These twelve photographs are from my portfolio “Barriers”. I explore the journey of claiming my story and sharing my healing process, using my photography as a stepping off platform. I have posted each photograph with my story compiled from journals, letters, and personal conversations during the past two weeks. This is the series in completion.

I.

Let go of the need for perfection – perfection bought at a high cost.
Embrace imperfection, acknowledge mistakes, claim the lessons they provide. Embrace change.   ~ Bo Mackison

II.

Your life with its immensity and fear . . . now bounded, now immeasurable, it is alternately stone in you and star.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, from Evening

III.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude
in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”  ~ Viktor E Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

IV.

“We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds.”
~ Pema Chödrön When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Hard Times

V.

“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
~ Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Hard Times

VI.

“Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking it.” ~ Naomi Wolf

VII.

“Art is not a part of life, it is not an addition to life, it is the essence of those pieces of us that make us fulfilled.
That give us hope. That give us dreams and provide the world a view very different than what it would have been without us.”  ~ Hasan Davis

VIII.

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable,
there we also stand already quite near its transformation.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

IX.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall. ~ Confucius

 X.

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. ~ Hermann Hesse

XI.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

XII.

“The portal of healing and creativity always takes us into the realm of the spirit.”  ~ Angeles Arrien

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  “Barriers” – a twelve part series exploring photography, possibilities, and the healing process.