Quiet Space – September’s Photo-Heart Connection

October 1, 2012 by 31 Comments
Quiet Space

Quiet Space © 2012 Bo Mackison

The beginning of a new month! When I turn the calendar to a new month, I know it’s time to look for a photograph for Photo-Heart Connection from the last month’s photos. I look for one that speaks to me in a special way.

Here is my choice from the many photos I took in September. I took it on the last day of September, on an early Sunday morning when Autumn’s sunlight cast a spell on me. I stopped at this set of prayer benches situated high on a hill overlooking the city I call home.

It was a quiet morning.

A quiet time in a quiet place and I was grateful to spend some time resting on one of these benches.

I felt a deep connection with place, a sense of renewal, a new strength. I acknowledged that I am at a crossroads, and that simple acknowledgement gave me an inner peace for which I had been searching.

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”
~ Chas. R Surndoll

This photo is my choice for this month’s Photo Heart Connection.

Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  She joins other photographers at  Kat Eye Studio and posts a photo taken the prior month that “connects with her heart’ during the first few days of the new month.
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Autumn, Overlooking Madison

September 30, 2012 by 10 Comments
Autumn, Overlooking Madison

Autumn, Overlooking Madison © 2012 Bo Mackison

“Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity;
but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance.  What man can stand with autumn
on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling
hills that reach to the far horizon?” ~ Hal Borland

I stood on a hill-top this morning overlooking a prairie remnant, then a line of ash trees dressed in the brightest of yellows, next a small woods touched with a variety of color – dark greens, yellow greens, yellows, oranges, reds. Beyond the woods, the blue of Lake Mendota in the early morning contrasts with the city of Madison that rises from the shores to the gently rolling hillsides. I could see the University of Wisconsin and the State’s Capitol building in Madison’s downtown.

It’s a sight that made me pause, filled me with a deep joy that Sherpa and I had decided to settle in Madison nearly three decades ago. Madison in autumn with the change in the weather to pleasant days, cooler nights; Madison in autumn with its glorious colors — Madison is at its best (in my opinion) from mid-September through mid-November.

Viewing Madison, and a bit of the surrounding countryside, from the top of a hill is one of those perfect autumn moments.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  Since autumn’s cool weather arrived, she’s been spending many an early morning at a prairie remnant just north of Madison — wandering, thinking, and taking a few photographs, too.

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Exploring — My Lawn as a Metaphor

September 28, 2012 by 6 Comments
Fully Floral

Fully Floral in Black and White © 2012 Bo Mackison

“Think of your free time, and how you spend it. Are you fighting your inner geography and planting a lawn? Are you going with the ambient climate and keeping it simple? Do you want to do work that is intense and may not fit the popular climate, or do you want to go with the flow and keep your work suited to an easy schedule? Or, do you want to create an environment that’s exotic for you or do you want to explore your nature as it is?” – Quinn McDonald

There are just so many options for spending my free time, and I always pack more ideas into my brain than one woman could do in a lifetime.

But that doesn’t stop me from adding to the list constantly. When I factor in my penchant for change, I need to consider several options for my front lawn if it is to be a metaphor for my free time.

At first thought, I liked the idea of a tall sunflower field.

I would be surrounded by eight foot high plants, all topped with giant yellow sunflower heads. Hidden in the glory of all those waving flowers, spending my free time wandering without being seen. But when I thought about the upkeep and the crispy brown remains of sunflower stalks once autumn’s frost paid a visit, those glorious sunflowers lost their appeal. Maybe I would get tired of being surrounded by a jungle of bright yellow flower heads the size of dinner plates. Too much intense color, over a long period of time, it might be too bright. Or too lonely, hidden away in the flowers.

What about a mass of low growing, take-care-of-themselves-flowers?

And while I’m imagining what I’d really like my free time to look like, in lawn form, I’d like a black and white flower yard where I can change its colors on my whim – like the original movie version of The Wizard of Oz which begins in black and white, and then magically transforms into resplendent  color. That would satisfy my preference for quick change – white to match a pristine day, red for a passionate mood, multicolored when I’m feeling  festive.

Of course, I’d need a magic wand to keep the flowers in tip-top shape, growing lush while remaining an easily tended ground cover.

