Date: 12/04/2019

Time entered: 4:30 pm

Time left: 5:28 pm

Temperature: 47 F

 

Today, as I entered my blog spot, I felt a sudden silence in the environment. My blog spot which was generally filled with so much noise has recently been very silent. It makes me very sad and curious to know where the animals/ organisms must have gone. The leaves that were highly scattered on the floor have now been cleared up which makes the place look much cleaner but at the same time devoid of organisms. I would say Beale Garden is one of those places that actually shows a huge shift and effect of the weather on nature. With the rain from a few days ago, I also noticed that the ground was still mushy and wasn’t as dry as it used to be. However, seeing the stream alive did give life to the garden. 

I went to my sit spot and looked at the three organisms of my interest. Knowing this could possibly the last time that I look at my organisms for some time gave me a bittersweet moment:

  1. Winter Berry cherries: The plant is fully dead and now looks like skeletons. The white fungus is no longer there and the plant looks smaller than it used to be. It looks much like it is now old and hence fragile and very weak. The other winterberry cherries nearby look equally dead too.  
  2. Water Striders: There are no water striders in the stream. With the high flow of water now, I had assumed there to be tons of water striders in the stream but throughout my time there I wasn’t able to spot even one. I tried seeing in other regions of the stream and was not able to spot even one. I wonder where they must have gone. 
  3. Twigs/branches on the ground: The clean ground doesn’t have a lot of twigs or branches. Instead, there are some leaves nearby and tamarind like plants that have fallen on the floor and dried up. I tried searching for some insects such as ants that I used to see a lot throughout, but couldn’t track any.  

Today was a very windy day. I tried looking at the sky throughout my time there. Since my blog spot is in a region with a lot of tall trees, the sky isn’t seen very visibly. I see in a far distance that there are some clouds. These clouds look like they are cumulus clouds. During the day there were some clouds too, which moved away as I went to my sit spot. I still saw some around the spot. My theory says that the windy day probably pushed these clouds away from the spot and ultimately made them land somewhere else. These clouds were small and looked pancake-shaped suggesting that it is not going to rain anytime soon. The rest of the sky was really blue. Despite being horrible in direction, feeling the wind’s direction, I would think that the wind is coming from the west. 

My previous blog sit-ins have helped me realize that I enjoy being around in nature with my eyes closed. So, this time too, I tried to do that. I tried closing my eyes to just feel the moment. The two things that stood out for me were the stream and the wind making the trees rustle. Throughout the time I closed my eyes, I felt like everything around me was changing its dimension and with every second there was something new happening in nature. Time was suddenly going faster than expected. In the distance I could hear the stream softly tumbling making me feel more and more calm. This was the perfect imagination of nature in my head. In the distance I heard people walking, and it seemed like it was more populated than before, which seems obvious given that this place gives one of the best feelings of being in nature. 

It was a bittersweet moment for me to leave this place. I have seen this place change throughout time. For me, seeing such a small place change gives an impression of how the world might be changing around us by each passing week. It made me realize that, this place had brought me back to nature and inspired me even more to appreciate and spend more time in nature. It was an end of an assignment but a start of something new that would take me back to nature.