Welcome To My Nature
Blue and Red, Black and White …
… Male and Female. The opposite poles of existence. The primary duality that predicates the multiplicity that spawns complication by a process of identification driven by the fundamental insecurity of emotional being – the first addiction or false identity that comes to be known as pain, impelling the search for truth or resolution – what doesn’t change or divide – One. The circle of being, unending.
Sense, no more wanting, door to the beginning and end, unifies the separateness of things in existence, completely resolving the psychological by right focus and necessary action. Behind it nothing doesn’t change, ever. Sweet peace of mind.
But don’t believe me, have a look and see for yourself …
… inside.
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I am told the blue is male and red female and I accept that for now, but it doesn’t really matter – to me, I am not a Harlequin Bug – depends on who ‘I’ am though, doesn’t it, since the ‘I’ of Intelligence is in all things.
What matters is the beauty, a quality of the deep psyche the bug is reflective of. Yes, even a bug is born of beauty sublime, why not? It also matters the form is as it is, wonderfully balanced and coloured while designed for survival in their world – not by anything known. Beauty rendered in sense as form and colour with function. Perfection.
They love the juice of the wild Hibiscus tree and breed and live their lives out on and around one in particular, that I know. I did a post on them – Hibiscus Harlequin bug – last year so I know a little about them. It’s good to see they are back again.
I saw just one female laying eggs on the tree a while back, about five weeks or so, and it is now populated by adults. So are there populations on surrounding trees, between them enough to generate the new season’s beauties. And on , and on, and ….
Wild and wonderful Hibiscus Harlequin Bug.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Macro Day Six
It was a hot day today and after the rains there are few creatures about. At least you have to know where to find what is there, experience gives you that. I didn’t take many shots myself since I spent most of the time setting things up for the others because the little ones were not being very cooperative.
But never mind, we got some shots and I have more from earlier in the week that I’ll post later.
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Human nature is combative, no surprise there since it comes through the instinctive species. Thing is though, the ‘species’ only do it when necessary for survival, reproduction rights or/and dominance of the herd.
Oops! That’s when people do it too, though often unnecessarily. But we don’t have to be ‘controlled’ by instinct anymore, do we?
Well, we do our best.
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When nature presents something unusual or spectacular it usually means something and can readily be connected to a recent ‘event’. Nature is after all a reflection, to the degree the observer is grounded in sense.
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Plenty of Grasshoppers and Clown spiders about in places.
The occasional Assassin Bug with prey – a caterpillar here, nearly sucked dry.
Mating Weevils in the forest.
And a Hibiscus Harlequin Bug, little beauty.
From today what recurs to me is ‘relax’, and be alert, by a focus of attention where it is necessary to do so. First by calming the body by ensuring enough oxygen through breath control, second by dropping the tension in the body, and third by taking control of what you give your attention to – sense. It’s simple.
And that is probably the most important exercise. Don’t forget to relax, by doing it when reminded.
What you attend to grows.
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If you or anyone you know is genuinely interested in coming along for hands on experience of what and how I do what I do check these links : Macro Meditation Day, Macro Illustrated and Meditate, and email me at contact (at) beingmark (dot) com so you are on the list for mailouts. Put Macro Meditation Day in the subject line of any email.
Everything of relevance to my Macro Meditation work goes into my blog so if you are interested in what I do and want to keep up I recommend you subscribe via email. Go to top right of this page, there’s a button that reads – Click Here – for subscription. Type in your email and click. You’ll be sent an email with a link to verify the subscription, just click it.
All the best.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Cicada Ladies and Nights
She must have just dug herself from the earth and climbed the rough barked cutting I left against the Hibiscus. As I came along she was getting comfortable, locking onto a leaf. Looking closer I could see she was about to emerge from her old shell of an earth dweller, hard, smooth and bristly with big front digging ‘arms’, to become an air dweller.
Then she started pulsing and I knew a birth that I hadn’t seen before was imminent, so I got the camera.
I sometimes go into the garden at night with a small torch, nothing fancy, to see some nocturnal stuff.
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The house where I live is probably one of the original Queenslanders in this area, judging by the condition of some of the wood. And the garden has remnants of the coastal wetland forest it once was. I find all kinds of bugs around the house I would normally expect to find in the nearby forest, reminders of another time.
There are many small Cicadas coming out of the garden at night but this was a big one, about three inches long from nose to wing tips, and it’s rare to catch an emergence like this – for me. I was in position for a few shots and I didn’t want to disturb her and once the process began it didn’t last long, about fifteen minutes before her wings were filled and she was changing colour from the creamy white of a new born.
