Barbed Wire – from “The Barrier Series” on Art and Healing

Barbed Wire © 2012 Bo Mackison

Barbed Wire Barrier © 2012 Bo Mackison

“Your life with its immensity and fear . . . is alternately stone in you and star.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, from the poem Evening

Before there was a beginning, before the crisis and a diagnosis, there was a dream.

I see the world. It is there. When I reach up, I reach into the cool air. When I look up, I see a bright blue, cloud scattered skies. Yet the world is beyond my reach. In this dream I have repeatedly, I’m trapped in a tiny enclosure, an enclosure tall on four sides, but open to the sky. I struggle to unlock the gate. When I try to move forward, I’m blocked by a cold steel fence and chain-link wire. Barbed wire adds an extra degree of isolation.

Barbed wire – a common fence, a stereo-typical barrier.

And then I am no longer dreaming. I am living my life in slow-motion, denying there is a problem.

I know I am in a separate place. I cannot reach out to my family and friends, I cannot communicate with them. They are on the other side of the barrier, and even if I managed a whisper, no one can hear me.

I am cast in fear, held down by a weighted stone. My only relief is a connection, however slight, to the natural world. When I look out the window, it is snowy and cold, but I do look up at the sky. I can always see the sky.

The human spirit focuses on that which is in the beyond.

— based on journal entries, October 1990.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Over the next weeks, I’ll be re-posting an 11-part series I first ran in January, 2013 on art and healing. Feeling somewhat vulnerable doing this once again, but this message is too important to keep buried in the bowels of my blog. It is my hope that my journey will also inspire others. We are all on a journey of one kind or another. We are all pilgrims following our path.

Possibility

Tumbleweed in Barbed Wire Fence

Tumbleweed Fence © 2013 Bo Mackison

Winds that once blew free,
now scatters dust to the sky.
~ lyrics from The Cowboy, by Randy Newman

Wandering, I am lost.

I speed along the washboard dirt road, skimming its ridges,
Don’t jar me, bumping along dips and rises.

Earth so dry, wild and unsettled winds sweep orange dust into roiling vortexes,
chase tumbleweeds across the grasslands.

Hello, tumbleweeds, caught in the barbs and fence lines,
impaled on gnarled mesquite.

Globes of sun-bleached gold, you can no longer travel on wind’s breath,
whipping forces crumble your desiccated skeletons.

Tumbleweeds, no more wandering and skittering across this land.
I know how it feels to be trapped, too, unable to roll away.

Ominous clouds, they are possibility.
Desert rain is never a promise, yet
when seeds swell with moisture, they open.

——————–

Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is exploring creative photography and emotion in a  series called Desert Lines – a combination of visual lines and written lines.