Seeded Earth - Bo Mackison » National Parks

Early Morning Coffee in the Desert

Bo Mackison — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:36:47 +0000

Coffee is real good when you drink it it gives you time to think. It’s a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup. ~ Gertrude Stein

A pitcher of water, a container of ground coffee, a backpacker’s stove with a little fuel canister and a French press coffee cup. That’s a lot of equipment but I find it all to be incredibly important. With the above contraptions and about five minutes of my time, a simply perfect cup of coffee can be had.

I think it a necessary morning ritual after one sleeps in a car wrapped in a sleeping bag with only nose and mouth exposed to air (while ignoring any claustrophobic tendencies.) One should be able to take that first hike at dawn with a full cup of hot coffee for companionship!

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is exploring the Sonoran desert and making desert coffee.

Desert Twilight

Bo Mackison — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:52:23 +0000

Sonoran Desert Twilight

Seeing form with the whole body and mind.
Hearing sound with the whole body and mind.
One understands it intimately.
~ Eihen Dogen

When I am in the desert, I have two responsibilities — to listen, to see.

I watch as nature busies herself doing the quiet things not easily seen, sometimes only sensed. A lizard scooting from under a cooling rock. Cactus wrens darting from their nest holes in the saguaros to the top of the cactus, on alert, the look-out. Then swooping about, catching an insect or two, and a return to the nest inside the huge saguaro.

A pack of coyotes sing. A second pack joins, in harmony. Silence. Then the who-ooo of an owl. I hear it, I never see a twitch of movement.

I am content, also, to hear the sound of silence. Silence has a sound. I feel surrounded by the desert, as if she has a hold on me. The desert wakens all my senses — sacred senses.

Now is the time to remember that all you do is sacred. ~ Hafiz

I stayed in the desert overnight. There was no roughing it for me. My days of primitive camping ended decades ago. This time I had my car, a sleeping bag rated warm enough to keep me comfortable in the desert night. (The low reached 38˚F — not too cold.) I had a backpacker stove and a French press coffee cup. I had coffee and soup in a box for dinner and granola and fruit for breakfast and lots of bottled water. I had a lantern. I had the necessities. I also had my iPad, a last minute addition to my camp gear. I was set. Luxury camping.

When I woke up at 4 AM and couldn’t fall back to sleep, I sat in the car and read The Turquoise Ledge by Leslie Marmon Silko on my iPad. Now that is really desert camping in luxury. I didn’t wait the first touch of daylight to make my coffee. The sun rises late in the desert — I don’t know why — and I got cold. I finally maneuvered in the dark and heated water and made my first cup of coffee by the yellowish-orange hazy lights of Tucson reflecting off the clouds.

By the time it was light enough to follow a trail and not walk into the desert plants, I was dressed in layers and had my hiking stick and coffee cup in hand. I followed a trail along an arroyo and was quite pleased to be out in the desert, alone, at dawn — until a pack of coyotes ran across the trail twenty feet from where I stood.

Once I got my heart out of my throat and back into my chest where it belonged, I turned around and hiked back to camp. All those sacred senses were on alert.

But it was a great explore.

My first overnight camping trip in the desert.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is exploring the Sonoran desert.

Ocotillo Sunset

Bo Mackison — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 03:21:56 +0000

“Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder…”

~ Hafiz, The Gift

I have desert dreams. They are not as tidy as I would like, but perhaps they are tidier than one would imagine. My desert is a tidy place with a tidy habit. No dense, tangled tropical paradise. In the desert there is room to move. Space for movement. But even more important to me, there is space to see.

Vision is not blocked by billboard or building. When I look, I can see afar. It is not unusual to look across the desert and see a mountain thirty or forty miles away. There is space to form thoughts, to search for answers. My desert dream affords me a polite habitat, nothing to tangle my feet and make me fall, no hidden roots to trip me, no overgrowth to hide my path.

There is room for all to grow, for me to grow.

In my dreaming desert, I do not cut myself on the spines of the cacti, the thorns on the shrubs and trees. I do not step upon desert earth that has rotted from beneath the surface, that gives way with the weight of my step, and sucks my leg into a gaping hole in the desert floor. The desert in my dreams has been sanitized for my night time journeys.

Awake, the desert is wild and streaming a series of ever more deeply saturated color. There is the silhouette of the ocotillo and its thorns, long and sharp. I watch the sun disappear, it drops below the horizon, and the layers of red, orange, purple linger until night’s arrival blackens the sky.

The sun sets. I breathe in tempo with the still warm desert. I inhale, the desert earth inhales. I exhale, the desert earth exhales. Heat stored in the desert’s earth meets the night’s cooling air, and the desert pulsates with energy.

Desert rhythms. I stand and watch, supporting myself with my walking stick while gripping tightly to my world.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is in the Sonoran desert.

Pottery at Tumacacori

Bo Mackison — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:53:01 +0000

Courage is the price that
Life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not,
Knows no release from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear the sound of wings.

Nor can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion.
Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold the resistless day,
And count it fair.

