The Beauty and Mystery of the Natural World

Heron Dance explores the beauty and mystery of the natural world through art and words. It is inspired by a love of wild nature. A close connection with the natural world, with beauty and mystery, can contribute a sense of peace to our lives.

Twice a year, Heron Dance publishes The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal. Each week, A Pause for Beauty, a weekly e-newsletter featuring a new painting and short nature essay, is sent out to subscribers. Heron Dance also publishes books, calendars, notecards, blank journals, and dayplanners.

The underlying theme of all of this work is that by opening ourselves up to the beauty and mystery around us, we gain an appreciation for the gift of life, the Great Dance of Life. Heron Dance is an expression of gratitude for that gift.

Much of the work we publish is based on the art and writing of Roderick MacIver, a nature artist whose home and studio is located in the Split Rock Wildway, a several thousand acre nature preserve in Adirondack Park. The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal also includes interviews, book excerpts, poetry, and essays. Heron Dance is a work of love.

The print publication is now a 72 page journal that is published twice a year. Each issue contains dozens of paintings in full color and is printed on recycled paper. The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal contains no advertising. Click here to subscribe.

26,000 people have signed up for A Pause For Beauty. Each issue contains a new Roderick MacIver painting and a thought on the gentle arts of life. Click here to sign up.

Heron Dance supports the important work of over a hundred wilderness protection groups and other nonprofits through the donation of prints for fundraisers, notecards, and the use of our art. Click here to learn more.

To read more about the work of some of the groups that Heron Dance believes in and supports, visit here.

Heron Dance has survived with minimal foundation support thanks to the support of our subscribers and the sale of our art and books. Click here to visit our Studio Store.

Thoughts On the Evolution of Heron Dance By Roderick MacIver, Founder

     YOU DREAM A DREAM, and you go with it. You may think you know where you are going, but you will never know where it is going to take you. It takes you to places you never thought.
     At a seminar once, a young man came up and handed me a slip of paper that read: “Happy are they that dream dreams, and have the courage to make them come true.” That has stuck with me ever since. You have got to have a dream, an idea, a concept. And then you have to do something about it. There is no big merit in just being a dreamer. But there is a lot of merit to dreams. If you are just willing to go with some of them, things happen. Some very outstanding things happen to people who dare to dream and dare to do something about those dreams.  
     - Verlen Kruger, canoe adventurer extraordinaire, from a Heron Dance interview, Issue 16, 1997

The first issue of The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal was published in 1994. To paraphrase Verlen, I dreamed a dream, I went with it, and it took me to places I never imagined. The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal has certainly evolved differently than I thought it would. One difference is the evolution of my art; the first draft of the publication had no art in it. I taught myself how to paint while hospitalized in the couple of years before I began the publication.

Then there was my crusading white horse. I fell off. When I started the publication I wanted to contribute to positive change. I used The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal to voice my dissatisfaction with the way things are. For a variety of reasons, The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal has instead evolved into a celebration of the gift of life and an effort to contribute something of beauty to the lives of others.

Heron Dance is an impractical endeavor that somehow survived. I founded it with very little money and soon after I was diagnosed with advanced cancer of the lymph nodes, which, at that time, was considered to be treatable but not curable. Impractical also because instead of serving The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal subscribers, I set out to serve the people I wrote about. I set out to generate attention and hopefully funding for people serving something, or some Thing, larger than themselves. The people I interviewed in the early years worked in refugee camps or worked to protect wild places; some worked with kids in the inner city or volunteered in prisons. I set out wanting to contribute to change in our culture—a culture many of us consider unsustainable. While I haven’t given up yet, I’m a little embarrassed by many of my early efforts. Over the years, I’ve become suspicious of people who proclaim to know Truth on an intimate basis, whether they happen to be in the religious right or the environmental/wilderness protection movements. Self-righteousness, including my own, tends to be accompanied by a lack of humility and compassion.

Underlying all of the changes in Heron Dance over the years is a gradual shift away from a faith in words, towards an effort to create an art form that combines words and watercolors in service of a feeling. In Albert Camus’s words:

     A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.

