Dorothy was right – sometimes you don’t need to look further than your own back yard to find wonderful things to inspire you. Who needs a trip to Oz when our magical world is where we wake up?
I’ve always had this sense of wonder about the natural world. It’s often simple things like the beautiful symmetry inside of a purple onion, or the star shape of seeds when you cut the apple sideways. I’ve had friendships with trees (very good listeners) and connections with rocks, which I bring home from practically any walk outside of pavement. In some ways, I’m always on the lookout for treasure from nature, a hole in a tree that could be a fairy door, or a sunbeam that stirs that part of my imagination that longs for connection and magic.
This has led me to become a Wiccan, to take photos and turn them into art, to fill shelves with birch bark, seed pods, seashells, feathers, crystals, fossils, bones.
I’m fascinated by this idea that things out of stories and fairy tales are all around us, here in the real world, if you only know where to look. You have to be sensitive to it, like a psychic channeling spirits, awake to the possibilities. It’s almost the opposite of cynicism, embodying the belief that the real world already is inspiring, fascinating, beautiful, peaceful, connected, magical.
Do not disturb the spidersfrosted winter lacepath through the woodswhat’s beyond the bridge?bicycle to freedom
A lot of what I blog about is the art of seeing, and I hope we can gather real things, people, and places that fulfill the dream of seeing our magical world is real.
One Thing Clear
The spider watched the fog catching in her web, each bright bead another dying breath of the misty September morning. Frankly, she preferred dragonflies, but at least it made one thing clear: sometimes you cannot admire your creation until you stop working.
As a writer, you could say I have always wanted to make my own magic. My mother used to say I’ve been writing stories since I could hold a crayon and before that, I was dictating. I dream in stories, songs, poems. The idea of conjuring up images, people, or whole worlds that don’t exist, with just the right words, with intriguing journeys and satisfying endings, is a kind of magic in itself, isn’t it?
My photography, too, is like that, taking pictures because something strikes me as beautiful or meaningful and then tweaking/contrasting/recoloring/pixel-sculpting until the image matches my vision. Somewhere between fantasy and reality. The crossroad of image and vision. Artifacts from the world in my head.
Sometimes I mean “magic” to mean wonderful transformative experiences that make you feel good to be alive. Other times I mean recognizing how amazing the real world is already. It certainly can be a unicorn holiday your daughter invented or an artist creating whimsical teapots that are straight out of fairy tales. Fantasy inspiration definitely counts, for me. So do pagan paths to the divine in life all around us. It also includes mind-blowing science about our brains, music that gives you goosebumps, or methods for finding your perfect scent.
It’s part of my quest, a lot of why I started this blog, and central to my creations. There are myriad ways you can make it part of your journey, too.
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Delve deeper into making your own magic with these blog posts.
One Thing Clear
The spider watched the fog catching in her web, each bright bead another dying breath of the misty September morning. Frankly, she preferred dragonflies, but at least it made one thing clear: sometimes you cannot admire your creation until you stop working.
“They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?”
When the world becomes very small — because of illness, grief, or, just spit-balling here, the isolation of a lockdown of global proportions and the existential terror of possibly dying because someone breathed on you in the grocery store — it can be very useful to focus on what’s in front of you in great detail.
I’ve always had an inclination to notice beauty in unusual places: the tiny bubbles inside the flesh of a green pepper, the gossamer strand of a spider web that picks up the light, that moment when your turn signal syncs up with the car in front of yours. Sometimes it’s big things like chasing rainbows so you can see them a little bit longer, or staying at that amazing concert through all the encores to soak up just a little more sonic vibration in your skin and heart. But besides those big moments, you’ve got myriad small ones that can fill your cup just as much.
It takes work. It takes effort. The word that comes to mind is vigilance. That alertness to the awe and wonder and everyday beauty requires us to be mindful of those things that give us the “wow” of being alive. This is one of the ways I bring a feeling of wonder into my daily life, by seeking out the magic in the mindfulness.
