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A Dark and Story Morning - A Pause for Beauty 307


Dear Heron Dancers,

   The most demanding part of living a lifetime as
   an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself
   to work along the nerve of one's own most
   intimate sensitivity.
        -Anne Truitt, sculptor.

There is a lot of energy swirling around when I’m painting nudes and when I’m traveling down a wild river. Both panic and silence are in the air. My goal over the last year has been to avoid the rocks with a minimum of effort, to make the turns necessary but not the unnecessary turns. I’ve been trying to get in harmony with the energy flows. I’ve been learning to use the river’s current to get me where I want to go.

As well as in wild rivers, currents exist in our spiritual lives, our creative lives, in our connection with the natural world, and they exist in relationships. Living life as art means getting in harmony with those flows. The currents are stronger than we are. We can’t out power them. All we can do is tune into them and exercise leverage at the crucial points. To do that, we need to move slowly and thoughtfully.

Yesterday, we were moving slow, my canoe and me. At times it seemed slow motion. The river’s sound — ranging from a roar to a babble — slowed down too. Instead of taking off in a panic as they usually do, the mergansers fishing at the foot of the rapid lifted slowly out of the water and made their way downstream. I slipped my paddle into the water on one side of the canoe and then, as necessary, into the other. I kept my balance right on the center line. Rocks moved by in a dream.

There is usually more than one water path through a rapids, but usually one is deeper than others and requires fewer turns. Streams of water move through a rapids at different speeds. Rocks, the bend of the river, the different depths across the breadth of a river, all affect the speeds of the water paths. If part of the canoe is in one water path, and part in another, the current will exert conflicting pressures on the canoe’s hull. In harmony with the river’s flow, the paddler uses the differing currents as part of turning strokes. Out of harmony, the river turns the paddler. That’s rarely good.

I go through most rapids a little more off balance than I did yesterday. I glance against a rock or two on many river trips. Often for a few seconds, as I hurriedly shift weight to avoid a rock that appears out of nowhere right in front of the canoe, the canoe will rock out of balance for a moment or two. To avoid capsizing, I hurry up and relax. The canoe will steady in an instant if I will. Yesterday, the river and I moved as one. It’s quite a feeling.

Practice and technique count for a lot running rapids, just as they do in creating art. You don’t get there easily. But the true art of running rivers, and of life I think, involves tapping into the transformative force, that element that comes from slowness, calmness, reflection and from the deeper recesses of the mind and soul. The conscious mind takes you only so far. Making your way through the rapids is intuitive. It’s preverbal. You can’t put it into words fast enough to avoid the rocks. You need a sense, a vision. When you get that feeling, believe in it. I’m a very intense guy, and there’s nothing wrong with that but intensity has to be focused. If it is diffuse, chaos results, whether on the river or in life. I’m better at it on the river than I am in life. Moving in harmony with the river means being intense at the pivot points and retreating into a relaxed awareness the rest of the time. When you get that feeling, lean over and stick your paddle in. Be intense then. Wait until then.

Finally, to connect with the currents moving through your life, or with the currents moving through a rapids, you need to move slower than the energy flows. There are just too many haphazard rocks around to move faster than the current. If you go with the flow and leave your speed up to the river, the river will determine where your canoe goes and it will go into rocks. In life too, I don’t want circumstances to determine my path. I want to get a lot out of life, and that takes vision, effort and courage. So I try to remind myself to move slower than the energy flows and allow my intuition a chance to offer its message — senses and colors, images and feelings.

They will guide me to the quiet waters below. Quiet waters and birdsong.

In celebration of the Great Flow of Life,

Roderick W. MacIver

Canyon Crow - A Pause for Beauty 306


Dear Heron Dancers,

Over the years, positive emails and letters from subscribers to Heron Dance and A Pause for Beauty have outnumbered negative responses about ninety-nine to one. Of course, that excludes the time a few years ago when I quoted Doug Peacock, aka Hayduke, who said in a Heron Dance interview, “Beware of homicidal lesbian motorcycle gangs in the Dakotas!” (Issue 21). That time the ratio dropped to about ninety: ten. A couple of weeks ago the responses became more like eight to one, and the reactions on both sides have been much more intense than usual.