In the sense that Camus meant it, Heron Dance seeks to serve the peace, harmony and beauty we’ve experienced in the natural world.

The idea for The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal came to me during a walk in the woods in mid-December 1994. I was 38 years old, broke, and sharing an old farmhouse with a vegetarian chef, devoted gardener and neat freak. My share of the rent, which included space for Heron Dance, was $200 a month.

Between bouts of experimental chemotherapy, I was struggling to make a living as a nature photographer. My best-selling photograph, which had earned me a few hundred dollars, was of a Tri-color or Louisiana Heron dancing at sunset over the golden surface of a lake in Florida. It looked like ballet, but the bird was actually trying to stir up crabs for dinner. From that image came the name of this publication. The alternate I was considering was Osprey River Notes, out of the memories I have of those birds from early morning canoe trips on wild rivers.

I started to work with watercolors about two years before I published the first issue of The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal. I had always been fascinated by art, and in times of surplus funds had purchased a few paintings, but I had only sporadically sketched, mostly with charcoal. In those days I was spending one week a month in the hospital, feeling more or less fine, but tethered to an IV pole. I decided to use the time to learn how to draw and paint. I began with Betty Edwards’s book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and then moved on to watercolors, which quickly became an all-consuming passion. I painted six to twelve hours a day and gradually got the hang of it. I chose watercolors because they seemed the least toxic of the alternatives. I came across a book of cowboy watercolors called Cowboys and Images by William Matthews, and I tried to duplicate the paintings in it over and over. In the hospital, I did portraits of the other cancer patients, most of whom were elderly and alone, and they loved the company. When I showed them the results of my work, they tried to be polite.

A couple of weeks after that walk in the snowy woods when I first decided to start Heron Dance, my parents gave me a Christmas gift of $1,000. I borrowed $5,000 from a former business partner and $5,000 from a former client from my days on Wall Street. I traveled around the country interviewing people for The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal. Despite the worsening condition of my health, I was on a high in those early days of the publication—euphoria brought on by work I loved and contact with people who inspired me. I convinced myself that the publication and I would both survive. (In fact, I would lie in bed every morning with my eyes closed and chant silently to myself, “I am a survivor, I am a survivor.”) A year after starting Heron Dance, I traveled to Nova Scotia to interview Gabriel Gély (The People of Lake Ennadai, Issue 7, February 1996). Coincidentally, 15 years earlier, I had purchased a print of one of his charcoal drawings, which appears on the front cover of Issue 7. After World War II, during which Gély had fought in the French Resistance, been captured twice by the Nazis, and escaped both times, he spent decades living in the Canadian Arctic with the Inuit.

On a whim, sitting in a bar in Halifax, I phoned a former investment client who lived there, a man who owns companies all over the world, and mentioned I happened to be in town. He came down to meet me, noticed my bald head, and we talked about lymphoma. He had an investment in a German pharmaceutical company that had an interesting new cancer drug, WF-10. I got in touch with them. The drug wasn’t approved—they couldn’t sell it to me—but on some of their frequent trips to the U.S. they brought it in for me. A couple of months after my first treatment with WF-10, my tumors had all but disappeared. That was a favorable turn of events. Just before I found WF-10, my blood counts were low enough that the doctors were telling me that more chemo was “problematic.”

Heron Dance has been like that. Perhaps if I hadn’t experienced it I might not believe it, but time and again when I really needed help, help was there. Heron Dance and Rod MacIver were broke for almost all the first five years, but when the rent absolutely had to be paid, there would be enough money in that day’s mail, with a few bucks to spare. Sometimes I lived with a girlfriend, sometimes I lived in my van. I always had enough to eat, and I always had enough to keep Heron Dance going for one more day. I worked 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and I loved it. Usually. There were some down days. The day a virus wiped out my computer was certainly one. I put my backup disk in there, and it wiped that one out too. So I went off in the woods and slept for most of the next three days, came out and kept going.