Chasing Lake Glimmer
I moved from Montana to Wisconsin for a lot of reasons. Family, money, friends, culture, the familiarity of the Midwest where I grew up. One of those reasons was big water. My favorite place to be is on a beach, preferably Great Lake or ocean where the horizon is flat and blue, but the four lakes around Madison still fit the bill. Looking out on big water, my shoulders relax and somewhere deep inside, my tangled heartstrings unfurl and drop free. I feel timeless. I forget myself. I get lost in the blues and grays and the sparks of light glimmering on the tiniest of waves.
I drive to work in downtown Madison (called the Isthmus because it’s between the two largest lakes), and for many months drove the most efficient route by the capital building. Nice enough in a cityscape kind of way, but eventually I realized if I took an early turn, I could jog over to the road that runs right up against Lake Monona, the second largest lake in Madison. It didn’t add significant time to my commute, and then for a few precious minutes, I could see the lake, take in the blue, wink back at the glimmer winking at me. Even when the lake freezes over and the profusion of sparks becomes a slow cold gleam, I relish the chance to say hello to the lake.
The lake view is free. The feeling I get from the lake view is priceless.
Even with the smudges on my car window, this view makes me happy.
There is magic in the kind of mindfulness I’m talking about. This is the kind of vigilance I try to practice, finding ways to enjoy and marvel at the world even when moving through mundane tasks like chopping vegetables and driving to work.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Take a moment each day and find something that will make it brighter for you. I try to make it something real, but if a funny animal video is all you can manage, hey, I’m not gonna judge. Find something that delights or amazes you. You can spare a few minutes. If you are juggling kids and herding cats, bring them along. Show them the wonder, too.
And teach them to practice seeking out the wow of being alive, every day.
I’ll add the other ways and hows I go on my quest for magic in the mindfulness below. What else would you add to the list? What precious focus brings you gratitude and joy? Help me grow my list and share with other seekers by commenting below.
Snow on the ground this morning, the first of the season. And not a little snow – 2 or 3 inches. An impressive amount for October in southern Wisconsin. I’d gone to bed in a foul mood after an up and down day. I got the first proof copies of my book, The Flight of……
Have you seen the meme asking, “What three objects would you use in a ritual to summon me?” It surfaces from time to time, and I never answered because I could never nail it down to just three things. It tickled my brain, though, and being a witch and writer, I ended up writing a poem in answer.
Music for the occasion:
any Wonder Stuff or Kila
Scarlett's Walk by Tori Amos
or in a pinch
Cheek to Cheek by Fred Astaire.
Don a piece of clothing
you wished you wore more often
because it's too fabulous
or ridiculous
for ordinary days.
Light a candle scented
like secrets, warm treats, old books:
amber, lemongrass, smoke, chocolate.
Draw a circle
in purple nail polish.
Inside draw a star
in silver Sharpie.
Sprinkle liberally
with coffee grounds, toast crumbs,
and a few cat hairs.
In one hand,
hold three treasures you found in the forest.
In the other,
three treasures you found on the beach.
Call out any
of my many names,
except, for B-words,
leave it
at "Beth."
What three things would someone put in a circle to summon you? Maybe more than three things? How would you use objects and ritual actions to imply your essential self?
All the best,
In case you’re wondering, here’s the music. The rest must be found on a quest of your own making. KiLa ~ Fred Astaire
Hello, magic seekers. Not long ago, I announced that my story, “Medicine or Poison,” had won Fairy Tale Magazine’s flash fiction contest, snagging grand prize. It’s the Hansel and Gretel story told from the witch’s perspective. This is just a quick (ecstatic!) post to say the winning fairy tale issue is out for purchase now. You can read all the wonderful flash fiction fairy tales for only $5.99.
My extra good news is that as the grand prize story, Fairy Tale Magazine published it on their website for free. You can read it here right away!