~Amelia Earhardt

Fill one pot with courage, one pot with loving kindness, one pot with contentedness, one pot with a store of the sun’s healing rays…

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Bo Mackison loves visiting Tumacacori where she often think deep thoughts.

Shadows of the Olive Leaf

Bo Mackison — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:22:32 +0000

On my first full day back in Arizona, I spent the last hours of sunlight in the historic mission garden at Tumacacori National Historic Site in southern Arizona. It is one of places I visit most often when I am in Arizona – a tiny historic preservation of an 18th century mission church in ruins. I often find a quiet space – easy to do – and simply sit.

Take in the warmth of the lingering sun which soon will disappear behind the Tumacacori Mountains. Watch soaring hawks dip and slide on the currents of wind. Listen to the breezes whispering to the leaves. Listen to the voices from the past, voices raised in chanting song. (I don’t have to imagine these voices – there is a recording of the hymns similar to those sung by the O’ohdam centuries ago. It lends a surreal audio experience to the already memory-haunting surroundings.)

I took a few photographs in the garden, but not one of a flower or a desert plant. I captured these olive leaf shadows on the bark of another tree, other trees ou of focus in the background, but adding another layer of shadow and mystery. I captured the blue waters in the silent fountain. A few cracks in an adobe bench, the textures of the hand fired bricks.

It was a fine first day explore of one of my favorite thinking places. Very quiet, a pensive place. This mission garden provides the perfect space for contemplation.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is taking a few days to adapt to her cross country move from Wisconsin’s snowy-frigid winter to Arizona’s desert-sun winter.

Filling Containers in the Desert

Bo Mackison — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:52:02 +0000

In ancient times wise men and women fled out into the desert to find a place where they could be fully present to their inner struggles at work within them. The desert became a place to enter into the refiner’s fire and be stripped down to one’s holy essence. The desert was a threshold place where one emerged different than when one entered. ~ Christine Valters Painter

Last year I traveled to Tucson, urban civility at the edge of the Sonora Desert, and ventured into the wild spaces, a bit at a time, a few steps from my safe haven. I had many goals, and I achieved many of them, but they were more a to-do list of photography related exercises, learning the routines of running a fledgling business, and practicing the ins and outs of living on my own.

I considered my first solo experience in Arizona a successful venture, but now I’m in a different place than I was in early 2011. I have new plans, new goals, new business ideas I want to put into practice. And I have a totally different agenda, too. I want to take specific steps to assess what I am doing, who I am, and who I want to be as I approach a transitional time in my life.

I will be going to Arizona in a few days. I will be asking questions, and hopefully discovering many answers and possibilities and options. When I come back to the Midwest in three months, I hope to have symbolically filled at least a few of the empty containers I am bringing along.

I’ll be working on this part of my journey – my desert days – and writing about my discoveries on my Seeded Earth blog. Maybe the seeds I planted last year will sprout, maybe even bloom, with the care I bestow on them this year.

I love the above photo. I photographed the original in March of 2011.

The photo reminds me of many things. First, these are containers for necessities. This pottery were photographed in the ruins of a granary at the Tucumcacari Mission in southern Arizona. Several hundred years ago, clay pots like these were filled with the autumn harvest and stored in the granary. The mission inhabitants relied on their stores of grains and other foods to sustain them through the winter months.

The photo reminds me of the simple things in life. Since I now have a place of my own in the Tucson area, I’ve made a commitment to maintain a minimalist approach while living there. It is a small place, so I am making some no cluttering ground rules from the very beginning.

And finally the photo reminds me of change and the need to keep an open mind. When I re-discovered photography five years ago, I had never used a digital camera. My first camera with interchangeable lenses was a Pentax K-1000, a film camera. I knew film. I knew how to develop photos in a darkroom. I knew nothing about digital photography.

But photography is an amazing art medium because there are so many levels of expertise and so many options. There is never only one way to take a particular photograph. One can take good photos with the simplest of cameras and with a minimum amount of practice. But add reading about new things, trying new techniques, exploring the advancing technologies of photography software, and shooting thousands of photographs a year, and then the opportunities become inexhaustible.

When I first began taking digital photographs, I thought I would never use Photoshop — partly because I didn’t have access to a Photoshop program and partly because I had no idea how to use Photoshop. Anyway, I was busy enough learning the basics. It was actually a good move, though I didn’t realize why at the time.

The first year I went digital, I shot my photos, then posted them straight out of the camera (SOOC). Gradually I learned how to adjust the simplest components – color, contrast, sharpening, cropping. Finally I bought Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Elements (the easy Photoshop) and began to explore the mysteries of post-processing.

And now?

Now I’ve discovered the amazing world of seeing a subject, taking photographs, and then bringing the files back to my computer where I manipulate them — without rules or limitations — until I again see what it was I originally saw. I explore the idea that what I see is unique and worthy of creation.

I’ve opened up a new world of digital photography and I’m learning anew by study and practice, practice, practice…while having a great deal of FUN!

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. In a couple of days, she will cross the threshold and begin her desert experience.