She …
She lies in wait, unmoving … threads on the blue to tell and trap or trip.
Capture … seen first from below, or upside down.
From above … after a little manipulation, careful not to alarm her.
A bountiful day … for the spider queen.
The discarded husk, falls from the blue, form without much life, emptied of nourishment.
… waits by the flower for her love, a need of food to sustain her, in this time of reproduction, instinctively – without self-conscious calculation.
The blue flower embroidered with her silk, the better to do her job of capture and eat, to feed the young, potential in her.
Red Nasturtium papers the walls of her minds eye, bees and flies the action in her unoccupied space.
Perpetual nature, incomplete in mortal form, knowledge to the seeing eye.
Thank you for the perfect little things.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Ambush …
Everything needs to eat, it’s fundamental to existence. Things die so other things can live, that’s the way it is in the closed system of energy the earth is. It’s basically an exchange of energy from one form to another. That’s just nature the way it is, no problem.
Spiders have various methods of capture, too many to go into here and I am disinclined to too many words these days anyway, words without purpose – why write again what someone has already done well enough.
Right now though there is this ambush spider active in the garden, a few in fact, and though they are known to take on the colourings of their particular hunting environment, for camouflage no doubt, this one stands in stark contrast.
It can get away with this because of the structure of the flowers, it can slip in between and beneath so as to almost disappear to the unwary eye. It must be effective since the spider, let’s call it he, he is still alive after a week or so and growing bigger all the time.
I have also recently seen a starkly white spider sitting on purple flowers catch a blue green fly as it came within reach, focus for a short time on immobilising the prey before pulling it into the comfortable shelter of the flowers. An amazing display of speed and dexterity in colour, clearly intelligent, to me.
At another time I saw it miss its prey and slip back into hiding, without a sign of emotion, disappointment, sullenness or regret. Most creatures have no discernible emotion, behaving primarily from instinct, but nevertheless are as clever as any person – it is our nature after all, clever, cunning, savage. Not what we like to believe, I know.
There is nothing we are that isn’t already in nature, as much as we like to think we are special. What makes us special is the potential to transcend all that in the clarity of being – our ‘other’ nature, a place of stillness inside uncluttered by thought or emotion, imagery and its genesis. But it’s not for everyone, apparently.
Relative to what I know people can be, in my own experience, nature, for all its manifest savagery, is at least honest. Not imagining it is something it is not, it can be itself without the problem of emotion imagining generates, you can’t have the up without the down – that’s not something I made up, and the delusional complications that arise from it. A problem to which the solution is so simple, to love – not as easy as it sounds.
But, just as the spider has little to no self awareness beyond it’s immediate needs, so is the person but with an expanded cognizance of what those needs are – is what makes us think we’re special. And that’s all right, for the person – every thing has its time, and the spider – who can be no other way.
He still hasn’t caught a bee as far as I know, loved it in her way. I don’t think he’s big or strong enough, perhaps not venomous enough. And he knows it, so he only goes for the certain kill.
Or the bees are just too fast for that form of love, of a spider. Remember how quick you got out of the way of that ‘danger’, bees are quicker, more intelligent, having no ‘minding’ in the way.
Can we get back to that state before mind as random thinking and emotion, with all its accumulated experience.
Can we love that clarity enough to do what is necessary and what is essential to make it incorruptible.
That’s the only question, what matters, for me. Everything else is noise.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Butterfly Bush …
… and visitors.
I haven’t seen a Butterfly on the bush yet but there are plenty of other creatures enjoying the bounty of fragrant nectar.
The Crab or Ambush spider is unusually plentiful but elusive with so much flowering to hide away in at the sense of touch of a finger to the branch – I usually hold the creatures platform, resting lens tip on same hand to optimise image sharpness.
They are not big enough yet to tackle the Honey bee that is a frequent visitor, as is the Blue Banded Bee. The former doesn’t stop longer than a couple seconds, the latter even less. I am lucky to get some feeding bee shots at all.
It would take different equipment than I have to get feeding Blue Banded Bee shots, or the perfect alignment of some unlikely circumstances, shooting at a working distance of 4 inches and less and only seeing what’s in the frame through the LCD – time lapsed.
I take what I can get, or accept what I am given, maintaining equilibrium in the face of inducement to ‘try’ for more. As if nature is teasing me with a view of a desirable composition of behaviour only to whisk it away in the blink of an eye, again and again.
Such anticipation, the conflict between structured desire and what is calmly attainable, is a fundamental pain. An unacceptable disturbance to peace of mind that is best negated as quick as possible, eventually, by practise.
In the end, the end of finding out what doesn’t work, for me – what I don’t want, nature or life presents and I receive with a final single motion of the press of a button. Relaxed is the focus.
To take a single step in the right direction, against the pressure of mind, to capture a masterpiece of nature.
What I do is present pictures of that, images of the masterpiece nature is.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Droning On …
8 seems like a lot but I couldn’t leave out any more.
Tough little creatures these Hoppers, careful handling required.
The new Butterfly Bush, six of them, are coming along nicely. One has been flowering for a week and the scent is divine, the colours dark and rich. That’s to me, who knows what the little people see and smell. Probably the same in their way.
I got the plants early in the year off ebay, grown in Victoria, and put them straight in the ground a couple months ago, with space for them to expand, and they are all doing well. I’ll have to do a post on just the flowers, with their different and wonderful colours and scents they deserve it.
