Portraiture
… to portray – the art of rendering ‘some-thing’ in the best possible light, according to accepted practice, by intuition – an untethered understanding reached through experience by letting go the already known – sifting gold from muck. Photography is just one medium for such expression, writing is another, gardening no less so.
Everybody is an artist, has something they excel at, if they have been lucky enough to find or been guided to it in these dense materialistic times. Some are more ‘artistic’ than others, doesn’t deny anybody’s art. Anyone who hasn’t found it is holding on to some mental construct of what they are.
The image is unreal, any image, only a representation of the thing, any thing. And representations change, being of things that die. Thing is to see the fact and go with the reality of change rather than hold to the known, old and worn. A representation is always of something passed, or past.
One such representation, bordering on the solution to finding the lost art, is to stand on a diving board in the dark of night with the intention of jumping in the water. Feel the fear? There are others, more fitting to some than many.
The simple solution is inside, looking past the sensation that is the basis for meditation, to no-thing – that has no image. It’s no big deal, it is where is after dreaming stops, from awake to asleep – a place inside.
Trick is to not ‘fall’ asleep, but go to sleep, looking to see. Just never mind the imagery on the way.
Or enjoy it but don’t hold on to what passes, as everything does.
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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A Sleepy Dragon
It’s all … a gift, or a curse, depends on how you look at it. But the fact is whatever it is today is gone tomorrow, so there’s no point fretting it – whatever ‘it’ is. Making it less a curse, or a gift, and more simply what it is.
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I know, easy to say. But it can also be ‘done’ if done enough. Letting go is the key, not holding on to what’s inside – though it may appear outside – by thinking too much or getting emotional about ‘it’. Whatever it is.
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This sleepy dragon doesn’t give a … Lying there, resting in the hot afternoon sun, takes no notice of me – as long as I am careful, considerate of its sensibilities, discernible as what my own would be if …
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… I were a dragon.
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© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Meditation …
Above is a native Australian Leafcutter Bee, I believe, getting ready to sleep in a local field of grass. They have a sting but never used it on me, really gentle creatures.
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Rarely do I write a post directly on this subject, meditation, but today I begin teaching once more, having taught a number of times before in different places. There has been a good response to the only ad I put out, a free one in the community column of my local weekly paper The Bayside Bulletin, which covers a large area of the SE of Brisbane.
I am grateful for that service as it allows me to gauge the local need for meditation without a significant, to me, cash outlay. Part of the arrangement is that I don’t charge for the meditation instruction, which suits me fine as I prefer to keep money out of the process as much as possible and my costs are reduced to a few phone calls and a bit of ink and paper.
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The key to the meditation I teach is to ‘recognise the need to slow down and relax the mind from the stress of negative thinking and emotion.’ It is the only prerequisite to learning this form of meditation really. Without it there is no ‘real’ need and it would be too simple and so boring to the mind that’s looking for another form of excitement or entertainment.
This is the very practical work of stilling the mind so living can be enjoyed in its simplest form, the senses. It is practical because it works. It works by the practise of some simple exercises that enable the transit from mental emotion living, or being, to being in sense – as the sensation inside where it is always a pleasure, and the senses that reveal the wonder of the earth. Anybody who is willing can do this.
Sensation is best described as grains of sand in space, inner space, seperate and immersed. It’s the actual feeling and not the image the mind would make. There is space between each grain and space in and behind. Look into it until there is nothing else but that.
Or it could be dots of light in the darkness inside, appearing and disappearing in inner space. A pressure, a pulsing, whatever it is for you is what you focus on – the actuality. The mental image is not the actuality.
Space, inside and ‘out’ – everything occurs in space, see it, sense it, allow it to be. Everything else passes.
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There is a distinction between the earth and the world. Earth is magnificent, where we can see the wonder of the stars at night and the beauty and magnificence of the flowers and insects of the garden by day, the clouds as they pass on by and the rain or sun on our skin, all forms of sense. Sense is simple, there’s no problem in it, it’s a pleasure that everyone experiences at some time, especially when young. The simple pleasure of sense only becomes eclipsed in time by the emotion generated by experience when the truth of the matter is not known or understood. This emotion, and the thinking it generates, which begets more emotion, accumulates until it is enough of a problem to do something about it.
Mind is where all problems originate, mind as rampant or unbidden thinking and emotion. Mind as seemingly endless associative thinking that stirs emotion which generates more thinking in an ever worsening spiral of negativity until it just can’t be tolerated any more. That’s when a solution ‘must’ be found and the realisation may occur; my mind is the problem, it’s not ‘out there’ at all – and nobody else can fix it but the one realising it.
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When this meditation is practised properly for long enough the transit from the occupation with complicated mind to the simplicity of sense is effected and living, what was once a pain, becomes a pleasure, or a love – and what other purpose is there to it ‘all’ …
That’s the beauty of it, once the solution is known nobody can take it away. It also eventually dawns; ‘I’ am responsible for my life – I do it or I don’t do it.
The way of stillness or ‘no-thing’ is difficult at times, and invariably rewarding.
© Mark Berkery … CLICK a link for more – Meditation – The Idea – Nature’s Place
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Storm Crew
The long dry spring come summer ended with a massive thunderstorm, fittingly – the dry spell to, well, dry out, and the rain to impel the life-forms to rise up anew.
I was outside in the field when I saw the storm coming, darkening the sky until I was in between the afternoon light on my right and night-time dark on my left where all the street and car lights had come on of necessity – a thin line.
The sky was black grey and it started to rain as I got home, pouring down soon enough. The lightning would flash and the thunder did follow, the time it took between them indicating the distance to the centre. In a short time the lightning flash was followed immediately by a thundering clap of the air – attention.
Right outside my window, the surrounding storm electrifying; it’s coming an exclamation, it’s passing a sign of the new to come. And as it passed I stood out in the rain, the pleasure of the clean cold water washing away the dusty days. In the few days since there has been cloud and rain and damp so some bees, and others, have come into sense once more, heralds of the new year – angels of a kind.
Magical brew … and just as I finished the necessary work in the garden.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
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For the Life of Me …
We’ve had some rain recently and no shortage of sunshine, but today was a remarkable day for the creatures of the garden. The first visitor was a bronze lizard, about 4” long, which came into view as I was sitting at the computer, zipping along the floor. The second was a Snowy Egret, a tall slim elegant bird that landed in the garden looking for a meal, keeping an eye on me as it strutted around.
The third was a Blue Banded Bee that, while I was watering some plants, came and hovered in the spray from the hose – made me smile that. And the fourth was a Water Dragon that appeared from beneath a pile of broken branches from a tree and sat there while I sprayed it, elevating its rear body while dropping its head to catch the water that flowed down towards its mouth.
They all have two things in common. They appeared in (my perception) the house or garden and I didn’t get a picture of any of them – this time. I let the little lizard wander about the house, no point in trying to catch it – probably do it damage. When the Dragon had enough it climbed into the pile below the trees and disappeared, for now.
The bee, along with all its flying kind, buzzes around the garden supping from the many flowers and when I went to look where the Egret was investigating I found what I had thought might be the case. Death, what else …
The leopard beetle I saw tucking into the flowers heart yesterday was gone. I found a piece of its carapace on one of the sunflowers broad leaves. No doubt the Egret will be back, along with the rest.
It’s a pleasure watching the garden grow, the life that comes and goes.
Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab, they do look better bigger – FireFox – for me
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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 …
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Nature's Place 
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