August 13, 2026

Where: Ranger Road Park

When: 6:25 pm

Bird Species: Carolina wren, Carolina chickadee. This amuses me.

Things I Thought About:

• Work. I am thinking about work. “It has been a long week," is something I first said around 12:48 pm on Tuesday.
• Something I have always been good at and actively practice is creative visualization. When my mind is racing and my body feels bad, I have some go-to imagination exercises that I've been using for decades now.
• My body is a clear shell and it's filled with greenish-gray smoke, heavier where I have pain or tension. With each breath, when it enters my shell, it turns into great billows of warm pinky orange smoke. The more I breathe, the more the clean colorful warm smoke makes the older smoke dissipate. As I breathe, I can push the smoke into the spaces around my bones, between my toes, adding more and bigger plumes where my shoulder hurts. Eventually the new smoke pushes out all the stale old smoke, and my whole body is filled tight as a tick with warm pink soft billows, light as a feather, completely relaxed.
• That is going to read so weird when I try to describe it.
• I have been practicing this exercise since I was 18 or 19, and it works every time. The problem is, it takes kind of a long time. Often I fall asleep before I'm, for want of a better description, full.
• Where are all these noisy ass birds? Show yourself, cowards.

• I have been developing a visualization for when I need to put work thoughts away, and it is much more literal and concrete. I see myself writing down three or four bullet points about whatever is nagging at me, and then I put that piece of paper in an old, green five-drawer metal file cabinet and lock it with the little thumb bolt.
• That was a first draft visualization, but I kept opening the drawer, so now when I lock it, I use a small key, and then I toss the key high up on top of my kitchen cabinets, where I have to drag a stool over to get it. This has been working pretty well. My brain does stay away from the files. Sometimes it thinks about where the key is, though.
• I think the logical next step in this visualization is I swallow the key and then I am not allowed to revisit the issue I filed away until I wake up and have a shit.
• Sara Kate, you spend too much time alone in your head.
• Why haven't I written like four novels?
• I can hear so many birds, but they are being secretive and withholding. Why should they be different.

BOTD: Carolina chickadee. These guys were everywhere in the treetops today, buzzing and rattling the way they do, but also singing their lovely little four-note songs. That one very kindly came down close enough to get a nice look at him. I like black and white birds. I think the white edging on a soft gray chickadee wing is very good, though they are much bolder and contrasting on a black-capped chickadee, which I don't really see around here.

Heard but not seen was on one tonight, very active, but the only two birds I actually saw with mine own eyes were the wren and the chickadeedle. Nothing could be finer than a bird from Carolina. Birds got jokes.