Sometimes a story needs to find the right audience to be considered grand. The key is to not give up. This is the story of my story that won grand prize in a contest at Fairy Tale Magazine.
Wise Women and Their Medicine
I wrote a flash fiction story for a contest a while back, which asked for tales of wise women, cunning women, or witches. Wisdom of the woods, in other words.
I’d been carrying around this notion in my head of someone who sees food as medicine or poison. An awesome and intense conversation with a new friend who was a nutritionist sparked the idea. She said that anything you put in your body could act as either medicine or poison. One was nourishing, encouraging growth and sustaining life. The other was toxifying, slowing down natural processes, and included many things that a body needed to filter out. Wholesome food versus processed food. Herbal tea versus whiskey. That idea stuck with me, as a binary I’d never thought of before. I decided to save it for the right story.
Cross-Stitch meets Cross-Reference
I took up cross-stitch in the pandemic, as a meditative practice to focus on sewing tiny Xs instead of the real world’s problems. At the time I was stitching a Hansel and Gretel pattern, a candy cottage deep in the woods.
I added a bunch of detail and the surrounding trees to the original pattern.This hangs in my kitchen.
These three things collided in my brain: Hansel and Gretel, Cunning Woman of the Forest, Medicine or Poison. So I wrote a short-short story, retelling the classic tale from the witch’s perspective. Maybe it had all been a mistake. Maybe she had offered medicine, and the wayward children, terrified and starving, had only seen poison.
I had to write it very quickly, in about two days, because I saw the contest notice right before the deadline. This pressure was actually a good thing, because it forced me to hunker down and make the story work instead of ruminating on possibilities.
The right story for the right audience
My story was rejected from that “cunning woman of the forest” anthology. Phooey.
But guess what? I submitted it to a flash fiction contest at Fairy Tale Magazine. And my story, “Medicine or Poison”, WON grand prize!
Proof I didn’t dream it.
I’ve never had a story win Grand Prize before, and as a fairy tale teller, getting chosen by Fairy Tale magazine just makes it that much cooler.
My son suggested I write a series of stories where the traditional witch is not the bad guy we always thought. Like Neil Gaiman’s classic short story, “Tori Amos), and the true evil is smiling behind ruby red lips.
I’m thinking of Sleeping Beauty (which needed a rewrite from the outset, frankly). Perhaps Aurora is a diva princess who should be taught a lesson, only the curse wasn’t meant to last a hundred years, and the whole thing is overblown for the jealous witch who made one teensy wicked wish….
You can buy the upcoming “Tales from the Night Queen’s Realm” issue of FTM, due out on September 1st, to read “Medicine or Poison”. I would love to hear what favorite witch’s tale you’d like to hear retold in the comments.
All the best,
Buy The Flight of the Starling, A Fairy Tale by Ella Arrow, out now. You can read the first chapter here.
Ella Arrow artwork is now available on jigsaw puzzles! Society6.com, where I have my artist shop, has started offering 200, 500, or 1000 piece puzzles, so I set up dozens of my designs.
Personally, I love doing puzzles, especially when I’m feeling stressed. It fills that need to feel productive (without actually being important to finish) and requires a certain level of concentration that lets me block out the Big Scary News or whatever is troubling me. I don’t know about you, but I’ve done all the puzzles in my house in the last two years, so it might be time for some new ones.
Different artwork results in different puzzling difficulty. Not so hard: Box of Sparks, Green Mermaid, Fairy Creek
Medium challenge: Sea Treasures, The Question, Air Through His Bones
Quite a challenge: Blue Fairy Stars, Golden Road, Oak Tree Canopy
Woof: Dive In. I mean it’s all purples.
Give art and you support an artist. Art is a unique gift that you can be sure they don’t already have!
I found bittersweet beauty in an old schoolhouse, on the edge of my town and a crumbling past.
