Dear
Heron Dancers,
I encountered Joseph Campbell’s writing and interviews in the early days of Heron Dance — when it was just in the planning stage. His words encouraged me. Follow your dream, he said. Find your own path, don’t follow the beaten trail of others. Create that which only you can create. Doors will open that would be open for no one else if your journey is authentic, if it has heart and energy,
I have found that you do have only to take that one step toward the gods and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will be supported. The hero's journey has been compared to a birth; it starts out warm and snug in a safe place; then comes a signal, growing more insistent, that it is time to leave. To stay beyond your time is to putrefy. Without the blood and tearing and pain, there is no new life.
- From A Joseph Campbell Companion by Diane Osbon.
Now, as I read, think and write about the creative process, and in particular about meandering along the edge of the human imagination, the human enclosure, “of forcing oneself to work along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity,” to quote sculptor Anne Truitt, I’m realizing how relevant Campbell’s work is to the creation of art. By slight displacement of accent, by replacing for instance the word hero with the word artist, such as in the following quote, Campbell’s work offers insight and encouragement.
Once having traversed the threshold, the artist (Campbell wrote hero) moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.
-Joseph Campbell from The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Compare that to Henry Miller’s description of the artistic life from Sexus:
The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture further was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself.
The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propulsion, of bathing in the senses of human odors.
By “hero” Campbell meant the person of myth who embarks on a journey of discovery — including of self-discovery. A hero is the mythological figure who risks in the pursuit of a really full life. Campbell wrote:
You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.
Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else's path.
You are not on your own path.
If you follow someone else's way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.
- from A Joseph Campbell Companion
An artist too must find his or her own unique way, must dive down deep into an interior world, and then have the courage to manifest that in their art.
Campbell also wrote about the Waste Land,
The problem of the grail quest is the re-vivification of what is known as the Waste Land. The Waste Land is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think they're supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven't earned them. This is the situation of the Waste Land: everybody leading a false life. T. S. Eliot used that idea in his poem, The Waste Land, and he actually quotes several lines from Wolfram's Parzival. The Waste Land is a place where the sense of the vitality of life has gone. People take jobs because they have to live, and then they find in mid-life that the job doesn't mean a thing.
You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life that you have planned in order to have the life that's waiting to be yours. Move. Move. Move into the transcendent. That's the whole sense of adventure, I think.
- An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms
Compare that to what Picasso wrote about art:
Art is something subversive. It is something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order. Once art becomes official and open to everyone, then it becomes the new academicism....If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because its been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it's not worth fighting for.
...every poet, every artist is an antisocial human being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way. Of course the state has the right to chase him away...and if he is really an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat—worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. People just don't have that much vision. So this business about defending and freeing culture is absurd.
...the right to free expression is something that one seizes, not something one is given. There is absolute opposition between the creator and the state. If the idea of society is to dominate the individual, the individual must perish. Furthermore, there wouldn't be such a thing as a seer if there weren't a state trying to suppress him. People reach the status of artist only after crossing the maximum number of barriers. So the arts should be discouraged, not encouraged.
There has to be a rule even if it's a bad one because the evidence of art's power is in breaking down the barriers. But to do away with the obstacles—that serves no purpose other than to make things completely wishy-washy, spineless, shapeless, meaningless—zero.
- Picasso quoted in the book Life with Picasso, by Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake
The artist embarks on the creative journey in part to explore his or her inner world, honor it, manifest from it. The hero embarks on the journey seeking transformation, seeking new awareness, new understandings. Both risk in the pursuit of a life outside the Waste Land, a life not possible in the Waste Land. Both meander along the edge, the frontier, the precipice, of possibilities.
In celebration of the Great Dance of Life,
Roderick W. MacIver
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Almost every day, Rod posts a thought-provoking quote on art or the creative process to both his Facebook page and the Heron Dance Facebook page. Examples of artists quoted include Mozart, Picasso, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Toni Morrison. You can now receive these quotes emailed to you directly as they are posted.
To sign up, visit here.
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Bird and Bear
Signed, Framed
Limited Edition Print
Double Matted
$75 - $225
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50% OFF SALE!
Heron Dance has a little too much inventory in a few items, so we're offering the following items at 50% off for the next week (web orders only).
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Anthology Issues 1-25 Back Issue Set
HERON DANCE has been published continuously since March 1995 — 57 issues in total.
A couple of years ago we sold out of the first print run of our back issue set. We’ve just reprinted the first twenty-five issues. These early issues were largely based on interviews of people serving some concept of a Greater Good — people who volunteered in refugee camps, who worked with addicts in the inner city or who worked to protect wild places. We asked them about their motivations, about the triumphs and setbacks of the paths they had chosen and about their spirituality.
Individually, these issues sold for almost $170.00 total!
Visit here to order Anthology Issues 1-25 Back Issue Set
for $43.
Regularly $87.00
The Man Who Planted Trees - Hardcover
Jean Giono's classic tale, The Man Who Planted Trees: Generosity of Spirit as a Source of Happiness, explores the themes of generosity, living in close connection with the natural world, and persisting with a dream through adversity.
This hardcover book, featuring full-color watercolors by Roderick MacIver, was previously priced at $45, but is now being offered for just $22.50.
In all, over ten thousand people owed their happiness to the Shepherd. That one man, a man with not much more than his health and generosity, had turned barren hillsides into the land of Canaan. With dogged persistence he had done his work, a work worthy of God. When he died, at the age of eighty-nine, I celebrated the Shepherd’s well-lived life. His example had inspired my own life, and in fact had changed it in profound ways. He showed me by example the great goodness of which humans are capable.
– Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees
Visit here to read additional excerpts from The Man Who Planted Trees.
Visit here to order The Man Who Planted Trees for $23.
Cover price: $45.00
HERON DANCE Complete Back Issue Set 1-57
Heron Dance has been published continuously since March 1995 — 57 issues in total. This set includes all of our back issues up to and including the latest.
A couple of years ago we sold out of the first print run of our back issue set. We’ve just reprinted all of the sold out issues.
The early issues were largely based on interviews of people serving some concept of a Greater Good — people who volunteered in refugee camps, who worked with addicts in the inner city or who worked to protect wild places. We asked them about their motivations, about the triumphs and setbacks of the paths they had chosen and about their spirituality.
The middle issues — issues 26 through 50 — were an exploration of the human connection to the natural world, including samples of some of the most compelling nature writing we're aware of. Issues 51 through 56 were more a medition on the beauty and the mystery of the natural world. Most of these issues included Rod's watercolors in full color.
Issue 57 was a semi-fictional account of a wild artist who loves wild rivers and wild women. It explored a spiritual journey — the triumps and setbacks of someone on a personal path of internal and external adventure and discovery.
Individually, these issues sold for almost $250 total.
Visit here to order the Complete Back Issue Set 1-57 for $87.
Regularly $175
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