Trees are Sanctuaries

Looking at the Past

Trees are Sanctuaries © 2012 Bo Mackison

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. ~ Herman Hesse

Trees Are Sanctuaries

1806, The People Build the Church

They make the brick, kiln the lime, raise the walls, lay the roof,
paint murals and sacristy ornamentation, build niches for the statues of the Saints.
They clear the land, build the fences, plant corn and wheat,
and from the priests’ cache of pods and seeds, they plant and then tend
fruit orchards, nut trees, and olive trees.
They learn the ways of the missionaries,
they marry, raise children, care for their sick, weep for their dying, bury their dead.

1827, Weary, Ill, and Wary of Raiding Enemies

Many of the People wrap the statuary in leathery strips of yucca,
the bundled saints cradled like newborn babes
protected from summer’s heat, shifting winds, monsoon thunderstorms,
from damage to their wooden limbs or chipped painted robes or eyes of porcelain marbles.
They walk north, leave the Tumacacori Mountains,
settle in another valley with another priest and another church.

1848, Tumacacori Mission, Deserted in the Desert.

No missionary priest leads his people, crucifix in hand,
his carved cross held high, a silhouette in the blue bowl of sky.
No one gives signal to the last few of the Desert People
who now abandon their homes, possessions, crops;
abandon their church, stacked bricks of adobe, and
precious, the limestone wash, white like angels’ wings;
now the church is an apparition towering amidst the desert grasses, agave, mesquite,
standing in the foreground of the mountains.

2012, A View through the Window

Open to the cool desert nights,
no roof for protection, no doors.
Only the ruins remain,  maintained as ruins.
But the window opening frames the cottonwoods, green and tall,
lining the Santa Cruz River, growing.
They hold my fascination. When I walk to the river,
they form the arched roof over my head,
provide a spongy carpet of decaying leaves under my feet.
Wisps of white cottony fluff, seeds for the future, drift on the southwest breeze.

The trees are the sanctuaries.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC, living and photographing in southern Arizona. There are also days Bo wanders through Mission ruins, thinks of days long past, and writes poetry.

Let the Sun Shine In

Let the Sunlight In

Let the Sun Shine In © 2012 Bo Mackison

Let the sunshine
Let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine
Let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
Let the sunshine
Let the sunshine in
The sun shine in…

~ lyrics from the 5th Dimension’s song Let the Sunshine In, 1969

This is another photo from a series of photographs of a small adobe room, the granary, part of the ruins of the mission at the Tumacacori National Historic Site in southern Arizona.

I am finding much to think about as I work with images from this ancient storage room. There are pots to fill, small windows to let the sun shine in, even a quiet exercise I employed using my imagination to change seemingly drab surroundings into a scene (and sense) of vibrancy.

More to come. Amazing how many metaphors for living one can find in a centuries-old adobe ruins.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  She frequently visits Tumacacori where she finds herself deep in thought.

Pottery at Tumacacori

Pottery in Tumacacori Granary

Pottery in Tumacacori Granary © 2012 Bo Mackison

Courage is the price that
Life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not,
Knows no release from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear the sound of wings.

Nor can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion.
Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold the resistless day,
And count it fair.

       ~Amelia Earhardt

Fill one pot with courage, one pot with loving kindness, one pot with contentedness, one pot with a store of the sun’s healing rays…

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Bo Mackison loves visiting Tumacacori where she often think deep thoughts.

Filling Containers in the Desert

Pottery Row

Containers © 2012 Bo Mackison

In ancient times wise men and women fled out into the desert to find a place where they could be fully present to their inner struggles at work within them. The desert became a place to enter into the refiner’s fire and be stripped down to one’s holy essence. The desert was a threshold place where one emerged different than when one entered.  ~ Christine Valters Painter

Last year I traveled to Tucson, urban civility at the edge of the Sonora Desert, and ventured into the wild spaces, a bit at a time, a few steps from my safe haven. I had many goals, and I achieved many of them, but they were more a to-do list of photography related exercises, learning the routines of running a fledgling business, and practicing the ins and outs of living on my own.

I considered my first solo experience in Arizona a successful venture, but now I’m in a different place than I was in early 2011. I have new plans, new goals, new business ideas I want to put into practice. And I have a totally different agenda, too. I want to take specific steps to assess what I am doing, who I am, and who I want to be as I approach a transitional time in my life.