And the magic wand would come in handy when it was time for a color change, too. My flower lawn requires a bit of magic – is that because I don’t want to do all of the work that fun sometimes requires (such as the wild rush that comes before and after a planned vacation.)

Perhaps I’d like a magic wand because I’m not the quick change artist I wish I could be in real life.

One day I yearn to be a landscape photographer tramping through the wilds of red rock country or the Southwest desert; another day I’m the artist curating her photographs for a museum or gallery show.

One day I am a photographer who is demonstrating the simple workings of a pinhole camera to a group of excited children; another day I’m an urban photographer documenting form and shape in the architectural details of abandoned buildings.

Maybe I’d even be in the mood for some meticulous, creative work. I spend much of my free time doing just that when I am in front of the magical computer screen processing my photographs.

What a changeable yard…um, photographer…

 

 

 

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Changing Season

September 26, 2012 by 2 Comments
Changing of the Seasons

Changing Season © 2012 Bo Mackison

Some of my friends are honoring this day in their special ways. Today is Yom Kippur. It began yesterday at sundown and continues until sundown today. Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day of Atonement. It is the day the Great Book is opened and one’s name either is or isn’t written in its pages for another year. I’m told some people spend their day in temple praying and listening to sermons.

Others practice in their own way, spending their time in recollection and reflection, using the day to consider the lives they have lived, to consider the life they hope to live in the coming year, the coming years, however many that may be.

It is certainly a day that urges the consideration of one’s mortality.

There is no specific day in my year set aside for atonement, or to recall the last year and assess how I did in this practice of mine called living. There is no day set aside specially for the purpose of considering how I hope to live my life in the coming year, or even the coming years.

New Year’s Day, January 1st, doesn’t do it. Happy New Year doesn’t give much serious time for assessment and goal setting, for apology and hope setting. I find it hard to think deeply when the party horns are going off next door, though I do like a few rounds of Auld Lang Syne. For some reason, the melody of that song seems to lead me into a deep thought space. (I’m mixing holidays!)

I do hope my Jewish friends do not mind if I borrow from their solemn High Holy Day, and spend some time today walking in the frost-nipped garden, taking account of how I lived this past year, and setting intentions, filled with hope, for the coming year. Doubtless, I have the theology all wrong, but I do believe my intention is worthy, and an evaluation of the practice of living is valuable practice for each of us, not just those who call this day Yom Kippur.

In this season of change – trees in my neighborhood have turned yellow and red in the past few days remind me that colder days are not on their way any longer, they have arrived – in this season of change, I ponder what it is that I need to change in my life. Of course I could brush off that question with “I need to change just about everything” and decide that even the thinking part is too hard, so I won’t try to change anything. Or I could pick one thing and at least reflect on how it shows up in my life each day. A few minutes, at the end of my meditation walk, seems to be a good time for a minute summary.

So with that in mind, I will reflect how fear shows up in my life, and how I react to and interact with fear. It seems a good first step. I need to have awareness before I can decide on specific steps for change. Fear and I are old companions. It is time, I’m quite sure, that I need to spend less time with him.

I looked up some of the traditional greetings for this day. One of them is “G’mar Hatimah Tovah” or “May You Be Sealed for a Good Year (in the Book of Life).

It is greeting that carries an awareness, a reflection. A soul-searching question in a greeting.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She also finds nuggets of inspiration in many of the worlds’ cultures, religions, and practices.

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Life Cycle of New England Asters

September 24, 2012 by 10 Comments
Life Cycle of New England Asters

Asters Life Cycle © 2012 Bo Mackison

… in gardens, beauty is a by-product.
The main business is sex and death …
–  Sam Llewelyn, The Sea Garden

Oh, that quote seems so appropriate for many of the botanical photographs I shoot.

I am either shooting the reproductive parts of flowers or I am shooting the flowers that are no longer beautiful flowers but on their way to brown and crispy, or the parts that are left standing to produce the next flowers, the seed heads. But the by-product of all those seeds and reproductive parts make for some pretty fine floral displays in the flowering seasons.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and the owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is catching up on photography work at the computer today, after a weekend of weddings and birthday celebrations.

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