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Ramunė Vakarė / Photo by R. Konteikienė

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Ramunė Vakarė, an enthusiast of wildlife photography and winner of the competition "Plant Portraits", lives in a remote forest village in the Karšuva Forest, which she calls her paradise. Almost every day she walks around the forest with her camera and captures plants, bugs, mushrooms, birds, animals, which she then curiously studies, making sure to find out what she has captured.

Ramunė believes that her intuition guides her through nature. She thinks we should rely on it more often in our everyday life.

- Ramune, could you introduce yourself to the readers?

- I live in the village of Eičiai, which is really a forest village with four apartment buildings in the Karšuva forest, Tauragė district. I myself come from Šilutė, from the village of Pagryniai and the German farmstead that is still there now, visible from the Grinius Bridge on the way to Rusnė.

I lived and worked in Tauragė for a while, and when a vacancy for a librarian opened up in the Eičiai library, I found myself here on the first day of summer in 1981. Since then I have been living in this paradise. People who love nature make special trips to such places, and at home I hear cranes, see roe deer, and was the first person to see an otter fishing in farmer Eimantas' pond in winter.

Solitude in nature is a style of life that I have brought with me from my childhood. Growing up with two brothers seventeen and fifteen years older than me, I learned to be alone. Summers seemed immeasurably long, and in winters, the fences were ringing from the cold. And it wasn't childish games that mattered - it was helping my parents with all the farm work. And if there was any time left, I was taught embroidery by a neighbour as a primary schoolgirl...

As a young girl, people knew me as perpetually restless: if I'm interested in something, I dive straight into it. And there were a lot of dives: paper cutting, knitting, lace, various embroidery techniques, tapestry weaving, drawing, painting, origami tricks, etc. My current passion - photography - has been going on for more than a decade.

- And how did the latter come into your life?

- When I was still working in the library, together with my friend, teacher Virginija Norkevičiūtė, we founded the club "Vakarutė", a club for meeting interesting people, which was active for 29 years. One year we wrote a project, received funding for filming equipment, a camera... And I have to stop here (laughs). I said that I would not take that contraption - the SLR camera - into my hands anymore. But I did. I'm stubborn: I wanted to figure it out for myself, so I went from photography books to forums until I found out what it could do. What's more, the doctors advised me to walk as much as possible, so that's how I started - with a camera.

I used to say, when I die, bury the crochet hook with me, but now I changed my mind - put the camera with me.

- Right away you felt the strongest attraction to nature photography?

- Yes. As soon as I knew my camera, I started going everywhere with it, and I started taking mostly nature photos. But soon I got bored of sunsets, sunrises, dogs and cats. So I turned my camera to butterflies, which I had been interested in since I was a child, and I was constantly drawing, cutting, sewing them. And also plants, which have also fascinated me since childhood. I wanted to try artistic photography too, but my observations of nature won out: it seems that I have to find out what I have photographed, what plant, mushroom, beetle, or at least what family it belongs to, by any means, and to write down all the metrics of what it is, where it is recorded.

When I kept asking the experts, for example, what kind of butterfly caterpillar I had found, they would tell me - grow it and see. I tried it, I was interested and I will continue to play that game. And I feel that as much as I get from nature, I have never gotten so much from anything in my life. Inner peace. Understanding. The ability to understand, to discover, to remember, to want to share with others.

- What is the biggest insight that you take away from being in nature, exploring it?

- When I am in nature, I am always amazed at how in this millennium there are so many people teaching others how to live. After all, we have all the answers within us, we just need to learn to be still and silent to hear them. Today, I allow myself to wait calmly for the morning with a nagging question or a conflicting situation, instead of frantically looking for advice from others. My only advice to others: learn to hear your inner self in nature. And fall in love with solitude. It is your teacher. In my youth I wrote: you too are a creature of loneliness / the snow of last year / turning into rain.

- When you go out into nature to take photographs, do you have a goal for what you want to capture?

- Oh no, I never have a goal that I'm going to go now and look for such and such a dragonfly or orchid. It's a man's approach. I go into nature with an open heart and whatever I can spot is mine. Recently, a friend asked me to find a rare plant from the Red Data Book by a small lake in the forest. And I patiently looked for it. I walked around the marsh for half a day, but I couldn't spot it, but I saw the eggs of a pine sphinx. I took a picture, picked up one bark with two eggs on it, carefully put it in my rucksack and took it back. I was determined that a beetle or a fly would hatch. And one morning I look, two caterpillars - pine sphinx.

I am a person of intuition. I think I inherited my intuition from Mummy. She used to say: "Baby, you'll bring me down before you fool me. Inner knowing is a constant help in everything, without it I would feel blindfolded.

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