After the first year, The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal had 80 subscribers, and I sent every new subscriber a handwritten thank-you note. After the second year, we had 300 subscribers. The third, a thousand. After four years, we had 3,000 subscribers. Then we started sending flyers out, and by the end of year five we had 5,000 subscribers. Now we’re up to many thousands of subscribers, and occasionally get as many new subscribers in one day as we did that first year. Prior to nature photography, and prior to lymphoma, there was a book that didn’t get published. My working title was Free Spirits, A Book About Choices. In the course of doing interviews for Free Spirits, in a tiny little village on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande River, I met Sara Harrison. I had driven down there from New Jersey, sleeping in the back of my car. Sara was a Minnesota Outward Bound Instructor, working mostly with victims of violence. She said to me:

     I think it is incumbent upon us who have been given the gift of life, to give something back. Something that costs us, something that involves real sacrifice. It is in sacrifice that we lose ourselves, our pain, our problems. It is in the sacrifice of self, for something bigger, that life gains meaning.

The more I thought about what Sara said, the more I asked myself what I was willing to sacrifice for. That interview, and two or three others I did in the early years, shaped Heron Dance.

An interview of Gruffie Clough, also an Outward Bound instructor, had a real impact. I’ve quoted from that interview of Gruffie many times over the years, including Issues 1, 2, 9, 10, 30, and 42, so I won’t here. The point is, I set out on a search when I started Heron Dance, and as much as anything else, it was a search for a set of personal values and guidelines that would bring meaning to my life. Gruffie had said to me that that was a lot of why she worked in Africa: Africa helped her identify what was important in her life. Although it has been a circuitous route, it has worked for me. Heron Dance has helped me find what is important in my life. Some of those answers I found through my connections with the people I’ve written about and worked with, but, just as often, Heron Dance has helped me find the answers inside myself.

A month before my cancer diagnosis, I met Doug Peacock. Doug is the real life inspiration behind the character Hayduke in Ed Abbey’s, The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives! Doug has written several books of his own, The Grizzly Years, Baha, and Walking It Off. Film footage he took of grizzly bears when he was a forest tower lookout in Glacier National Park has been featured in the PBS show, Nature. Not incidentally, he was a Green Beret medic in Vietnam, a period of his life that continues to haunt him.

Our interview started in the late morning and ended close to midnight, with some breaks in between. After nightfall, javelinas—small desert pigs with big incisors—came up to where we were sitting and snorted around for anything remotely edible. When we would laugh or reach for a drink they would scurry off into the desert. I often think of something he said during our interview that evening. The conversation had to do with inner power, with pursuing your passion and living life on your own terms.

     The notion of following your passion is a cheap instinct and a good instinct and it’s worth indulging. Your passion is your source of power. In order to have power, you have to live a life of passion. You have to live a really full life. You need to follow those paths, no matter where they lead…in defiance of all things conventional, perhaps. And of course it is at a price. It’s going to cost. You have to know that going in. But the price you pay, in my opinion, is not even worth the time of day to think about. It is so important not to knee-pad around the world. You should never bow down to anything but those you love and respect. Ever. For anything.

And then, a few minutes later in the interview:

     When you walked by a period of life when you could have been really happy, you should have seized it. You should have leaped upon it. I just try to let myself go. It’s not necessary to live in the moment every day, in a traffic jam with smog creeping in your windshield, listening to bad rap music on the radio. But when it’s there, you have really got to live it. The best reason for living it is knowing you are going to die. It’s no big deal. I have had some sense of my own mortality for a long time. It’s not a negative thought. It’s just the way things are. If you want more life, that’s fine. But you should get as much out of the life that you’ve got as you can….I wish I had a clue as how to find happiness, but I know it slaps you in the face all of the time.

Doug asked me why I was traveling around doing all these interviews. I told him I was looking for people who were living their truth, who could inspire others who were looking for the courage to live their truth. He suggested I tell my own story, rather than drive thousands of miles to get other people’s stories.

     One of the best things anyone can do is write their own story. If they have really lived, they indeed have a story to tell. Anybody that can tell a story can write a book. Just write the story. The story of your own life. You have to stick yourself in the middle of it all the time. You don’t just start out with an introduction, and end with a conclusion. The way you interact with the people you are interviewing is as much of the story as any of their stuff is. It’s the thread that carries it through. The way you see it all is the way the reader is going to see it all. We need to know all of the way through what you think.
     You can’t render it through the tape recorder. You are going to offend some people. That doesn’t matter. You are going to take a chance of being wrong. But that doesn’t matter. You have to stick yourself in the middle of it. You have to arbitrate it. You are doing a really cosmic mix here. These people would not get along in a bar, or in a helicopter.