She climbed slowly out of the old form, filling the new as she went.
The will, a singular focus, unhurried intent.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Macro Day Five
One more quiet relaxing day doing a bit of Meditation Macro was had by two, myself and Robert – who might post some of his pix later. The after effects of the floods and other things still keep some from making it.
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It was a lovely day, not too hot, some cloud and no rain. We started it in the shade of the house surrounded by some living nature, with a simple and effective breathing technique to put the body at ease. Then a method of relaxation that helps dissolve tension of the mind. And a practical nuts and bolts form of meditation that helps consolidate the above and develops clarity of mind – more really an uncluttering of mind – by taking control of what we focus our attention on.
What to say about this day? There was a shine to it, inside. A clarity that allows the natural simple intelligence to shine through. It’s a simple practise to learn to do it.
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If anyone is interested in coming along for hands on experience of what and how I do what I do check these links : Macro Meditation Day, Macro Illustrated and Meditate, and email me at contact (at) beingmark (dot) com so you are on the list for mailouts.
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And a few pix from the day.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Mystic Nomad
Nomadic by nature, doesn’t mean they have no home. Any place is home to a nomad as long as their need is filled. And in the filling of their need Nature’s need is filled, they are not separate.
One need fits to another the way a tree does to the Earth, as all things fit to some thing at some time.
There is an out-of-the-way place where these little beauties go to sleep at night. I am the only one I know of that goes there and I can’t see that changing. It’s a small clearing in the middle of a field at the edge of a forest and off the beaten track. It is a special place for these beautiful creatures.
Towards the end of their day they fly in and circle their favoured roosting site, a dried out grass stem in this case. They land at the top of the stem, as far from the ground as possible and grip it in their jaws as they settle in for the night, face to the ground – usually, but there’s always the odd one.
Face down, probably because that is the direction danger would most likely come from while they sleep, it’s a defensible position and can easily be abandoned if necessary. It just makes sense to have your array of detection senses, antennae, eyes, mouth and feet facing any danger.
I often watch them at dusk as they jostle for position on the twig, seeming to prefer to join up from above, makes sense as they fly in from above. When one does there is a pushing and shoving with legs and jaws, from the front and back, but no violence, as positions are adjusted to fit the newcomer.
At times dislodging one or another so it flies off the twig and comes in from behind again and the process begins over until there’s not enough light and they have settled positions for the duration of the dark hours, it takes a little time to get to sleep time.
It looks comical and sweet at the same time, innocent, and makes me smile, what a wonderful nature we have.
They are not unlike children in their innocence, and how they might sleepily jostle for space in a bed they share.
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It’s a popular place for the little creatures, with native bees and wasps of different kinds making a home of it, a safe harbour to rest at night. Care must be taken not to blunder into a wasp nest or disturb the roosting bees, don’t want to get stung or intrude. I approach the bees slowly, careful not to strike their perch or loom threateningly over them.
It’s not a hunt, it’s a prayer.
There are times when it seems my presence at a metre or so is enough to disturb them, and times when they seem fast asleep while the sun is still up and I can shoot away to my hearts content.
They live their little lives noticed by few but their own sweet selves, but are well accounted for in the tapestry of nature. Little weavers of life that they are.
Their big green eyes and long white furry manes, specks of pollen showing where they’ve been. A tale yet to be told.
Without them we would surely be less.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Macro Day Four
At the peak of the Brisbane river floods, safe in the S.E. corner, we went for a walk in the nature and found a few creatures to photograph.
Just myself and Andy, a few couldn’t make it due to the floods. Weren’t we lucky, when so much of Queensland went under water and some died we were virtually unaffected.
And a pleasure it was to have Andy along. I enjoyed it.
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Andy did well judging by his thread on the Macro Meditation Day.
Today’s lesson? Always be prepared, so you won’t be taken by surprise by the details. RTFM. ((:
Well done Andy.
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If anyone is interested in coming along for hands on experience of what and how I do what I do check these links : Macro Meditation Day, Macro Illustrated and Meditate, and email me at contact (at) beingmark (dot) com so you are on the list.
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After relaxing and a short meditation to slow down inside we went to the local bush. Here’s a few of mine from the day. And maybe a few more later.
Crab Spider with Cricket prey.
Burp!
What next?
Sandpaper Fig Beetles mating.
Clown Spider.
Potato/Ladybug
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Dangerous Liaison
It’s a jungle after all. One hungry creature attacks another and someone comes off the worse, usually dead, but maimed is probably common too – having seen so many of our tiny creatures missing limbs or bearing wounds.