I will be going to Arizona in a few days. I will be asking questions, and hopefully discovering many answers and possibilities and options. When I come back to the Midwest in three months, I hope to have symbolically filled at least a few of the empty containers I am bringing along.

I’ll be working on this part of my journey – my desert days – and writing about my discoveries on my Seeded Earth blog. Maybe the seeds I planted last year will sprout, maybe even bloom, with the care I bestow on them this year.

I love the above photo. I photographed the original in March of 2011.

The photo reminds me of many things. First, these are containers for necessities. This pottery were photographed in the ruins of a granary at the Tucumcacari Mission in southern Arizona. Several hundred years ago, clay pots like these were filled with the autumn harvest and stored in the granary. The mission inhabitants relied on their stores of grains and other foods to sustain them through the winter months.

The photo reminds me of the simple things in life. Since I now have a place of my own in the Tucson area, I’ve made a commitment to maintain a minimalist approach while living there.  It is a small place, so I am making some no cluttering ground rules from the very beginning.

And finally the photo reminds me of change and the need to keep an open mind. When I re-discovered photography five years ago, I had never used a digital camera. My first camera with interchangeable lenses was a Pentax K-1000, a film camera. I knew film. I knew how to develop photos in a darkroom. I knew nothing about digital photography.

But photography is an amazing art medium because there are so many levels of expertise and so many options. There is never only one way to take a particular photograph. One can take good photos with the simplest of cameras and with a minimum amount of practice. But add reading about new things, trying new techniques, exploring the advancing technologies of photography software, and shooting thousands of photographs a year, and then the opportunities become inexhaustible.

When I first began taking digital photographs, I thought I would never use Photoshop — partly because I didn’t have access to a Photoshop program and partly because I had no idea how to use Photoshop. Anyway, I was busy enough learning the basics. It was actually a good move, though I didn’t realize why at the time.

The first year I went digital, I shot my photos, then posted them straight out of the camera (SOOC). Gradually I learned how to adjust the simplest components – color, contrast, sharpening, cropping. Finally I bought Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Elements (the easy Photoshop) and began to explore the mysteries of post-processing.

And now?

Now I’ve discovered the amazing world of seeing a subject, taking photographs, and then bringing the files back to my computer where I manipulate them — without rules or limitations — until I again see what it was I originally saw. I explore the idea that what I see is unique and worthy of creation.

I’ve opened up a new world of digital photography and I’m learning anew by study and practice, practice, practice…while having a great deal of FUN!

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  In a couple of days, she will cross the threshold and begin her desert experience.

 

 

On the Journey

Tumacacori - In Balance

Tumacacori – In Balance © 2011 Bo Mackison

I am rather fascinated by the granary and the clay pottery. So many opportunities for composition studies. Maybe too many, hmm? Even though I have moved on, and I am visiting new places, I will share these photos of pots in this post, and then I will share photos of the cemetery at Tumacacori National Historic Park tomorrow.

Tumacacori - Two Plus Three

Tumacacori – Two Plus Three © 2011 Bo Mackison

I was asked, after I wrote about sitting in the garden at Tumacacori, what I heard and felt as I rested in that sacred space.

I let my thoughts flow freely as I sat there, as I took in this ancient place, still filled with the “ancient.” And as my thoughts came, I thought about freedom. It was as if this place was filled with an energy that was all about seeking freedom.

Tumacacori - Three Pots

Tumacacori – Three Pots

I sat mostly in silence, and listened–to the birds singing, the wind rustling the dried grasses, the footsteps retreating from me, and I wrote only a few words in my journal. As the thoughts came, I wrote, no censoring, no editing.

Give us our freedom.
Give us our freedom,
but we were never freed.

Now you say, “Let me be free.”
And your request has been answered.

Do not look back at the past; live in this moment.

Take this gift, give thanks, move on.

As I spend my time exploring southern Arizona on my own, I have been thinking a great deal about freedom, but also about connectedness, about creating, about making meaning.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is living in Tucson for two months, exhibiting her photography in art shows, taking photographs of Arizona landmarks, both historical and natural, and blogging about photography, art fairs, and learning to live on her own. It is an experience well worth the effort.