Honolulu – First Impressions

Honolulu Skyline

Honolulu Skyline

To the arriving and leaving. To the journey
I wake to freshness. And do reverence.
~ Jack Gilbert

Circling the Hawaiian Islands – part family tradition, part pilgrimage, part challenge.

Family Tradition:

I’ve been traveling the United States – summer road trip! – for nearly 50 years; my husband and kids joined me in the annual camping/cross-country road trip over thirty years ago. By the time our three kids had graduated from high school, we had visited 46 states. My younger daughter and I explored Washington and a bit of Oregon in 2010 to increase our “states visited” number to 48. Our recent visit to Hawaii made the island state #49. With good fortune, Alaska will be #50 in 2016.

Almost a year ago Manda and I began planning a visit to Hawaii. To take best advantage of our short stay of 9 days, two of which were travel days, we planned to fly into Honolulu and then take a 7 day island cruise, with stops at Maui, the Big Island (day long stops at both Hilo and Kona) and then an overnight stop in Kauai before cruising back to Oahu. The plan worked well for us as first time visitors – it was a delicious taste of Hawaii. We now have a long list of new favorites to visit the next time we head (far) west.

St. Augustine Catholic Church and Waikiki Coastline

St. Augustine Catholic Church and Waikiki Coastline

Pilgrimage: a spirit-renewing ritual, a journey to find/see the sacred in the ordinary.

~ Bo Mackison

Part Pilgrimage:

We arrived in Honolulu a day early to get our land legs after our long flight, although in retrospect it wasn’t so much the land legs I needed as a stronger pair of sea legs…

The view from the hotel – iconic. Not only the golden Pacific, a sea of honey-hued waves aglow in the setting sun, but also a bit of the Waikiki coast, the iconic surfers (and surfing students) waiting to ride incoming waves, palm tree-lined streets. And this church, tucked into the hotel hustle and beach crowd – St. Augustine by the Sea. The modern church, built in 1962, replaced an older wooden structure built in 1901. The older church was well-known as the “church without windows” — latticework walls provided an open structure and ocean breezes provided ventilation. I hoped for time inside the church — a soothing place to sit with my thoughts and a place to rest my knees for a bit — but the building was locked.

Instead I found refuge sitting on a bench tucked under a banyan tree and watched the rhythm of the surfers and the waves.

Hotel Visitors, 26th Floor

Hotel Visitors, 26th Floor

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

~Toni Morrison

Part Challenge:

This trip was on my maybe list for months. Though we’d made the reservations almost a year ago, 2015 was one of those challenging years, punctuated by way too many ups and downs. I’d had to cancel several greatly anticipated trips throughout the year, aware that in order to best care for myself I had to limit travel and other activities.

So it was with a mixture of concern and relief that I packed my luggage for Hawaii. I also packed a mental self-care list, acknowledging the need to balance the joys and frustrations of travel with my awareness of limitations and the willingness to practice extreme self-care when needed.

Challenge…but I wanted to fly.

 

New York City – So Much to See, So Much to Do!

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Coffee to Start the Day © 2014 Bo Mackison

Start the morning with the largest cup of coffee in sight. A very good beginning.

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Harlem School Children’s Mural © 2014 Bo Mackison

Then a walk through the neighborhood, brightened by a long wall of children’s. There is something about community art that makes the whole street a happier place to walk

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MOMA Interior © 2014 Bo Mackison

Pre-baby-shower duties performed, we took a two break and visited MOMA. We arrived early enough to beat the Saturday crowd, and so had no lines to negotiate. Matisse’s Cut Out Exhibit was a surprise bonus (no photos inside the exhibit though.)

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Shower for Smudge © 2014 Bo Mackison

Baby shower fun and games. So happy we were able to be there to celebrate with daughter, soon to be mama.

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Tea Blossom © 2014 Bo Mackison

After the party, it was time to relax with a cup of tea. Specially brewed with a tea blossom – a bud of tightly wrapped tea leaves that opens like a flower when submerged in hot water. Beautiful.