One of the things I’ve been promising to do once school was back in session is to go on a photography safari. Not to shoot wildlife, just take a drive for an hour or two and stop when I see something that strikes me in the right way. While I probably could have done this with kids in tow, I worried too much they would have gotten bored, making me feel rushed instead of meandering.
The first place I wanted to go had haunted me for a while. On the way out of Stoughton, almost to the freeway, there’s an old one-room schoolhouse perched on a bit of lawn between the road and a golf course. I’d always found it charming and a bit mysterious. What was its history? Was it still in use for anything? Could I park and hop out and peek in its windows without annoying golfers or the owners of their club?
I parked across the highway to be a bit less obvious and used the golf-cart viaduct to cross under the road to the schoolhouse. The paint is peeling more than I expected, as if whoever owns it has forgotten about the little historical building. A few windows are broken. You can see right into the basement through a square hole in the stone porch, as if a hatch or bunch of bricks are missing. The cellar is piled with lumber; the main room houses old furniture and flags.
I tried to capture the melancholy of the broken windows and fallen slats. I tried to catch the charm of the past in the familiar shape of the building. Many photographers find the same bittersweet beauty in shabby vintage vistas these days, so I mimicked the close-ups for texture and the wide shots for structure. After years of passing it on the road out of town, I was not disappointed.
I wish I knew its name.
I wish I could take care of it. It could be an art gallery, a quiet retreat, or a tiny coffeehouse. There’s an ache about such decaying beauties, an unspoken desire to imagine the heyday, and a slippery slope of enjoying the varying grayscale of weathered boards while wishing you could polish life back into their bones.
Do not disturb the spiders.
I live in a house built in 1885. The dining room slopes decidedly toward the windows and none of the doors are straight. I know how to love time-worn buildings and their glorious wrinkles.
I had no destination after the bittersweet beauty of the old schoolhouse. I drove through a few little towns I knew, and followed some country roads I didn’t. My other find of the day was a few barns on the verge of collapse, on the edge of otherwise healthy-looking farms. A few years ago my son dubbed these “Jenga barns”, as if the loss of one little piece of wood could cause the whole thing to tumble. I didn’t want to creep around someone else’s property, but I got a couple of shots I liked from the side of the road. I love that you can see the sky through the ribs.
There was a Jenga barn on the road to turn in to my last office job. I loved driving by it every day, thinking about not only what it must have been, grand and wide and sturdy and useful, but admiring the way it sloped and shrugged, losing its shape to the weight of time. Someday I’ll head back there and get more than a snapshot on my phone. Some future safari, maybe.
Anyway, I decided to anthropomorphize the nameless schoolhouse in the photos’ one-sentence story. Hope you like it.
School’s Out… forever.
The dilapidated one-room schoolhouse stands despite flaking paint and broken windows, wondering when summer will finally be over.
When will summer end?
As usual, prints and products of the images are up on my Society6 artist shop, and you can get digital versions on my Etsy store for less than five bucks.
Most people don’t need to be told to Go Play Outside as much as they can in the height of summer. My pre-teen son, maybe, when he’s eyebrow-deep in videogames and YouTubes of other people playing videogames. But otherwise, we all know July is a playground, don’t we? Summer’s free gifts abound wherever you look.
Example: When you find yourself free for half an hour while your kid is in drum lessons (in person again, thank God and Goddess), walk up the hill so steep you have to zig-zag in switchbacks to spare your ankles.
Find an intriguing path through unfamiliar woods.
Follow the path as it loops around a park, empty but for an ancient swing set, made of wood and rusty metal, replete with one broken swing.
Count four varieties of butterflies. Pause at mossy trees, like twisted skeleton hands, among the riot of green life. Get scolded by a blue jay. Startle from an animal crashing through the woods, across your path and into the bushes on the other side, so suddenly and loudly that for a moment you aren’t sure what it was. A dog, surely, as you are surrounded by neighborhood and farmland. But those woods, that whip of a tail, that speed….
It was a dog, chasing a rabbit. Must have been a dog.
