Mushroom Radar

Here in the states, we just had our Labor Day holiday with a 3 day weekend.  The weather has cleared up and I was able to get back into the mountains for 2 days of mushroom hunting.  What a joy it was to wander in the woods on those sunny and breezy days, looking for the choicest of local mushrooms, the chanterelles.  They can only be found above the 10,000’ level in elevation, so a bit of hiking is required.  In fact, yesterday, I was well above the 11,000’ level near the tree line, going from shady woods to sunny clearings. 

Here is where the mushroom radar comes in.  I was hiking on established trails, but realized that I had to get off of those trails and deeper into the woods to hopefully find patches of chanterelles that had not been harvested by other shroomers.  I also had to keep my bearings and not get too far off as to get lost like I did last week.  I did eventually get back to the trail after climbing over many logs and slogging through swampy areas, all the while having visions of the search and rescue dogs and helicopters coming to find my dead body! 

Anyway, what I did this past weekend was to get off of the trail a bit and stand there and visually scan the area around me.  This process goes back to my shamanic training, where I would visually and psychically scan a client that would stand in front of me, as I looked for heavy energy patterns.  My eyes would always naturally stop scanning and just look at the location of that heavy energy, even if I couldn’t directly see it. 

In this case, I was intuitively scanning for patches of mushrooms, so I just kept looking around until my eyes stopped and focused on a particular area.  I would then walk over and see what was there.  Of course, a certain amount of trust went along with this process, as the mind’s objections needed to be ignored.  “What if I strayed too far?  What if I fell into a hole?  What if I got lost again?”  Just trust. 

I ended up finding several very nice patches of chanterelles that had not been previously harvested.  The lesson here?  Learn to quiet your mind, activate your inner radar, and trust what you get without hesitation.  You will certainly be rewarded!