Endings and Beginnings

End of the Season

End of the Season ©2012 Bo Mackison

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.  ~ Anna Quindlen

Life is about muddling through the middle. November is about endings and beginnings. The ending of autumn’s high season and the beginning of autumn’s low season.

Autumn, three months long, loses much of its easily seen glory after the first month. Autumn conjures scenes of flaming trees, crisp fall mornings which glide into warm sunny days, apple picking, pumpkin patching, harvest gathering. That is high season autumn, autumn in its glory.

Then the low season of autumn arrives. The generosity of the year’s gardens dwindles. Anything worth saving from the coming cold is saved.

The first hard frost crisps the hardiest plants, the cold holds them in icy suspension for a few hours, and their leaves droop, as if in a state of exhaustion. Plants crinkle, dry out.

The planters are emptied, plants pulled from their summer containers and dropped on the compost pile; gardens are trimmed – a few perennials are cut short and banked with mulch in preparation for the soon to fly snow. The taller ones, their seed heads dried and bountiful, remain standing, crowded one upon another for support.

For now, the garden is quiet, an empty space. Wait until autumn is in her last days. The seed heads of the cone flowers and sunflowers will be the birds’ favorite in late December when other feeders are empty and the ground is hidden in drifts of snow.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. In this month of many ending and as many beginnings, I will post iPhonography processed with the Snapseed application.

 

Adventure in an Antique Mode

Hot Air Balloon

Adventure in an Antique Mode ©2012 Bo Mackison

Like a shamanistic language, flight speaks in different idioms. We can blast rockets to the stars. We can race across the sky on fixed wings. Ballooning appeals because it is more languorous and low-tech; it’s adventure in an antique mood. What a treat to stroll through the veils of twilight, to float across the sky like a slowly forming thought. Flying an airplane, one usually travels the shortest distance between two points. Balloonists can dawdle, lollygag, cast their fate to the wind and become part of the ebb and flow of nature, part of the sky itself, held aloft like any bird, leaf or spore. In that silent realm, far from the mischief and toil of society, all one hears is the urgent breathing of the wind and, now and then, an inspiring gasp of hot air.  ~ Diane Ackerman, ‘Traveling Light,’  New York Times, 11 January 1997.

There are so many phrases in this quote by Diane Ackerman. I want to just pick them out of their sentences and fling them about, see if, perhaps, they will soar as they have my mind soaring.

“stroll through the veils of twilight” – rather like the slowing down part of the day, the time when you sit in the comfy chair near the fireplace and rest your head on its high back, and close your eyes so that you can take a short mind-travel of the day’s events.

“float…like a slowly forming thought” – I have more and more of those. The kinds of thoughts that if I hurry along, force out into the open, well, they are lost forever. I need to nudge those thoughts forward a bit, those thoughts that linger on the edge of consciousness, and then I let them rest awhile. I pretend I am only vaguely interested, and move on to a project that is more busyness than business. More often than not, that elusive thought gradually moves closer, until it is close enough that I can see more than just the edges. I capture a glimpse of the idea. The glimpse is enough. A little more time and the glimpse becomes the thought I once wanted to capture. It has come to me of its own accord.

“become part of the ebb and flow of nature” – well, yes. That is often my intent. I am happiest trekking through the wilder lands than walking along a paved sidewalk or doing business in a building where I feel cut off from the natural world. But the next part speaks even more loudly to me.

“become…part of the sky itself, held aloft” – What would that feel like? The experience of flying, of soaring, or circling the earth below, all the world held at a distance while I took enough time to gather my thoughts. And being held aloft? On what? Gentle air currents, pockets of weightlessness, invisible threads held by unseen angels. Oh, sometimes it is fun to let my mind just take off, and I follow along to see where it will take me.

“far from the mischief and toil of society” – Yes, some days I do dream of escape, of tucking a heap of insulation around me and resting, far from the mischief and from society’s expectations. At one time in my life, I was a phenomenal mind-escape artist. I’ve learned it’s more advantageous, more acceptable too, to take only a bit of a time out – perhaps a walk around the pond – not a long escape, but I still find myself dreaming of the quiet.

“all one hears is the urgent breathing of the wind” – Yes, in the sky, I would expect to hear the urgent breathing of the wind. Here, land-bound, I seem to hear the urgent breathing of the earth. How does one calm the earth’s breathing, soothe its shuddering inhalations and exhalations? How does one help the earth slow its breathing, how does one touch the earth?

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.Occasionally, she veers off course and takes a look at the world through a somewhat poetic view.

This is my October Photo-Heart Connection contribution. When a photo (and the accompanying quote) move me to consider my place in the universe, it is a truly heart connection combination.