Lobelia Cafe …
Born to hunger, built for the job, he set out to find his fulfilment.
This way and that, hither and thither, finding only what falls to his nose.
Then out of the blue, a stairway did rise, a possible route to enlightenment.
Climbing around, there a dead end, the scent of the mystic as ever arose.
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Undeterred, by weak footing and treacherous winds, his life appeared a plod.
Now and again, breakthrough the tangle, the stairway would rise up once more.
The darkness would come, he tuckered down, waking to morning light as a god.
To start over his climb, refreshed by the nectar, a sighting of the far shore.
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Til one day it occurred, he saw the flaw, stopping him dead in his track.
The error it was, the far shore is not there, was time to cease reaching.
Twas enough of him spent, the way he was bent, a load off of his back
Supped he from the well, the darkness dispel, listen … no more preaching.
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© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
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Life In The Green
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Carrying a can of water down the bare earth path between the giant ferns at the corner of the house, leaves high on both sides, I sensed movement as a Praying Mantis came into view. I stopped to look, eye to eye, and offered a finger which she mounted and I carried her over to the other giant fern leaf.
She took a few strides into the dark green jungle before she swivelled her big eyed head back at me and said in her sharp clickity little voice “Thanks Mark.”
‘No problem’, said I. But no, I didn’t have my camera handy. It wasn’t one of those encounters. Was and wasn’t …
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This might have been one, or two, of her many babies that appeared a couple weeks ago on the deck.
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The flowers are coming along nicely, drinking a lot of water in their skyward stretch, a lot of leg work too – my legs. Hand watering a big-ish garden is a good way to get to know what’s going on in the greenery. Notably, not a lot – as I recall last year same time.
The Carpenter Bee is still coming and going, a few bees are visiting – but not to the hotels at all, lots of little green plant bugs, some flies and the occasional spider.
He must have dropped in fully grown – climbed a tall tree, probably saw my bright yellow patch that instinctively registered ‘food’ and cast a strand to the wind in search of direction to pastures new. He’s a beauty, gentle faced and quiet of nature, a flower or ambush spider – consummate predator.
They often take on the colouring of their surrounds, camouflage to better hunt the visiting insects, collectors of pollen and drinkers of nectar – good in evading other hunters too.
Morning is best time to catch a meal on a flower. An unlucky bee, early to the feast, lucky spider, and green bug snacks.
And just for the show …
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Pausing every now and again, just to sense what is the nature now. Blue sky, trees blowing in the wind, Galah’s ripping up the seed pods of the African Tulip, smell of the wet earth, colour, sound, form – a simple pleasure. Feeding the winged visitors at days end.
Doves, Indian Mynahs, the Butcherbird and Pied Magpie. All with young ones to feed and be taught to fend for themselves, take a bit of bread in the late afternoon. You can see the teaching going on, the way things are.
The only one I could get of him today. Others lost in a broken computer.
When the cat, Djinn, shows himself, what a commotion from the screeching Mynahs. He just sits unmoved, on the edge of stressed, so long as they can’t actually get at him.
In sense, instinctively …
© 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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To Laugh About …
With the rain and cold of this winter came the Kookaburra family to the garden, the male and female. Mates alone, with the young from last season gone to find their own place to live and die.
I suspect a shortage of food around these parts, suburbia, where people keep tidy gardens. It seems to be a rule of mind, with the occasional refreshing wildness.
These birds know where their bread is buttered, a plethora of small lizards to be found scuttling around my garden, plucked mid-stride. Gulped.
Every now and then a sudden raucous noise hits my ears, the distinctive ‘ HA HA HA, HO HO HO, HAHAHA’. Well, something like that.
They remind me of the practicality and diversity of nature, and to laugh – while they scan the ground for a morsel.
A proper laugh strategically applied can change the pattern or weight of a mind.
Does mind have weight, or is it the gravity of the past that tugs?
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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Long Night in the Undergrowth
A wholly unpredictable nature. Rain or shine, at least the season is reliably that. Mid winter now, just past the shortest day in Oz, and the rain has blessed the earth. Washing all the dryness down and into work with the living of the soil as the basis for the forms of spring to come. And the freshness can be invisibly sensed, just behind the appearance, inside. A clarity above, a functional chattering of other forms below.
The sun lights the morning yellow and clear calling ‘Good Morning’ as it rises above the rooftops. The green alights to the calling light ‘I’m here’, me too … ‘present’ good lord. It is the lord of the morning, when the storm is not, here whatever … A functional lord, of the solar system, solar lord. Having dominion, care for, the children in its influence – us, me and you at the beginning and end …
All we have to do is ‘the work’. To find and establish the only resting place, inside, to observe the wonder of the passing dancers – the other forms of me and you, the colours, the shapes and other senses of things that die, and don’t. It’s what passing is, a movement from visible to invisible and round again. The passed being something else, at the base of it all, you or I.
That’s the way of things here, a cycle of events in form that represent the inner life. A process of detachment through pain, or something more extraordinary – to me, that ends in … peace.
It’s the perception that matters, is realised and actualised, here … it’s a long night in the undergrowth, everybody sees.
Good morning sun … good morning bee.
© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …
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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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Nature's Place 
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