Mushroom Magic

If you don't know, I keep another blog at www.travelingchariot.blogspot.com where I chronicle other creative pursuits as well as natural life in the Midwest. (I also keep another shop at www.travelingchariot.etsy.com where I specialize in hand crafted journals and old-fashioned quills). Over at Traveling Chariot, when the weather is right, I post Mushroom Mondays where I share my photos of the many unique, magical, and sometimes edible mushrooms. And since it's been raining again there are lots of fungi to be found. So if you'd like to meander through a woodland of toadstools, faerie caps, and magic hop on over HERE.

A Different Sort of Portal

My Portal Collection shows love to the architectural doors of Celtic lands but nature, especially an Irish forest, offers us many portals to other worlds, literal caverns of arching trees as well as sun dappled or shadowy worlds of our imaginations. I am grateful for the places that the natural realm takes me in my life and in my mind, with my feet and with my soul. Grateful, too, for the magical places I've been that have really transported me. I often include this quote by Stephen Graham in the journals I take on trips to remind me that doors are everywhere, but we must look for them:

As you sit on a hillside,

or lie prone under the trees of the forest,

or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream,

the great door,

that does not look like a door,

OPENS.

- Stephen Graham

Painting in the woods in my travel journal from last trip to Wales and S.W. England. 

Natures does seem to present me with actual doors, too, sometimes, though I think they lead to the Faerie Realm...