You might think; ‘Oh! Poor Sweet Little Bee. Beastly Assassin Bug.’ I might. And bees are sweet things – maybe something to do with their pollinating and honey making, especially the Australian native bees – since this is where I am.
But Assassins aren’t beastly, just designed differently to fit a particular niche in the living pattern of things, or the pattern of living things. Truly, each piece of the pattern is a wonder unto itself.
The fact is that’s Nature, everything that is has its place in it. It can’t be denied. And to take sides is absurd, or is it?
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Well, Nature gets on fine without our interference so it’s hard to put a case for interfering. In fact where we interfere we invariably make more problems in trying to fix the one we focus on, but that’s probably because the ‘problem’ we try to fix isn’t a problem at all, just an inconvenient – to us – fact. And when you try to change facts that don’t need changing in a world of effects a ripple of predictable consequences is what you get, but unknown outcomes.
The trouble is we personalise Nature and so make of it the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ when there is only the fact, no good or bad at all. This notional existence of good and bad is self-divisive, the high and low of emotional consideration, the ‘I like’ and ‘I don’t like’, the source of much personal misery and ill health, and is ultimately unsustainable.
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How to depersonalize then? When you’ve had enough – ever tried giving up something you love before you’ve had enough, just leave the good and bad out of it and see the fact. And that’s the end of ‘problems’.
It does mean no more judgment of the fact, no more unnecessary thinking.
Simple really, when you’ve had enough … ((:
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Green Adventurer
Is there such a thing as a lonesome Cricket?
I don’t think so. Where there’s one there’s a lot, usually. And besides, Crickets don’t get lonely, naturally. If one was to be experimented upon it might be ‘discovered’ what is being sought, but we don’t go to such unnecessary and neurotic extremes. Unnecessary to the simple beautiful sense of things.
In this field of long grass and other plants, weeds to some, were all this Crickets relatives, uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters – maybe even their dads and mums. Big and small, and every size in between. Light and dark and various colour schemes, they were also all very different from each other. Just like us, in a way, the same but not.
Hopping from stem to leaf and ground and back again, it didn’t take much to disturb them in the sunlight or shadows of green. They weren’t used to people at all. A scramble to get out of the way of the big shadowy giant, me. I gave them a little time to see me and know no danger from me and so they did settle down and I could get a few shots.
Doesn’t mean they didn’t still hop around, since hopping, and eating, is what they do. To eat they hop, makes sense, to me. To hop they eat. With each hop a new discovery. I’ve seen they don’t very often know where they are going to land, so each hop is a voyage in the unknown, unknowable being, and unanticipatable circumstances – except that everything is changeable.
They also get to meet each other, and who knows how who meets who, a mystery. Chance? What’s that but inscrutable design, natural attraction of need to its fulfillment and round again. Since two have to meet to mate and make more Crickets for the next season of long grass, a wonder too. A hop and jump needed here, to make a future out of now. Being now it’s what comes, now. A little magic to the brew.
Each Cricket an adventurer, an adventure in living, the possibilities uncontained, except by form and circumstance made of yesterdays. Cricket is Cricket after all.
And one may show an unusual character, a little different in that he’s not showing anything – normal – at all.
See you later Cricket, me ole mate. ((:
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
A Guest in the House
I can’t remember what I was doing now, but I looked up at something moving in the corner of my eye and, sensing me, it stopped dead in its tracks. A little Gecko had come in from the unceasing rainfall and was making his way across my ceiling. Love the way they can walk upside down on the ceiling, with that waggling gait.
A small fellow, about the same size as the one in The Kill. This one had a different outcome though, in the short term anyway, that I know of.
I thought this little fellow would get lost and die in my place, with nothing or very little to eat, so I trapped him. I got a glass mixing bowl from the kitchen and just placed it on the Gecko on the ceiling, careful not to pinch him between the hard glass rim and the flat plasterboard. I then slipped a piece of cardboard between the bowls rim and the ceiling until he jumped down into the glass and I had him.
Then I brought him outside and let him go on a table I use for shots of creatures from around the house that allow me. He dashed this way and that but wasn’t frightened of me when I put a hand out to keep him from running away. And I was delighted he hung around for a little while, with that little encouragement from me.
Of course he was wary of me, a strange giant to his little eye. But after a while he came to sit on my finger once and allowed me to touch him before he darted away.
What a long tongue he’s got. And a lovely golden colour. Little beauty, to me.
Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Nature's Place 
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