negative. And it is so. But I would also change everything, or more precisely; Negate the lot – with a capital N.
Do it all again? What for? No, do ‘it all’ anew. That’s the challenge.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture to enlarge in a new tab
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Nature's Place 
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