For now though I want to introduce you to the Drone Fly, lover of the flower’s nectar. A female I’m sure, with clearly separated eyes,who dropped by and surprised me one day as I was checking for infestations – I have been getting hoppers congregating and mating on new stems of the two golden flowered bushes and I don’t want them destroyed.
What I do is grasp two or three hoppers at a time, sidelong between thumb and forefinger, carefully as they have some microscopic thorny growth, and throw them away with any wind to ensure they don’t directly return. As I watch them disappear against the sky they take wing and change direction, like tiny helicopters, usually toward the big palm tree nearby. Then, a day or so after, I do it again …
It’s a necessary process to keep the plants healthy as they grow. I can’t use insecticide, that would be silly since I want to photograph bugs, unnecessarily criminal even. Well, it would be if we valued the little people as we should. I enjoy going around the garden anyway, and everything I do there is of value, in a sense.
We should value them because they do enormous work, but we don’t because we don’t see it, and that will cost us … If ever there was a case for the need of faith insects are it. Have faith they are necessary, even vital, and enjoy their presence that is often delightful, when time is taken to observe them at play.
Giving them space, not too much to the destroyers – our nature has been unbalanced by our interference, and anything else they need for their well-being, and they will entertain all day long without robbing the larder.
They love nothing better than to show off their colours, form and flying skills, and other not so unusual but often surprising behaviour …
Faith, all is as it should be … And if something needs changing, change it will – where there is willing, or not.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Pretty On Pink
A Green Shield Bug flits from place to place around the garden. If it doesn’t find what it wants in one place off it goes to another. But what does a bug want? Food, shelter and a mate, what else …
It doesn’t know to want anything it doesn’t need. Could it possibly just enjoy the colour in the sunshine, playing in the garden. As many other garden dwellers can be seen or seem to do.
Is there any conscious self awareness in a bug, or is it an instinctive organic robot. Maybe a messenger of a greater intelligence, the earth perhaps.
And anything born has the potential of its mother, and more.
Let’s not dismiss the little things.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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And Now …
… for a little light entertainment from the wilds.
The simple elegance and beauty in the form and being of … a beetle.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on a picture for a closer look.
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A Shooting Star
Click the picture for a bigger version.
A crop of above, for the unbelievers … :-)
Was this Jewel Bug blessed by a shooting star, or was it the photographer or the reader of this, or was it the earth it passed over? Does it matter … all that perceive are affected, by the perceived and the perception, nothing stays the same after the cosmic touch. It matters …
In ancient days, when we were less rigidly rational and perhaps more intuitively romantic, we saw significance in small things. The flight of a bird, the twist of a gust of wind or a falling star. Everything has meaning if you can read it, and it helps to know what others have seen.
What it means is subjective, personal, a matter of context. Such things as shooting stars are universal and as old as the sky above our heads and their meaning has been intuited in various ways, divined in a mind as clear and magnificent as the night sky. Your mind …
So reading the universal is aided and coloured by the context of the reader. I looked up where in our culture the shooting star has occurred and the instance that spoke was this : ‘And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.’
Looking down, or up, within, see that ancient sky and all it contains now, as clear as mind can be. … are you a shooting star burning up with a flash of mystical purpose, or a rational meteorite.
Mystical purpose is a burning meteor, you wouldn’t know it to look at.
Cosmic symbolism in the ordinary life … nothing too serious.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Dragon Days
Still, in the heat of the day, overseeing its territory from rest, no less dangerous for that, to the other airborne creatures hereabouts – the vast canyons of bright empty space surrounded by deep wells of dark shadow.
To the Dragon I was invisible, a trick of being, not being anything a Dragon would fear. In the ever moving colour and form of the psyche everything is connected, and when ‘the time is right’ one thing knows another, inside.
The smaller the creature, the more distant the relationship, the less direct or immediate the connection. But the Dragon knew me, like Dragon knows Dragon, nothing to reflect on. Nothing to resist, no separation.
In being. In form it’s another matter, everything going its own way, clashing and thrashing, killing and dying, as some thing, Dragon or man.
The trick, or knack, is to slow down enough inside to slip into nowhere, as no-thing, at will, and still function some where, as some thing, outside.
A life’s work, for a man. Dragon does it naturally.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Meditate …
A Lizard, found exposed up on a wire fence after heavy rain forced it to seek high ground.
… for peace of mind.
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Periodically I offer to teach meditation and this is that time once more.
I started teaching years ago and paid the insurance and hired a hall, put flyers up all over the place and paid for advertising. And charged accordingly.
Today I only teach from home, in Victoria Point, Queensland and there is no charge for the meditation as there is no cost to me.
Or I can travel and if it’s any distance I would need my costs covered.
Either way it is my pleasure to teach where it is needed.
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What I teach is to still the mind. It is not easy to do but it is simple and worthwhile, and once learned you won’t forget it – what you need of it stays with you.
You can best benefit from this meditation if you are conscious of a degree of stress, tension, emotionality or unhappiness and recognise the need for peace of mind. That way you are motivated and will readily see how it works so the learning goes deeper.
If you want this contact me, by phone is best, email is ok too. See Contact page, top right.
See the other pages top right too, for the idea …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click the pix for a closer look
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Nature's Place 
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