When you return to your sit spot this week, take a moment to close your eyes and breathe, listen, smell, feel. Open your eyes and consider the word community in relation to your spot. 

As I open my eyes and pick up my pencil to begin my reflection, a tiny bug lands on the journal and crawls onto my pencil, quietly and unsubtly asserting its presence as part of this community.

My sit spot is in a city park on Nemanjina street in the center of Belgrade. At first glance, this spot is like the city it is surrounded by – bold, busy, bustling, and noisy, full of people, dogs, and the sounds of traffic.  Listen closely, though, and you will hear the brash caws of crows, the high-pitched chirps of smaller birds, the gentle rustle of wind in the trees, the ‘scritch-scratch’ of dry leaves as they tumble across the paved paths. In this spot, human and non-human communities are intricately intertwined. The crows eat food scavenged from a nearby trash can. Litter from their incursion lies scattered on the ground around its base. More crows perch in trees planted by the builders of this park. Children use the same trees for a lively game of hide and seek; their yells of delight match the pitch of the cries of birds circling above. The crows gather in number and caw until the cacophony seems to drown out the road workers’ drilling, the screech of the bus’s brakes, and the rumble of the car engines, if only for a moment.