Although I wish they didn’t, the negatives preoccupy me more than the positives, no matter what the ratio. But Heron Dance now has a creative energy and excitement it hasn’t had since the early years. It all still revolves around the connection with a spiritual core, a spiritual center of…of what? Of a human life? Of life in general? Of the universe? I don’t know, but I do know that, regardless, there are times of flow and harmony and times of disharmony, distraction and setback. I want to write about those ups and downs from a different perspective than I have in the past.

The protagonist of my story is a certain wild artist, partly fictional, partly me. He’s a deeply spiritual man and his spirituality revolves around wild nature and the sense of peace he finds there. He’s put a lot of thought into how he lives his life and lives more or less on his own terms. He has a wild and free creative energy. He loves literature and music. Security means less to him than sucking, as Thoreau said, the marrow out of life. He experiences a lot of ups and downs, triumphs and defeats. He tries to walk his path with as much dignity and equanimity as he can find within himself. Sometimes it is a lot; at other times it isn’t much at all.

As with most of us, eroticism and sexuality play a major role in his life. That, of course, is the controversial part of this work. Sex is such a powerful part of life that we fear it, even try to hide it. Perhaps we should; uncontrolled, it can cause a life to unravel and, at times, it causes our protagonist’s life to unravel. I’m putting the erotic part of his journey in the story because, without it, the story lacks authenticity. They all feed each other: his creative energy, his love of wild places, his sexuality.

He’s known a lot of love in his life. Profound love. He goes through long periods — in two instances more than seven years — in committed relationships. In between, he seems to go through multi-month periods as a free agent. He didn’t used to. When he was younger, it was one live-in girlfriend after another. As our story opens, he is in one of his wandering phases. He dreams of a committed monogamous relationship, but he also loves solitude and quiet. His struggle in this area, as in the other important areas, is to keep the faith, keep touch with that spiritual core. Sometimes he loses touch and I really want to explore that.

I’m painting a lot of nudes these days. I’m working with three different models, but one in particular has captured my imagination. She’s a very beautiful art student; a young woman who sometimes camps alone in the forest. When she’s standing there with her back to me, her right hip thrust out, I want to just go up and bite her gently on the nape of her neck. Then she’d moan and I’d cup her breasts in my hands. Of course, she might turn around and slug me. That wouldn’t be good. Or she might start crying. I’d very definitely go into a tailspin. I might start crying too. If I started crying, she might not pose for me again.

This is all ridiculous. This beautiful young woman, with her dreams of far off places and of new experiences, does not fit well into my scenario, nor I hers. We’d take rather than contribute energy to each other’s lives, and we both know it. Reality and fantasy are different sometimes. And difficult. Maddening, actually.

So we talk about past loves, about wild horses and wild rivers, about art and our families. We talk about sexual experiences from our pasts. I try to be on my best behavior, but sometimes my conversation is out of balance and crosses that vague but important boundary. I’ve got this fold-down couch and I ask her to lie down and pretend like she’s pretending she’s asleep and trying to nonchalantly interest her boyfriend in sex….She does. I paint her. My painting is off balance.

I think I need a break for awhile. Maybe I need to find a different model. There is so much highly charged energy flowing around the room. Unsettled energy. I lose my bearings. My vision for this work — sexual, erotic art but with a flow, a calm and peace about it — is unlikely to evolve out of this scenario. Maybe I need to just paint women with whom I have an emotional bond, women with whom I share a sense of peace.

That which does not have cannot give. And that, dear Heron Dancers, is all I have to say for today. That’s probably more than enough.

In celebration of the Great Dance of Life,

Roderick W. MacIver

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