Quest – A Desert Wisdom Card

March 20, 2013 by 10 Comments
Rocks - Desert Wisdom Card

A Path of Rocks ©2013 Bo Mackison

If we are spiritual beings on a human path rather than human beings who may be on a spiritual path . . . then life is not only a journey but a pilgrimage or quest as well. When we experience sacred moments it often is not so much a matter of outer geography but of finding soulful places within ourselves.  ~ Jean Shinoda Bolen in Crossing to Avalon

The QUEST photograph is of a rocky trail in the back canyons of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

While walking this trail, I quickly lost sight of the gravel road and ramada near the trail head. It was as if I had entered a wilderness region, far away from civilization. There was evidence of footprints, but at no time did I meet or pass any other hikers. Then, without much warning, clouds gathered and skies darkened with threatening storm.

After I’d ascended one side of the mountain and then descended into the back canyon, I found a large boulder to rest upon. The rising mountains, the canyon arroyo, the cactus and other desert plants offered signs of life, but it was eerily silent in the early afternoon.

Each well-considered question can lead to a whole universe of wisdom, because one insight leads to another as the answers come.  ~ Evan T. Pritchard

It was a sacred space, a place to take in the surrounding natural world and consider my place in the grand scheme of things. In the deep silence, I listened deeply as I considered recent paths on my life journey.

A quest can include travel to a sacred place or it can be an inner experience.

It is a time to stop and listen, ask questions, discern answers.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

QUEST offers these questions/options for journal prompts, creative activities, and calls to action:

  • What lessons might be learned when traveling on a rocky path? What questions might be asked while on a quest?
  • While looking at the photograph, visualize climbing the first rocky step and consider a challenge you are facing.  Then while climbing the rest of the steps, think of a positive action you can take as you climb ever higher.
  • Consider planning a pilgrimage to a sacred site, a place that has personal spiritual significance. This might be a historical church or other place of worship, a shrine, a labyrinth, a historical site, a quiet garden setting. Plan an activity for the visit – take photographs, make a pencil or watercolor sketch, create a scrapbook page, write a journal entry or pen a few lines of poetry.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  Bo is creating a deck of Desert Wisdom Cards to provide a focus and a framework for reflection, to encourage a connection with nature, using a Sonoran Desert theme – its myths and stories, cultures and heritage, and the desert’s remarkable natural beauty and resources.

Filed Under: Art of Healing, Desert Wisdom, Photography Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Play – A Desert Wisdom Card

March 17, 2013 by 8 Comments
Pottery Jackrabbits, Playing

Jackrabbit Wisdom – Play © 2013 Bo Mackison

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I fill myself so well, to the point of bursting. I wake up early and hear my morning voices leaping around like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
~ Ray Bradbury

I love the set of music-making, playful pottery jackrabbits.

I imagine them jumping around, creating joyful notes, all improvisation, unpredictable and original. I even hear a  stream of hoppy, happy notes.

I also love the idea of Ray Bradbury joyfully filling himself with words and music, comedy and rhythm, until he is bursting. He is so full that he wakes early each morning, ready to capture the leaping thoughts and joyful words. What an image — the power of play, so inspiring that it fills the creative well.

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. ~ Alan Wilson Watts

I love this set of music-making jackrabbits, pottery critters that I found at a folk art market in Southern Arizona. These funny little critters make me laugh. I imagine them jumping around, creating joyful notes, all improvisation, unpredictable and original. I imagine a stream of hoppy, happy notes filling the air.

I also love the idea of Ray Bradbury joyfully filling himself with words and music, comedy and rhythm, until he is ready to burst. He is so full that he wakes early each morning, ready to capture his leaping thoughts and joyful words. What an image — the power of play, so inspiring that it fills the creative well.

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. ~ Alan Wilson Watts

PLAY offers questions/reflections for journal writing, art, and a call for action:

  • Consider these journal prompts: What wisdom do the jackrabbits offer? When is my work play? When is my play work?
  • How can I incorporate play in my life as a daily practice? Jot down a few ideas of play that requires no set-up, no special equipment, only a few minutes of time in between other activities.
  • While chalkboard chalk is becoming a thing of the past, sidewalk chalk is easy to find. What might you do with a box of colored chalk? The obvious — drawing pictures on sidewalks — is great fun, and since expectations are minimal, you can easily lose yourself in this expressive process. Add an uplifting message. Write a famous quote or a few lines from a favorite poem. Add an observation. The options are endless.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She plays while she creates her series of Desert Wisdom Cards and then she plays with the cards.

Filed Under: Art of Healing, Desert Wisdom, Photography Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Reclaiming Innocence

March 15, 2013 by 18 Comments

In my last post I introduced and shared the origins of my book, the first November’s Child edition, a book I created with the Moleskine + MILK book editor.