I discounted what Doug said because at that time I felt my own story was a story of avoiding my dreams. I felt I had turned my back on living a meaningful life in favor of material comfort and security. I thought others had more to say of value. It is fair to say that I was in awe of a lot of people I interviewed, and that was particularly true of Doug. That awe actually led me to devote Issue 22 to my interviews of Doug and of some of his friends.

After ten years of publishing The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal, I began to put the people I interviewed into a little more perspective. They are people, not icons, not necessarily heroes. Some are wiser than your average human, some aren’t. I learned that a better place to seek answers was within myself, and that these interviews helped identify the questions I needed to confront. The people I interviewed led me to more deeply question myself. The answers came inside myself, but they also came from time in the wilderness, walks in the woods and canoe trips. Many of the answers cannot be put into words; they arise out of beauty and mystery. The process gradually led me to set aside the urge to use The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal to make declarations about right and wrong, about Truth.

Cielo Myczack was another person whom I interviewed and who shaped the publication. Cielo and her husband, Leaf, founded the RiverKeepers, a group of environmental and wilderness protection activists in Tennessee. Cielo talked of the spiritual challenges of a life of activism:

     By becoming Riverkeepers, we turned our anger into a flow of creativity. It is something I have to practice every day—to let go into Love. Let go, let go, let go. It appears black, it appears violent, it appears tortured—but I know there is a bigger picture that I, with my small eyes, can’t see. Then comes the trust.
     When you come from ego, and are goal-orientated, you sabotage yourself. So many miracles happen at the level of paradox. When I start walking around thinking that I am making a difference out here—thinking that I am going to heal the Earth—then I am in for burnout. That is the wrong path. We are out here to create new paradigms, and it starts by recognizing that we don’t make a difference. We have to get out of our own way. That is how I do it—by realizing that I am not going to heal the planet, I am not going to save anyone. When I get off the grandstand, when I finally melt into the All, I look around and notice that stuff is already happening. But I have to humble myself before those things that are greater than self will occur.
     Who am I to say how the Earth should look? I trust that there is a bigger picture, a larger or Greater Good that I may not be totally aware of. I don’t have the answers; Something bigger has the answers. All I can go with is my personal truth, my integrity, and my intuition. Try to tap every day into that higher voice that I hear and trust—that is more than enough. I feel good when coming from that place, because if I don’t, I get lost in the darkness and the despair. You cannot know what the outcome is supposed to be. We cannot be goal-oriented. We have to believe that if we do the best we can, and practice harmony with each other and with the Earth, that Something larger will be served, though we may not see it. We may not see it.
     Preaching to the choir is very important. You deal with the people that are ready to listen. I don’t go toe-to-toe with loggers, especially as a woman. I don’t choose to go toe-to-toe. I don’t choose force. If someone challenges what I say, I state my truth as I continue to breathe deeply and stay as balanced as I can. I try to state my truth, then let it be. If they need to act with anger and discourtesy, and they do quite often, that shows the truth. The truth is most apparent by the way you state your truth. (October 1995)

John Calvi is a massage therapist, gives workshops on healing, and works with people with AIDS and others who are dying. In our interview, he discussed activism in the context of results and recognition:

     You can’t go out there hoping that after you give your best, work until you hurt, that people will throw a parade for you, or confirm your goodness. If you think that, you will get disappointed and give up. It’s not about slaying the monster either. You don’t give it a kick and then go home and have a beer. Most of this work has to do with gathering up all of your peace and calm and sitting down next to the monster, without trying to kill it and without being intimidated by it. And not losing your calm. (August 1995)

Another person I interviewed, who has had a lasting affect on me and on Heron Dance, was Balbir Mathur. The organization he founded, Trees For Life, has helped rural villagers plant millions of trees in India and other countries. He said to me:

     A man who cuts trees has just as valid an experience as one who plants a tree. The dance, the orchestra of the spirit, needs all instruments, including those who play different tunes. I cannot see the mystery. I cannot see what the Master is doing with the orchestra. I play my instrument as well as I can. I won’t let my part in this orchestra fall down. The drums might not sound good to someone playing the piano, but that drum has just as valid a reason in that orchestra as anyone else. . . .
     The boat I travel in is called Surrender. My two oars are instant forgiveness and gratitude—complete gratitude for the gift of life. I am thankful for the experience of this life, for the opportunity to dance. I get angry, I get mad, but as soon as I remind myself to put my oars in the water, I forgive.
     I serve. I do the dance I must. I plant trees, but I am not the doer of this work. I am the facilitator, the instrument. I am one part of the symphony. I know there is an overall scheme to this symphony that I cannot understand. In some way, we are each playing our own part. It is not for me to judge or criticize the life or work of another. All I know is that this is my dance. I would plant trees today even if I knew for a certainty that the world would end tomorrow. (October 1996)

Feeling that your work is being supported by Something Greater, that your work facilitates a larger plan, even if you cannot articulate it, is perhaps the most satisfying experience of a work life. Money plays an interesting role in that. I’ve read that Mother Teresa declined endowments. She wanted the work to which she devoted her life to sustain itself on faith. My own faith, and the role of money in Heron Dance, has been somewhat different.

In the early days of this publication, I was on an adventure, and the lack of money lent excitement to the whole project. And righteousness. I was out to prove lots of people wrong. When I started out, I looked upon money as a primary cause of ecosystem destruction, injustice and unhappiness.

Many things changed when the publication grew to the point that I had to hire someone. And Heron Dance did need to grow. If, for no other reason, print publications that sell for less than $100 a year need 10,000 subscribers to be viable long-term, even if they have only one employee. I couldn’t run Heron Dance with 10,000 subscribers on my own and publish something worthwhile. At 10,000 subscribers I needed two people other than myself and an office aside from my living room.

Running out of money is okay when all I had to worry about was myself. But when the people I hired depended on me to meet payroll and the landlord insisted on the rent, running out of money became a reason for losing sleep at night. Once or twice a year we still run out of money, and we still need to rely on a faith unjustified by the facts, but it is nothing like it was in the early years.

I remember Balbir Mathur once saying to me that that which is sacred requires sacrifice. I am not implying that The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal is sacred, but if a person embarks on work that is sacred to them, they have to realize that, without sacrifice, it has very little chance of flowering into something worthwhile. Our conversation grew out of something Balbir’s wife, Treva, wrote in Lifelines, the Trees for Life newsletter:

     Three years ago Balbir and I were in a small village in Orissa, India. The villagers welcomed us with songs and flower garlands.
After introductions, the village leaders sat down with us. Our land is very degraded and we are very poor, they said. If our children were educated they could get jobs, but there is not enough money for their school. It’s like a trap, and we can’t break free. What can we do?
     Balbir closed his eyes, listening intently with great reverence. Then he spoke.
     If you will donate some very poor land to your school, we can help you regenerate that land, and it can provide income for the school, he said.
     Several villagers started grumbling. Our lands have been divided and passed down for generations, they argued. How could our people give up their inheritance?
     Balbir spread his hands. Nothing comes without sacrifice. The more important the task, the greater the sacrifice.

Heron Dance has been a sacrifice and it has been worth it. Sacrifice is the basis of real satisfaction and happiness in my life. Not sacrifice to perceived reality or to what others want me to do with my life, but sacrifice for those things that first opened my heart.

Art has been important to The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal, both to communicating its message and to its financial viability. As Heron Dance has grown and we’ve been able to hire more good people, I’ve been organizing my life to focus on my art. I still throw away three out of four paintings. I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve poured my heart and soul into my art, and I’m still struggling and still learning.

