Articles by Bo Mackison

Broken Stalks

Ice on Pond and Recent Snowfall
Strickers Pond, First Snow © 2011 Bo Mackison

https://rmscherubimhealthcare.com/services/prescriptions-medical-refills/ How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to say about it all. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

https://www.grupoursa.com/trayectoria/ For many years, I had long periods of time when I felt like a broken stalk, a decaying plant. Blackened, brittle, beyond repair. Beyond care. I couldn’t access my soul, my spirit. I held the broken-ness tightly. It was the only identity I knew.

https://www.52editions.com/personal/ When I became interested in photography, it was a last-ditch effort to instill a daily routine in my life, a ritual, to focus on a reason to get out of bed each morning and look at the world. Really look at the good in the world, in my world.

Buy Lyrica Without Prescription Depression sucks life until everything gets covered in a murky, ugly gray. Anxiety turns that gray morass into a roiling fearsome monster. Photography became my potent weapon against depression, anxiety, even despair. Photography provided me with a physical way to add meaning to each day.

https://www.jacobysaustin.com/events/ It wasn’t that I was not surrounded by a loving husband and family. I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the necessities of life and more. I did. But from that place of inner darkness, it was a struggle to appreciate the huge gifts that I had. Family, friends, doctors, therapists — all made monumental efforts to reach that dark place. With their help I made small gains, but I never felt like I had a “real” life.

Buy Clonazepam Without Prescription Forgiveness is the economy of the heart . . . forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits. 

https://thesentinelgroup.com/roundup-settlement/ ~ Hannah More

https://drbatayneh.com/glaucoma/ One of the major changes in my life began with a small change in my day. I began consistently taking at least one photograph each day and posting it to my blog. My goal was to post a daily photo for a year and I did so from October 2007 to October 2008. Once I reached that goal, I continued to shoot every day. What had begun as a few minute practice became a habit and then a creative art, then a career and a passion.

http://www.ztpackaging.com/art_requirements/ I do not only think of photography as my art, my career. I think of photography as a cosmic gift.  As I pursued photography, it began to light my soul, lighten my spirit. I think it not coincidental that the word photography consists of two Greek words combined into one. “Photo” is derived from “phos” and means “light” in English. “Graphy” is derived from “graphi” which mean to write or draw.

https://hymnsandhome.com/thrifting-vintage/ “Photography – to write or draw with light.”

go site While I repeatedly created photographs, I also shone light into my inner darkness. Gradually the darkness lightened. The murky gray took on color. The roiling emotional monster began to quiet. I was able to breathe deeply, look anew at my surroundings, and see beauty everywhere — in the colors of the tiniest flower, the majesty of a century oak, the grain in polished wood, even in the symmetry and angularity of broken plant stalks on a snowy pond surface.

Humanity is never so beautiful as when praying for forgiveness, or else forgiving another. 
~ Jean Paul
Anger is a difficult emotion. It serves no purpose years after an injury or an assault to the mind or body. The anger I held so tightly caused added pain to me and the people I most loved. Yet I didn’t want to let go. I knew anger. I knew anger intimately. The burning fires of anger, so I told myself, kept me alert, kept me alive. And living with this anger also isolated me, which, illogically, gave me a heightened sense of safety.

https://bettierose.co.uk/146_bakercaralaurenceella/ But anger is a hard master and requires immense energy to keep it burning. I was exhausted. And one more thing, a very important discovery, I was lonely.

https://thelonelycreative.com/photography-gallery/ It was time to stop the constant longing to change the past. Time to stop protecting myself by maintaining an invisible fence. Time to let go.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what’s bitter and move on.
~ Bill Cosby

When I held so tightly to anger, I became strangled by its force. I wanted to be loved, but I was afraid of love. I felt I wasn’t worthy of love, that once someone loved me, they would discover the true me and leave me. I made plenty of mistakes, trying to protect myself while controlling everything and everyone around me.

In letting go of my need to change the past, I can work on today. I can work on forgiving myself. And ask for forgiveness from those whom I have hurt. I am learning. I still have much to learn.

It’s all journey.

Pondering the Pond

Pond, Under and Above

Pond and Plants © 2011 Bo Mackison

One looks long and the world comes in. ~ Joseph Campbell

The skies were clear this morning and I saw the sun rise. My day always begins in a better place when I can greet the sun personally, and not have the clouds be an intermediary.

I walked around Strickers Pond again. Part of it winds through woodland on a bike path, part of the path divides the water from a few grassy backyards, part walks through tall plants and past a beavers’ territory, and the last part borders a dead end lane and allows great access to the shoreline.

I intend for my morning walk to be meditative, quieting. Some of the time it is. But then I get distracted. How could I not stare in awe at the lines of these aquatic plants, dried, decaying?  Some are broken, others still stand tall. A few hold the lingering plants they once held aloft.

