An Autumn Ritual 

For years, I have celebrated Autumn in my nature journal by going for a walk, selecting a vibrant fall leaf, and capturing every detail I can, from the brilliant colors down to the bug bites and pock marks left behind by a season of use.  The meditative experience of focusing on the miniature takes me into the present moment, and I am left with a record of the day, the leaf, and the meditation.  Chronicle your present moment in a journal with a leaf and it's portrait.

Catching up with my Nature Journal

Here are some more Inktober images from my nature journal.

Happy Inktober!

I have been keeping a nature journal for decades on and off -- since I found Charles Roth & Clare Walker Leslie's book Keeping a Nature Journal.  The bright illustrations and encouraging text sucked me right in.  As a stay-at-home mother of young kids at the time, nature journaling was a restorative foil to the intensity of my day job. Sunday afternoons, my husband would tend the kids and shoo me out of the house to give me time for myself.  Nature journaling became my creative renewal. I explored quiet woods and fields, tucked myself into hollow tree trunks on snowy days to watch the wildlife go by and filled sketchbooks with my experiences.  With a thermos of hot tea and a thick Hershey's bar, I luxuriated in my earth roving.  Now my life is less dramatic, but time spent sketching the simplest leaf or insect calms me, grounds me and brings me bliss.   I connect with the earth and my fellow creatures, and when I get home, I have drawings to remind me of my adventures.

I wanted a way to share my love of drawing in nature with friends and fellow artists, and to make an online version of my nature journal.   Why not start with daily ink drawings from nature for Inktober?  (If you're unfamiliar with Inktober, check out this YouTube video by Jake Parker, the originator of the project.)

Yesterday, I took my journal to the campus of the Community College of Beaver County in Monaca.  Down below the main buildings, my adult daughter and I found a stream, a clump of Fly Agaric mushrooms, a ferny woodland and plenty of mud after the recent rains to study animal tracks.  Here are the ink sketches from the day.