Autobiographical Notes, Roderick MacIver
Artist & Founder of Heron Dance

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
     - Galway Kinnell from the poem Saint Francis and the Sow

To live a really full life, you need to believe in yourself. To believe in yourself, you need courage. Courage is difficult. The parameters of my life have been defined by the times I've believed in myself and by the times I haven't.

I've fought forest fires in northern Canada with Dogrib Indians, sold commercial real estate, renovated old houses, been a stockbroker, an investment analyst on Wall Street and a money manager. In 1994 I founded Heron Dance. Throughout the last fifteen years, it has constantly evolved, constantly changed. Some of that change has been driven by economic factors and the realities of print publications in the internet age, some by my tendency to constantly want to explore new creative directions, to innovate and experiment.

In the beginning, Heron Dance was a newsletter that explored the human connection to the natural world, and what it means to live a meaningful life. The early years were a grand adventure. There was no money. Two years before starting the publication I had been diagnosed with advanced cancer of the lymph nodes. That circumstance added a sense of urgency to my life. I wanted to focus whatever time I had left on an exploration of what is truly important. In my mind, especially in those days, money was not one of those things. The financial risk seemed minimal in the context of the health risk. I spent a lot of time deep inside myself in those early years of Heron Dance. I still do, I guess, but it is different now. Life no longer seems fragile or fleeting.

In the beginning, art played a minor role. I had loved art all my life, but had not really tried to do it myself. When I found myself in the hospital with nothing much to do, I got some art books out of the library and began to paint. Art became part of my cure. I threw myself into drawing and painting. I painted for hours every day and dreamt about it at night. The graphic designer who worked with me on the first issue suggested that it needed something to dress it up. I showed her my watercolors and we used them. As the publication has developed, and I’ve become less certain of the easy answers, art has played an increasing role in Heron Dance. In the early days, the publication was strident. I felt that our culture was unstable, was headed for self-destruction. I still believe that, but I see life now more in shades of grey than in black and white. The challenge has become of one changing myself, of blossoming from within of self-blessing, as Galway Kinnell suggests, rather than of criticizing the world out there. I've come to see the world as essentially mysterious and the answers as elusive, and shrouded in beauty. We live lives of discovery, of challenge and of success and failure. Much of that success and failure is related in some way to encountering ourselves, our inner beauty and darkness.

I grew up in Canada. My father was in the military and we lived on Canadian army bases that were mostly rural and surrounded by fields and forests. Many of my memories of childhood involve roaming around in the woods, of soakers and bird song, of lying on my back watching the clouds float by. In my early teens I discovered wilderness canoeing. My first trips were with the YMCA a few hours drive north of Ottawa. Later, my parents owned a cottage in Quebec and I began exploring nearby lakes that had no road into them and no people. I’d drag my canoe up shallow streams, or portage, and find a place to camp where I could just sit and watch the birds and the water.

My academic career was limited. I left school when I was sixteen and hitchhiked north, hoping to find indigenous people living close to the land. The closest I came was fighting forest fires near Great Slave Lake in northern Canada.

Other than a couple of night classes at university, I’ve avoided formal education. Instead, I’ve read thousands of books and interviewed hundreds of people who had insights into subjects that interested me. Following this process, I learned enough to make a good living on Wall Street as an investment analyst. I followed a similar method in trying to find a path through cancer. I found and interviewed people—mostly researchers—who helped me survive. And also, truth be told, important to my survival was a fortuitous meeting with a former investment client in a bar in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He owned part of a German pharmaceutical company that manufactured a drug, WF-10, that played a major role in my recovery.

Over the last decades I’ve filled dozens of journals with excerpts from books and quotes from interviews. Words can take you a long way, but increasingly the answers that I’m building my life on are preverbal. They are images and feelings. For example, one day, hiking in the Adirondack mountains, I came across an older man who was sitting beside a stream. We talked for maybe an hour and then went our separate ways. We’ve never met again, but over the years since, my thoughts have often turned to his quiet gentleness and the peace I felt afterwards. I see myself as evolving towards a place in life much like that of his.

Morning Solitude

Algonquin Loons (from issue 31)

Blue sky. I am eight years old, lying on my back on the ground in the woods. I lie there and stare for two or three hours at the mashed potato clouds and their changing forms as they drift by overhead.

One afternoon, about twenty-five years later, I was driving north to canoe for a week in Canada’s Algonquin Park. I stopped by my parents’ house in Ottawa, and as I was leaving, I overheard my dad say to one of his old army buddies, “He lives for these trips.” That surprised me. I am not even sure I had yet come to completely realize how much those one-week solo trips, which I found time to take only every year or two, had come to be the center of my life. I was surprised he had seen that. I got in my car, waved and drove off. I have never mentioned it to him, but I think often of that offhand comment of his.

On the surface, I was in my early thirties, had a young family and was working in the investment business. On the surface, my dad was an ex-soldier, a bureaucrat in the secret police. We’ve had lots of ups and down, my dad and I, and yet maybe we understand more about each other than we let on.

Thirty-six or so hours later, I was sitting beside a lake that was shrouded in a gray, pre-dawn fog. I had gotten up in the dark, packed my canoe, and was sitting out at the shore sipping tea. Two loons drifted in and out of view. One stretched and called that haunting call of the wild. Four years later I had to spend one week every couple of months in a hospital getting experimental chemotherapy. I would lie in the hospital bed, close my eyes, and see and hear that lake and those loons. The actual experience lasted perhaps twenty seconds, but it sustained me through hours and months.

Perhaps each human life is fed by the underground spring of a few experiences. When we are there, we touch something beyond words. Four such experiences come to my mind. Perhaps there have been a few more. They make me who I am to me, who I am under the personas I assume to negotiate my way in the world.

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.

- Albert Camus

For more Rod's background and the history of Heron Dance, click here.

To learn about Rod's cancer treatment, visit here.

To subscribe to The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal , visit here.

Visit here to read Rod's "Artist's Perspective".