Experimenting – Or Mostly Playing – from an Airplane Window — Part III, Clouds, Clouds, Then Land Sighting

Flying from Madison to NYC

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
~ Cesare Pavese

The flight from Madison to New York City was a window view of ceaseless change.

It made me realize how little I know about the clouds I look at nearly every day, and discover that I wanted to learn about clouds. I couldn’t even recall the name for the study of clouds.

Nephology is the study of clouds, a subset of meteorology.

Nephology? No wonder I couldn’t recall it, I don’t think I have ever known that -ology. And cloud naming appears to be a mix and match affair, one that requires more than looking at a few photos to get an identification.

So for now, I’ll just go with:

Enjoy all the pretty clouds from the airplane window!

Flying from Madison to NYC

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”  ~ Pat Conroy

Flying from Madison to NYC

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”  ~ Leonardo da Vinci

Flying from Madison to NYC

“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown…”
~ Paul Theroux from The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

Flying from Madison to NYC

“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”   ~ Khalil Gibran from The Prophet

Flying from Madison to NYC

“I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you’re going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.”  ~ C. JoyBell C.

Flying from Madison to NYC

“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
~ Christopher McCandless

Flying from Madison to NYC

“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”  ~ Wendell Berry from A Place on Earth

Experimenting – Actually, Mostly Playing – from an Airplane Window: Part II, Clouds, Clouds, Clouds

Flying from Madison to NYC

“Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?”
~ Sylvia Plath, from Ariel

Flying from Madison to NYC

“The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be?–it is the same the angels breathe.”
~ Mark Twain, from Roughing It

Flying from Madison to NYC

“We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky’ thinking wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.”
~ Gavin Pretor-Pinney, from The Cloud-spotter’s Guide

Flying from Madison to NYC

Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over… The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, whilst simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.”
~ Steve Grand

Flying from Madison to NYC

“Clouds suit my mood just fine.”
~ Marie Lu, from Champion

Flying from Madison to NYC

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, ‘Consume me’.”
~ Virginia Woolf, from The Waves

Flying from Madison to NYC

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
~ Rabindranath Tagore, from Stray Birds

Experimenting – Actually, Mostly Playing – from an Airplane Window, Part I, At the Airport

Flying from Madison to NYC

Loading Luggage and Misc © 2014 Bo Mackison

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
~ Terry Pratchett from A Hat Full of Sky

Typically, I am a slow photographer.

I sit and absorb the feel of a place. I connect with the space. I may wait for a certain cloud formation to float into a certain location, or a shadow to darken a rock. I take in the feel of the space, the mood of the landscape, the energy of the street scene.

Sometimes, I am a photographer who wants to play and just see what happens.

I grab my iPhone, shake the camera,  start shooting.

My favorite techniques for giving myself full permission to enjoy the process  – PLAY – I refer to as my “shake and take” technique.

I open the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone and take a photo.

Then I shake the phone. The app randomly changes lenses and film. During my recent flight from Madison Wisconsin to New York City, I took a photo, shook, took the next photo. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Sometimes I simply must put serious aside and just play. On this flight, that is exactly what I did, and I loved the crazy, sometimes totally great, sometimes totally crazy results.

Sharing. Because sharing is part of the fun and play!

Flying from Madison to NYC

Safety Check for Take Off © 2014 Bo Mackison

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson from Emerson’s Essays

Flying from Madison to NYC

We Depend on Wisconsin Aviation © 2014 Bo Mackison

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.”
~ Douglas Adams from The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Flying from Madison to NYC

Winging Away from Madison © 2014 Bo Mackison

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
~ Anaïs Nin

I did something similar earlier this year, documented in the post A Series of Photographs – Exploring the Creative Process.

In that series I shot only one subject from the same perspective – a palo verde tree – using the “shake and take” method.

In this flight series, I explore a cross-country flight and then exploring bits of NYC using the same method.

Part one begins at the Madison airport, Part Two and Three are sky and (crazy) clouds and tiny landscapes, Part Four is rather amazing views of New York City on a clear day while descending into La Guardia. Parts Five, Six, and Seven include Long Island vineyards and wineries, the town of Greenport, and a funky restaurant in NYC. And then beyond…the return.

Enjoy. Then go play!