I was distracted by the view above the thin ice and the view below the ice. Amazed at the lines – angular, half hidden. The shadows added another dimension.

Don’t shadows always add another dimension – both in the plant world and in our lives.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer, owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.

Diverging Lines

Atrium  - in Color

Atrium @ 2011 Bo Mackison

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? . . . We are all meant to shine, as children do . . . And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” ~ Marianne Williamson

I am taking things easy this evening, after a wild day of stormy weather, intense explorations, eye-opening meetings, and a spell of night driving on dark, slippery roads where a few cars had already slid into the side ditch. I felt relief when I pulled the car into the garage, sat for a few minutes in the dark and took a few deep breaths to super-oxygenate my brain.

I met with some wise people today. I went seeking answers — again — to questions I have asked for nearly twenty years, questions that no one was able or willing to answer, and this time I got an answer. There was no guarantee, but I was offered a course of actions. They would require life altering commitments, but there is now a road map and a chance for success.

While I pondered my options, lines from the above quote by Marianne Williamson flashed through my head. I searched for the entire quote in my notebook where I have copied quotes for years. I read the words again.

“. . . our deepest fear is . . . Order Lyrica Online powerful beyond measure . . . It is our Ambien No Prescription light that frightens us . . . Be https://www.52editions.com/promotions/ brilliant, gorgeous, https://www.completerehabsolutions.com/employee-education-training/ talented, fabulous. . . here liberated from our own fear.”

Do I want to accept this challenge? It will be hard work. A change in life-style. Commitment to a routine, not for a few weeks or a few months, for a lifetime.

I make excuses. I am too old to re-wire myself. I am too set in my ways to begin a new routine. I don’t have enough energy to commit to a new movement regime. I don’t have enough will-power to re-structure my meals, my food choices. It would be too hard.

And I don’t source site want to change!!!

But, paradoxically, I desperately https://www.parolacce.org/eventi/ do want to change.

I glance at my book of quotations again, and these words catch my attention:

“The veil of illusion that has been keeping you from perceiving reality as it is, is starting to burn away. The fire is not the heated fire of passion, but the cool flame of awareness.” ~ Osho

And that is the answer. Now that I am Buy Xanax Online Without Prescription aware of a choice, of a chance for this change in my life, I can’t refuse.

—————

Bo Mackison is a photographer, owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is also a woman who collects wise quotations, and sometimes those wise words are exactly what she needs to read.

A Heavy Weight, Lifted

A Heavy Weight

A Heavy Weight © 2009 Bo Mackison

“For the next 30 days—the time most experts agree it takes to make a practice into a habit—I’m going to return to my practice of deep writing and walking meditation. Both of those practices help me nurture my spirituality, work on karma debts, hatch some creative ideas and allow them to fledge, and explore the rough ledges of forgiveness and healing.” – Quinn McDonald

I decided to do the practice of writing and walking, especially appropriate during this season, a hustling — and yes, I used the word hustling without the bustling, because I feel rather hustled by the Holiday consumer push — and busy time of the year.

Also, in the upper Midwest, it is a dark and gloomy time as we approach the shortest day of the year. It has been days since even the sun has come out for a peek. And yes, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this, and the idea of meditative walking and writing sounded like a great prescription for my darkening mood.

In fact, I needed the meditative experience so much, I decided to take the day off from my photo work and from the computer yesterday. I needed some “me” time to refresh not only my wellspring of creativity, but also my “soul” well that felt painfully dry.

When I went walking, I walked around the neighborhood pond, noticing the thin ice, the bare sticks poking from the rough surface. At the north end of the pond, a large patch of browned stalks of water plants sprang from the slushy surface, not yet decayed. There was beauty there. Deep beauty. I stood and watched the silent landscape for many minutes. It was meditation, of sorts.

I wrote at different times during the day, paying attention to how the different times worked for me. I slipped in a couple of naps, too, for it was such a silent, dark day. I read poetry – pages and pages of poetry. And I experienced a wealth of emotions – from despair to facing reality with a stiff upper lip to hope, and everything in between. I went to bed very early.

This morning, even though the light of day has not yet come, even though a steady cold rain is pelting the earth and it is likely to be another gray day, I feel as if I have refilled my soul well, at least partly – enough so that energy has returned, determination to see my way through has returned.

Perhaps exploring the depths of emotions leads not only to a re-emergence of creativity, but also a sense of rejuvenation and a renewed understanding that life is a set of many cycles, that winter’s gray and silence provides the base for spring’s renewal, that a season of light always follows a season of darkness.

———————-

Bo Mackison is a photographer, owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is spending 30 days exploring and refreshing the wellspring of creativity. And Bo is refilling her soul well, too.

Blue Doors

Evening Time

Evening Time @ 2011 Bo Mackison

I’m taking the day off from the computer – substituting a day of quiet, time for reflection and long hand writing, time for reading and aimless walking, and filling the empty well.