Category Archives: Human and Animal

This is not a grasshopper

Creativity, Ecology, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, Human and Animal, Martin Buber, Uncategorized

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the force

of what lives us

outliving the mountain.

John Berger

 

Last week I was delighted to come across this animal.

Part of my pleasure was that I thought I could identify it. Even though it was now in the front herb garden, and no longer among the camellias at the back, I presumed it was the same fine grasshopper with which I began this series of blog posts.

I don’t think this recognition was at the heart of my response though. The best clue to this  are the words I said to myself at the time. If my response had been recognition of the same individual, I would have thought ‘Oh, it’s that same grasshopper‘.  But this wasn’t my response. The delighted thought that came to me was ‘Oh, it’s you‘. Why did I say You? What did I see that made this a You and not just ‘that same grasshopper’?

This isn’t a minor grammatical quibble. There is a world — an ecology — of difference between the two utterances. Continue reading This is not a grasshopper →

Camouflage

Ecology, Human and Animal, Uncategorized

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Looking at this caterpillar, in a basil plant, it is tempting to ascribe it intentions that it does not have.  Certainly it has brilliant camouflage, not only in its colour but in its twig-like behaviour, but is it intending to deceive a predator? Is it deliberately hiding in greenery; has it decided to act like a twig? Continue reading Camouflage →

Birds of Newtown

Ecology, Human and Animal, Uncategorized

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I am fond of this photograph, because of its poor quality.

I find it difficult to take good photos of the birds that frequent the garden. They move fast, they move often, without regard for garden fences, and I don’t own a telephoto lens. But a family of noisy miner birds moved into the back yard during autumn, with a demanding fledgling, and I was determined to take their picture. Several times a day, whenever I heard them being especially chatty, I’d go out with my camera. But they were always too high and too fast for me.

One day I saw a docile pigeon on my neighbour’s TV antenna. Pigeons aren’t exciting, and it was too far away to get a good shot, but here, I thought, photographically speaking, was a sitting duck. I took three images of the distant pigeon surrounded by too much blue sky. As I pushed the shutter button for the middle image, I heard a whooshing noise, but only when I enlarged the photo did I realise that the noisy miners had photobombed me. There they were, tiny figures about to depart the top right corner of my shot. To show their disdain, they had glided past, not even bothering to flap. Continue reading Birds of Newtown →

A gardening state of mind

Belonging, Care, Creativity, Ecology, Human and Animal

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Gardeners often talk of their state of mind. Gardening relaxes them. It changes their mood or perspective. It makes them feel differently about their lives. Although we often imagine that moods and states of mind are attributes of an individual, these experiences of gardening suggest that states of mind are a matter of ecology or sociology rather than individual psychology.  The changed state of mind befalls the gardener; it emerges from their relation with the garden.

Indeed, just to take this thought a step further, maybe this is what is important about gardens. They are special places where people learn that what is innermost is also outside them. This is how they learn how they fit in a broader world that includes them but doesn’t belong to them. Continue reading A gardening state of mind →

A riverine environment

Ecology, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, Human and Animal, Uncategorized

 

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28th May, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we decided to have a stream built in the backyard,  the landscape gardener asked two questions. What sound did we want from the small waterfall? Did we want moss on the rocks? He returned with metres of pvc pipe, rolls of pool liner, and truckloads of bare bushrock  and river pebble. He was finished in three days, and at first his stream looked as artificial as a water feature in a shopping centre.

‘Now you wait’, he said.

And we did.

Continue reading A riverine environment →

The Australian bush fly

Belonging, Ecology, Everyday Mysteries, Human and Animal, Uncategorized

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To learn to take photographs is to relearn how to see. Whereas the selfie and tourist snapshot are confirming, the viewfinder and focus dial on a camera force you to reconsider what you are really seeing and how you are framing the world. They probe both the world and your unconscious preconceptions.

The focus dial, in particular, tests out relations of scale. Working as both microscope and telescope, it allows you to see things that are too small or too large or too distant or too close for you to normally see. As you test its possibilities, you glide between macrocosm and microcosm, part and whole. What is your focus? What is your detail detail of? What are you really seeing when you look at this or that? What are its wider implications? Dare you acknowledge a scale that you would usually brush aside?

Continue reading The Australian bush fly →

Charismatic Mammals

Ecology, Human and Animal
24th May 2016
24th May 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

Something’s been thumping on our roof at night. It could have been the neighbourhood cats.

Something’s been eating the succulents on the balcony, even after protective wire was put around them. It could have been a rat, perhaps.

At night, something rowdy has been ransacking the camellia flowers and shaking loose the palm nuts from high up the neighbour’s tree. It could have been the flying foxes.

When I have woken in the earliest hours of the morning, and looked myopically through the bedroom window, isn’t that a silhouetted animal I’ve seen, scrambling down the long branches of the ash tree? Continue reading Charismatic Mammals →

Borrowed landscape

Ecology, Gift and Grace, Human and Animal, Uncategorized

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This magnificent jacaranda tree is in our neighbour’s yard, but it overshadows ours, just as its roots must underlie the gardens of the neighbours further south and west. After a couple of weeks of taking photos of my garden, I realised that I had been treating it as off-limits. Unconsciously, I thought that I’d be cheating on the terms of the project if I included it. Continue reading Borrowed landscape →

Fences and bridges

Ecology, Human and Animal, Uncategorized

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Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall is based on a tension between two attitudes to fences. The narrator, noting how his stone wall needs continuous repair, is struck by the intuition ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’. When he puts this suggestion to his neighbour, pointing out that the neighbour’s pine trees are not endangered by his apple trees, the neighbour rebuffs him: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ Continue reading Fences and bridges →

What do you see?

Creativity, Ecology, Everyday Mysteries, Gift and Grace, Human and Animal, Martin Buber, Uncategorized
20th May 2016
20th May 2016

For the past few months, since beginning this photographic project, I have been uploading photos every day to an Instagram account. There are now many hundreds there. Every photo is different but every one is also the same.

Take this image. What do you see? A fist? An embryo? A fern? A mother and child? A helix? A shell? A heart in a rib cage? A mathematical formula? Continue reading What do you see? →