Autobiographical Notes, Roderick MacIver
Artist & Founder of Heron Dance

"I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky."
-- Sharon Olds

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

In the early spring, as soon as the snow melted, I’d head out to the marshes near our home. I wore rubber boots that came to just below my knees. Inspired by Huckleberry Finn, I built a raft out of an old pallet and tree branches. I’d pole out into the swamp, staring intently into the water, partly looking frogs eggs, partly concerned about what else the tanic, brown waters might hold. The raft would slowly sink. I’d pole out as far as I could until the water reached just below the top of my boots. Until I learned to weigh them down with rocks, the buckets I brought for frogs' eggs would begin floating away. Coming home with only one soaker was considered a successful excursion. Occasionally I’d come up soaked up to my armpits or higher and be absolutely forbidden from going back there again, but I would still go.

Even now, in my late forties, the year’s first chorus of red-winged blackbirds brings me back to that swamp and those spring mornings. Buckets of frogs eggs accumulated behind the house. Once, when the eggs started to hatch, I filled our bathtub and deposited the tadpoles and unhatched eggs into the water where I could keep a closer eye on them. I fully intended to take my bath with them. But, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and boys often go awry. Within minutes of my dad discovering them, they were swimming free in the stream behind our house. "Where they belonged", he said.

By my late twenties, after being a real estate agent, a stock broker and then an investment analyst, I found myself working on Wall Street doing research for hedge funds, money managers and private equity firms. For one week each year, I'd head north and canoe alone in Canada’s Algonquin Park. I'd stop by my parents’ house in Ottawa, and one year, 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 waved and drove off. I have never mentioned it to him, but I think often of that offhand comment of his. 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.

It amazes me how often in my life I have embarked upon work, upon commitments that have absorbed years of effort, that have nothing whatever to do with those moments of deep peace and joy. In fact, I can say that I have spent most of my life living as if I was trying to prove that those moments don’t matter. Now that I've passed the age of fifty, I see my life as a gradual reorientation, a gradual shifting of course, towards serving, with my art and words, a very few experiences.

What I’ve learned about life I’ve learned from experimenting, from trying many different things and from an inclination towards adventure. I've experienced a lot of success and a lot of failure, and I've tried to learn from both. Some of the biggest lessons came from adventures that were poorly conceived. Others came from a difficulty discerning the difference between life as it is and life as I think it should be. I now turn towards a quieter life, a dedication to my art and my connection with the natural world.

I was born in 1956 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. 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 or 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 with Dogrib Indians near Great Slave Lake in what was then Canada’s Northwest Territories. 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, and I learned how to draw and paint. I also found and interviewed people—mostly cancer researchers—who helped me survive non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Heron Dance grew out of the realization that my attraction to business, which in many ways was an attraction to challenge and adventure, was ultimately unsatisfying and perhaps even personally destructive. My marriage failed. I had two young sons. I was struggling with a serious cancer diagnosis. I wanted to do something with the rest of my life, however long or short that might turn out to be, that was positive, that involved the creation of work of beauty. I wanted to leave something behind that would help my sons understand who I really was and what I had learned about what is important in life. I wanted to celebrate the gift of life, in part because I thought celebrating life might help me hang on to it.

Over the last thirty years I’ve filled dozens of journals with excerpts from books and quotes from interviews. Two in particular have had an effect on my life and on The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal. The first is from an interview I did of Sara Harrison, an Outward Bound Instructor, then working in a tiny village along the Rio Grande River. She said:

The other is by Albert Camus:

My heart first opened in the woods. I seek to serve the sense of peace and joy I have found and continue to find out there. I want to serve that with my art and words.

Morning Solitude

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

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