In this post, I share the second edition of the book. I hand crafted this book after taking several book structure workshops. The original book has 18 photographs. Because of my book-making inexperience, I decreased the number of photographs in the second book to seven, including the cover photo. (I was working on a tight deadline in order to enter the book in the PaperWorks exhibit at the Tucson Festival of Books. I plan to create the book again and in the next edition I will include all of the photos.)

The first three pages of November’s Child tell the story in words. In this post, I present the words in their entirety. The remainder of the book is only photographs. They tell the rest of the story.

Novembers Child - Cover

November’s Child – Cover ©2013 Bo Mackison

I held tightly to my secrets for decades.

Then, when I was in my early thirties, I had a spirit breakdown. Most people refer to this kind of experience as a mental breakdown. But really, it was not my mind that could no longer function while carrying the burden of my secrets. It was my spirit.

I had a broken spirit.

After that initial break, I spent two decades of my middle-life, my prime-time years, in and out of doctors’ and therapists’ offices, in-patient psychiatric units, survivor’s groups, dialectical behavior training sessions, and art therapy groups. Occasionally, my spirit would become critically ill, and I would retreat inside myself for self-healing. These dissociative disappearances were met with great resistance by my treatment team, but they were a last-resort survival technique.

And survive I did, as best I could.

Eventually, I immersed myself in many kinds of art as part of my therapy, including drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, pottery, and weaving. I wrote daily in journals and spent hours walking in the natural world. For years I worked with a creativity/life coach. I added naturopathy, body-mind work, qi-gong, exercise, and meditation to my routine. Gradually I regained better control of my life.

My mind, body, and spirit were patched together.

November's Child - Inside Cover

November’s Child – Inside Cover ©2013 Bo Mackison

Still, the lost innocence of childhood haunted me, walked with me and my shadow. I carried evidence of my scars – post traumatic stress syndrome, diminished self-esteem, poor coping skills, non-existent boundaries, extreme introversion, and a highly sensitive personality.

It was then that I re-discovered photography, a hobby I’d enjoyed in my twenties. I began a daily practice of making a photograph and posting it to my blog. The photo-blog led to requests for fine art prints and offers for publication in printed media.

Eventually I shared my photography in person, doing juried art fairs and festivals in the Midwest and Southwest. Some of my photographs were accepted in group exhibits in art centers, galleries, and museums. I found meaningful work, meaningful connections, and meaning-making through my photography and my art.

In October 2012, I attended a week-long photography conference in Chicago. I participated in a workshop on artist books presented by photographer Lauren Henkin. I was mesmerized. I loved the idea of creating handmade books. Upon my return to my winter home in Tucson I joined PaperWorks, a paper and book artists’ collective, so I could explore the craft of bookmaking.

I returned to my family home in Wisconsin for the Thanksgiving holiday and visited my favorite botanical gardens to photograph the autumn flowers. While walking the less frequented paths, I wandered onto an adjacent property.

Novembers Child - Page

November’s Child – Page ©2013 Bo Mackison

I discovered an abandoned warehouse and walked around its perimeter. Everywhere I looked I saw features that spoke to me. There were symbols and metaphors — graffiti, piles of debris, garbage dumpsters, a crumbling brick building — that triggered memories of my past and my ongoing efforts to continue the healing process.

The next day I visited an antique store in search of carefully selected props representing childhood and the next weekend I returned to the warehouse. I placed the props — a child’s red chair, a green tricycle, a yellow dress — in the warehouse landscape and photographed dozens of vignettes.

Later when I began to process the photos, the immensity of what I had re-created struck me and I cried while studying the images. These tears released buried feelings and solidified my recognition and understanding of the innocence of children. They were tears of blessings.

I share these photographs as a testimony that, yes, the human spirit can be broken. But that spirit can also be mended and made whole.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  She believes in the power of healing using the creative arts.

Filed Under: Art of Healing, Book Arts Tagged With: , , ,

November’s Child

March 14, 2013 by 10 Comments
November's Child - Book Cover

November’s Child © 2013 Bo Mackison

We will tell you this: we are doing the impossible. We are teaching ourselves to be human.
When we are finished, the strands which connect us will be unbreakable;
already we are stronger than we have ever been.
~ Martha Courtot

In August of 2012, I began an online class offered by Abbey of the Arts. The class was a twelve week interactive class, Women on the Threshold: The Wild Heart of Longing. The course offered story, creative arts, and guidance to step into a place of unknowing, the threshold space where the old is released so that the new can be born. (This is now offered as a self-study course.)

I wrote the following last November, towards the end of the course:

I study the [above] quote first thing this morning, before the early morning’s darkness turns to light. I again read the words, “We are doing the impossible. We are teaching ourselves to be human.”

The sky lightens a bit more, and I feel a lightening in myself. Walking with others, though still alone on my path, I notice a strength that I long denied. I used to say, “I am not that strong. I am damaged. I am so alone.” It was my mantra.