For Issue 20, I interviewed author and artist Frederick Franck, then in his late 80s. His books include the best-selling Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. He said to me:

     When I start a drawing I am scared. Drawing from life, which I do at least once a week, I have to prove I can still do it. I did a drawing yesterday on the beach. There are 30 figures in that drawing. I scribbled them down in a kind of ecstasy mixed with despair. I could never do it again. Drawing is a strange process, for even when it succeeds you never do justice to what you see. If you draw well today, you can’t assume that tomorrow you can continue on that level. Often, you have to start all over again, from scratch. No guarantee of success, unless you are a hack who uses a routine.

I asked Frederick about the spiritual path. "Do you yourself feel that you live according to your own truth?" I asked. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said:

     No. I wish it were true. But I am always aware of it when I fall short. I am awake to it—to the existence of my truth. Our own truth is our true selves. It can’t be discovered, but perhaps it can be intuited. You can get in tune with its potentiality. And then you are out of tune again. It is not a true path at all...

     One’s truth is of course bottomless. When Daisetz T. Suzuki was 90 years old, which is very old, and I am almost as old now myself, he wrote what was perhaps his most profound essay. It was entitled, The Unattainable Self. I think that is a very good way of saying it. So one cannot say one has discovered it.

Frederick and his wife, Claske, created Pacem in Terris, public peace gardens a couple of hours north of New York City. In the visitors’ pamphlet, Frederick wrote about Pacem in Terris, describing the gardens as “a sacred place that speaks to the sacred space at the core of the human heart.” The booklet also contains this quote:

     Art is not a luxury! Art arises from one’s depths or it is not art but kitsch! Art, for me, is and was my digging tool for Meaning, for Truth…my own truth that may speak to your truth. Art then becomes a “religious,” a spiritual act, not in any sectarian sense but as a witness to a “religious” attitude to sheer being, to existence as such, being Supremely Meaningful.

Fritz Hull was one of the founders of the Chinook Learning Center, which evolved into The Whidbey Institute, of which he is now the director. I’d like to end with the answer Fritz gave me when I asked him what he had learned about finding happiness in life:

     Staying with it over the long haul has in fact brought me happiness and Vivian [Hull, Fritz’s wife] happiness. And that means staying with it in times of unhappiness. By riding out the storms, the times of bewilderment, and hanging on and staying with it. Coming through those periods, there is a confirmation, and that inner confirmation brings the happiness that makes it feel all worthwhile.
     It is not necessarily the confirmation from people, although at times there are people who say thank you, or people who acknowledge that you've stuck with them for a long time. But a lot of people aren’t interested in that. So you have to do it without confirmation from other people.
     To me it comes from Spirit. It comes from relationship with the mystery. With Spirit. It is something that is confirmed inside. It is felt. Something you know.
     It has something to do with the process of maturation. Both in oneself, and what you observe in others. It is like watching a young person grow up, watching things come into their fullness, watching things come into their time. It is how you nurture processes and individuals and help bring things into their right time for flowering. After you have gone through it enough times, you know that spring follows winter. It will happen. And it will happen probably in a way that you will have forgotten how beautiful it is. It is happening right now in these woods. We have had a rough spring.
     It is like staying with something and moving through the seasons. It is allowing all the time that is needed for things to come into their own. To their moment of flowering, of opportunity, and to be taken and lifted by that opportunity onto the next one, which will then include the next dark time. Probably, no doubt, there will be more bewilderment.

Related Links

• To read more about Rod visit here.
  
  
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• Visit here for more information about the people behind Heron Dance.
  
  
• Crucial to its mission is Heron Dance's commitment to helping other small nonprofits trying to do good work. We donated over $10,000 worth of art and notecards for fundraising efforts last year. Visit here to learn more.
  
  
• Heron Dance also supports the NorthEast Wildnerness Trust as part of its commitment to help preserve wild nature and in an effort to compensate for its use of paper. Visit here to learn more.

How did Heron Dance get its name?

Heron Dance got its name from a photograph Rod MacIver took of a Louisiana, or Tri-Color, heron at the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge in Sanibel, Florida. The photograph was taken at sunset, and the heron was dancing as part of its feeding efforts—attempting to stir up crabs on the bottom of the lake, which was only a few inches deep. The result is a dance of wonderful beauty—the avian version of ballet.