My last blog was done early in the morning. So, this time I wanted to do it in the evening. So, I reached my sit spot at 4:48 pm. Before reaching my sit spot, the gorgeous red tree in front of the tinker gave me the sign of fall. The tree in the right side of Cocke Building was all naked.

Even though the temperature was around 64 F, the air was windy and chilly. In the first fifteen minutes of my silent sit spot, I just heard the different chu chu, chya chya, turrrr of birds and the buzzing of insects. I rarely saw any insects and animals around me today. However, some birds were flying very fast in every couple of minutes. As I saw those birds closer, they were so stunning and tiny. I saw two of them. One was of blue grey color and the other was red with something in its head. The red colored tiny bird is Cardinal. These birds were flying with great speed as if they were getting late for something or may be, they are just making themselves warm with some wings flapping exercise.

 

Trees have given a lot of efforts in welcoming fall. Some have turned their leaves into attractive yellow or red color  and those who cannot have shed their leaves and remained naked. However, the plants in my sit spot are stubborn. They are still green. The sycamore tree below which I sit has equal number of yellow and green leaves, but it still carries thousands of green sycamore fruits. On the exact opposite side of sycamore tree, there is a young tree of red berries. In my last blog, the tree was full of red berries, but today I can easily count the number of berries. There is only one handful of berries. However, I was amazed to see another young tree which was full of blue berries. The blue berry plant was 170 degree south of red berry plant and they were only around 25 steps apart but the difference was blue berry was full and red berry wasn’t.

In the back of my sit spot, there is a small stream which had some water before. But today, there was very little amount of water. The water was only in the deeper part of the stream which seems to be the collected there from a long time. The bank of the stream constituents’ grasses and

some blue flowers. Today, there was not any flowers and that plant was wilting like aging in the human body. I used to see a lot of grasshoppers, dragonflies and yellow bumble bees in the bank of the stream but now they are gone. They probably might be hibernating or have gone to warmer places. But the drying of the stream has also resulted in the shrinking of the grasses. The small grasses below my sit spot seems to be fine due to the tap water it gets. However, the soil around me weren’t dry and I guess the trees could easily retrieve water from that soil.

 

 

 

The day was very windy and cold. I could hardly see any creatures other than quick flying birds. But the squirrels today were greater in number than the one I used to see before. 4-6 squirrels were jumping around. It was weird because on my way to sit spot too, I saw many squirrels. Each were in a group. It looked like they were in search of something. Maybe they are searching a suitable warm place to live in for winter or just playing, that’s was difficult to know about. Hardly, I saw only two bees around the stream. Since, there were no flowers, the bees were in the wet part of stream. They seemed to be taking water from the mud. The bees were brown black in color with hairy black head and thorax. They had three pairs of legs and two transparent wings.

The ground now is full of dry brown leaves. Its amazing how my sit spot environment has changed in this month. It has been easier to differentiate the sounds of birds and insects today although I didn’t see any of them more. The trees have been familiar, and the slow change of color has made them more attractive. For me, small things from dry sycamore fruit on the ground to black figure in the sky has started to make sense. I have started to be part of nature again.