It was also self-prophecy.

As I repeatedly told myself that I was weak, damaged, and lonely, I believed those words with an ever-deepening conviction. But change is possible. It happens as I journal, work on art and poetry, walk in the nearby woods. Collecting the stones and feathers and stories from this workshop, interacting in spirit and deep connection, I notice a gradual change in myself.

I watch the sky as it cycles into morning, and I repeat words of wisdom, the real truth. “I am strong, I am whole. I am not afraid.”

For too many years, I carried my life story in my heart. Instead of focusing on the positives, I let the negatives creep in and weary my soul, grieve in my heart. My story was my companion — not a happy companion or a healthy companion, but it was a familiar. I knew the story intimately. Some times I pushed the story away, only to find that it had crept back to take residence in dark crevices. It filled my empty spaces. I never could push away the story far enough.

Finally, instead of trying to eradicate the past, I embraced my story of long ago. I accepted what once was, the unchangeable past that is neither my present nor my future. I stopped pushing it away and instead focused on my present, while the past lingered around the perimeter. Gradually my story lost much of its allure and power, its grip on me.

I decided to face the past to see if there were lessons to be learned before I could release it, and began an art project. I stopped making excuses. I worked on the release of anger and hatred, I considered old habits and re-shaped them. I am not allowing them to interfere with present-day living. Not perfect, but better, so much better!

My art project took wings. It was a photography project involving vintage childhood toys from the 1950s. I brought home antique shop and flea market finds. I stashed them in corners of my studio – a yellow dress, perfect for a kindergartener’s first day of school, starched and pressed; two tiny red school chairs; and a twin of my first camera, a Brownie camera, which was a present from a beloved grandmother. My last purchase was a lime-green tricycle, much pre-loved.

As I worked on the project, I remembered me as a small girl. I clearly saw this child riding on her cherished trike, allowed to pedal around and around the block, finding freedom in the experience of traveling that short distance on her own, pumping the pedals until her fear and loneliness lessened and she could be in her body once more.

These vintage items, this collection, is rather like a collection of stones and feathers and shells. As I live with these tiny reminders of childhood, I find my heart softening. Memories of a kind smile or a warm hug resurface. I re-connect with a small child’s determination and resiliency.

Crossing thresholds, listening and absorbing so much wisdom, breaking out of routine, beginning this very personal creative project — so many wonders, so many miracles!

The project is now completed. There are two books. The first one, in the above photograph, is a book I created and ordered from Moleskine + MILK. The second is an abbreviated version which I made after taking a workshop on hand crafted book structures. The second book was in an exhibit of artist books at the Tucson Festival of Books this past weekend, and was selected to be in an exhibit at the Tucson Main Library during the month of April.

As the above excerpt from the poem states, “We are doing the impossible. We are teaching ourselves to be human.”

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  She finds healing in the creative art process. Photographs and an excerpt from the second book will be in the next post.

Filed Under: Art of Healing, Book Arts Tagged With: , , , ,

Choosing a Path

March 8, 2013 by 10 Comments
Ajo Mountain Trail

Ajo Mountain Trail ©2013 Bo Mackison

“One’s options in this world are as vast as the horizon, which is technically a circle and thus infinitely broad.
Yet we must choose each step we take with utmost caution,
for the footprints we leave behind are as important as the path we will follow.
They’re part of the same journey — our story.” ~ Lori R Lopez

Sherpa and I hiked several of the trails in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. When we trekked up the Bull Pasture Trail, we encountered lots of switchbacks, lots of rocky trail. Occasionally we walked along a packed dirt path, but more often we were picking our way through rocky rubble. Every foot placement was a decision.

I noticed that Sherpa and I chose very different paths. He would choose to veer to the side and balance on wobbly stones. I would choose to climb up larger, more solid rocks, balancing with my hiking stick and my hands when necessary. He sidestepped down the side of an arroyo, slip sliding as he descended. I did my sidesteps in smaller increments, testing the stability of the rocks so I had a firm footing. We each choose different paths, but we chose our individual paths with intention.

So different — hiking on a rocky trail versus strolling on a smooth sidewalk. For the majority of us, a sidewalk poses little problem. We barely notice where we place our feet. We walk, usually heading to a destination, and often pay little attention to our surroundings. Walking on a rocky path requires concentration and deliberation, the path is seldom designed for speed, and often rewards us with magnificent views.

The kinds of paths we choose can apply to living a full life, also. We can choose to walk the easier path, walk it in such a way as to never call attention to ourselves. Follow the same path as everyone else. Or we can maneuver over a rockier trail, choosing our own way. We can walk with intention. We can be observant. We can take in the view.

I can’t do all of my walking climbing a mountain path, but I don’t want to do all of my walking on a sidewalk either.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She continues to make discoveries when she connects with the natural world.

Filed Under: Art of Healing, Photography, Travel Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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