Stumble across daisies. Dare to pick a few, hoping no one in the neighborhood that is not yours will notice, or mind.
Find a complicated purple flower bubbling up on fountains of green leaves. Learn by a Google Lens search that this has the romantic name of “crown vetch“.
Wonder what a vetch is, and whether it’s some sort of curse or blessing.
More daisies, glorious daisies, all the daisies you could dream of picking. No neighbor would scold you for collecting them, for no handful could be missed in this vast galaxy of white and yellow stars.
With your fist gripping your bounty, recall that wildflowers are just one of summer’s free gifts.
Find magic in the everyday through Jeff Goldblum’s wonderful series.
I’m always on the hunt for other people who create joy around them and explore the world with an eye for wonder. The Disney+ show, “The World According to Jeff Goldblum,” is a short-form series that basically lets the actor and connoisseur run amok while exploring a singular topic in our modern world.
Denim. Ice Cream. Bicycles. Tattoos. He picks a subject and seeks out its history, its evolution, the makers and gurus of it, and the ordinary people devoted to it. He gives an overview, he deep dives, and he tries his darnedest to get to the bottom of why people love whatever the thing is.
The documentary and human interest stories are charming, but the real star is always Jeff Goldblum himself. Quirky, curious to a fault, game for anything, he brings the perfect combination of gravitas and whimsy to his interviews and narrations. He takes everything seriously and nothing too seriously. He deals out thoughtful interview questions and hilariously unexpected comments with equal ease. He never, ever mocks an enthusiast, even when they seem bizarre or over-zealous, but respects them and genuinely tries to understand them and their passions. His commentary is unique and highly specific, and I can’t help but watch, mesmerized, with the feeling that no one else could stand in his place.
I feel like Jeff gets it, that quest for magic in the ordinary. Here are a few examples.
Copyright denimhunters.com
On a “denim safari,” Jeff explores an old mining camp with a curator and merchant of vintage denim. Their infectious enthusiasm plays off each other, until Jeff says they’re like two sticks about to combust. At the end of the adventure, he declares, “This is the most fun I’ve had in my whole life!”
In his eyes, cotton is “cheeky”, and each pair of jeans tells the story of the individual who wears them. At a weekly line dance held by the Dallas Pride LGBTQ group, surrounded by fabulous be-denimed cowboys, he meets someone from Kansas and begins a spontaneous sing-along of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
He makes his own ice cream flavor and shares it with active military troops, asking them to close their eyes and describe the memories the ice cream brings. “Ice cream is like a time machine,” bringing back fun memories with family and friends, perhaps from simple joys in childhood.
“Studies have shown that nostalgia can uplift feelings improve self-esteem and make us feel connected to people for whom we deeply care. It gives comfort. A torch that lights the way to a brighter future. Lady Ice Cream, I say,” – Jeff sings – “I love you, tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you….”
On that final note, Jeff skips off along the beach.
My favorite episode is Bicycles.
Jeff gets his own bike custom built and brings it to a weekly event called Slow Roll Detroit. This community bike ride drew 3-5 thousand people every Sunday to ride through the streets of Motor City. The effects on the city have been astounding: residents along the route throw front-yard barbecues, children come out to cheer, and more importantly, people are moving back to the city because of Slow Roll. They stay in the city more once they get there, going to local shops and restaurants and bringing the community together.
Jeff Goldblum is moved to tears as he concludes his opus on the bicycle and the way they make cities feel more human again.
“Community unification – that’s no small thing. The bicycle is mechanical, it’s a machine, but you know, I – I felt it was an extension of my body. It allowed me in a unique and subtle but profound way to be in connection with everything around me. The potential of me and that bike has allowed me to connect with something in me that is – can I say real? Well, it feels like, in some way, I’m home.” Choking up, he repeats wistfully, “I’m home. Gee.”
The World According to Jeff Goldblum is uplifting every time. I watch it whenever I need a treat and a smile. Two seasons are out now on Disney+.
